I suppose I came to producing art as a slow burn. I'd always taken photographs and I've documented student life in London during the 1970's and never completely stopped. My undergraduate training was as a science generalist on what I now know to be a ground breaking and innovative course. We even wrote a book about it 40 years later, my mugshot, below, was taken at last year's book launch event in Soho. It's nice to know that we haven't changed that much.
You can find our book here: Look Back in Candour
Don't ask...
When I retired from academia (computing science if you must know), digital photography was just beginning to match film technologies in terms of quality. It's the same old story, artists will always experiment with the latest technologies and it is my good fortune to have begun a foray into "art" just as digital manipulation was beginning to take off. So, "lens based art" is what I do. Everything starts life with viewing the world through a lens and hours and hours of drawing, deleting and colouring eventually ends up with work such as the examples on display here.
One of the things that stayed with me from my first degree was the study of epistemology, how do we know things? How can we think that the world is knowable. Some of the ideas that I was exposed to half a century ago have surfaced later in life in a suprising way, through the medium of some fairly abstract art. Examples of this are "Plato's cave", "Incommensurability", and "Is the set of all things a member of itself?" Take the time to look those pictures up, they're in the "Playing with colour" section. If nothing else, I hope that the colours will evoke an emotional response.
Tom Osman 2024.