Digital Artist Post 1

Gale Franey is an artist from Vancouver who specializes in digital art, photography, graphic design, and flash animation. Her art ranges from promotional work to childrens' book illustrations. Though she is still in school, studying to perfect her craft and master the digital art medium, Franey has been creating digital art for over a decade, and, according to her website, her art has been featured in an award winning children's book. Franey credits her past involvement with the YMCA and her extensive work with refugees and the homeless with having given her insight into "the full gamut of human experience", which she explores through her artwork.

All Night I Rose and Fell

Much of Franey's work relies heavily on an element of fantasy, which she uses as a medium to explore and appeal to human emotion.  There has long been a working relationship between the fantasy genre and digital media, and Franey is one of many artists who have capitalized on current technology that allows them to take a real-life image and doctor it to fit into a fantastical world of their own making. Franey herself typically starts with photographs that she has taken of family members, friends and models, which she then alters using programs like Photoshop, relying heavily on layer masks and similar tools in order to fuse images and combine worlds. She uses digital media as a way to break out of the boundaries of reality, depicting fairies, angels, dragons, and other mythical figures in her art. The highly romantic nature of Franey's work lends itself to an escapist quality, but it moves beyond this to evoke the unconscious feelings, hopes, fears and aspirations that shape human experience, reflecting these back at viewers through fantastical symbolism. Some of her work even goes so far as to tackle serious issues like abuse and addiction. Ultimately, Gale Franey's art transcends the bounds of rationality to tap into the irrational and purely emotional realm of human experience, and through that window we as viewers can touch base with the deepest and darkest parts of ourselves, if we so choose.

Behind the Attic Door

The success of Franey's work, both conceptually and aesthetically, is somewhat variable and indicative of an artist who is secure in her voice but continuing to develop her skill with the digital medium. Conceptually speaking, her art is highly narrative, but there are times when the story and the message behind it are not always clear. In some cases her images are so busy that the viewer has a hard time figuring out what to focus on and struggles to follow the flow, which makes it difficult to appreciate the piece as a whole. From a technical and aesthetic standpoint, the quality of Franey's work varies. She seems to struggle  consistently with the coherency of her pictures, particularly when it comes to integrating figures taken from real-life photographs into her chimerical landscapes. She might do well to focus greater attention on face/body proportions, perspective, clearly established boundaries between fore, middle, and background and deliberately grounding her figures in relation to each. That being said, Franey's images range from whimsically beautiful to grotesquely haunting, and they usually are successful at eliciting the intended emotional response from viewers.

The Censor's Apprentice