MB·d·Art ►► Maël Bathfield digital Art
MB·d·Art ►► It is also my signature for the artwork presented on this website.
About the artworks
The ‘Phantasmagorical Bestiary’ series presented on this site is the result of a kind of ‘artistic serendipity‘. Indeed, it is partly by chance while carrying out an activity of the everyday life that I realized that I could create very original drawings. If I remain voluntarily vague here it is in order to keep the technique, and the material I work with, secret. I would just say that it is a material that is not preservable and that consequently the materiality of the drawings is very ephemeral. I can also explain that my drawing technique is based on substraction of material, previously spread out on a smooth surface. To keep a digital trace of them, my drawings are therefore photographed just after their realization. But the creative process is far from over at this stage. The digital photograph of a drawing is then passed through no fewer than five different software programs to obtain the desired final image. The materiality of the work is restored after it is printed on photographic paper. The choice (voluntarily restricted) of the type of framing constitutes then the final touch in the process of creation.
Finally, is it drawing? Yes, but not only that. Is it digital creation? Yes, but not only that. Is it a drawing technique already known? Probably not. In short, it is an original mixed technique.
These creations could almost be categorized as abstract art. However, when I take the picture of the drawing, I do see something, often a rather animal form, hence the title of the series. But as the concept of these creations is to play with the phenomenon of pareidolia, I won’t tell you what I see. Therefore, the creations are only titled with a number that follows the chronological order of the creation of the drawing. Feel free to see what you want in these drawings. If you want to give meaning to these drawings, you are a co-creator yourself!
About the artist
It seems that I am an artist as long as I present artistic works. I’m willing to take that label, but that wasn’t (until very recently) the goal: I just let my imagination run wild. So, you may be a little disappointed, but I have not followed any artistic training (except a diffuse self-taught training).
My initial training is purely scientific (PhD in chemistry in 2006). My artistic tropism may have started with 360° panoramic photography from 2008: it is true that I tried some experiments in this field (here and there, or again there). From 2020, I started to be interested in some digital techniques of transforming photographs into more pictural images; these few other experiments in image manipulation served as a ‘technical preparation’ for the later idea of the ‘Phantasmagorical Bestiary’ series, hence the idea of serendipity mentioned above: some randomness did come into play, but I was somehow ready to perceive the creative potential of that unexpected event.
Moreover, I stopped researching in chemistry and I am (slowly!) shifting to the history and philosophy of science, a field in which I have a beginning of research activity. Contrary to what my family name may suggest, I am French and I live in France: I recently moved to the Viganais region (southwest of the Cevennes)… after having lived in the south of the Haute-Garonne, in La Reunion, in Lyon, and in Montpellier.
Maël Bathfield, Auteur-Photographe, n°siret : 51108122600033
About this website
This site was made with WordPress using a free theme and various free plugins. I then tweaked the code to customize them.
See also the store’s F.A.Q. for more information.
