Digital artist, George Glasser, is offering the copyright-free usage of the art presently contained on his website. He said, “I am continually creating new imagery; consequently, from time to time, I have to update my site. Since the images in my present portfolio are sample work, I decided to release them into the public domain.”
Glasser is philosophical about his art in that he would rather give people free access to enjoy and use his art rather than store it away on a CD-ROM. He says, “When you put your art on the Internet, it’s like painting graffiti on a wall, you are opening the door for anyone to use the work with or without your permission. Personally, I am not bothered about people using my art; otherwise, I would not have placed it on my website. It’s not like someone is stealing my work - the images are there for people to use; otherwise, they will just wind-up on a CD-ROM collecting dust.”
Glasser began his career as a commercial artist apprenticing in sign painting and silk screen printing shops during the 1950s and went on to design animation and graphics for television commercials and motion pictures in the 1970s. During the early 1980s, he began painting Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican motifs in acrylics and on ceramics – he had several gallery showings and a clientele for his work through the mid -1980s when he decided to pursue other interests until 2004. For the past several years, Glasser has been a freelance artist/writer.
Presently, Glasser is exclusively creating digital art. He says, “The digital medium has opened many new creative doors for me in the exploration of amorphic imagery.”
Possibly, the best description of Glasser’s art is that it has a raw jazz-like improvisional edge grounded in a strong sense of graphic design.
He says of his present style, “Having spent a lot of time working with photography and photographic processing, I learned that you can take a ho-hum image and turn it into a dynamic piece of work through processing effects, darkroom tricks, etc. However, it requires recognising the potential of the image, then pushing it to its limits - experimenting.”
“Now” Glasser says, “Utilising the array of tools and filters in a graphics program like PhotoShop, I simply apply my previous experiences, but with much more versatile and powerful tools which offer me the opportunity to expediently explore and exploit the potential of an image. I will try potentiating almost any image that I have either generated on the computer, drawn or photographed. I almost never go into any project with a preconceived outcome in mind because experimentation leads me to places that I would never have conceived of in my imagination alone.”
