By Wayne Cosshall

As a kid, I was fascinated by the image. At first, I tried painting. But I was never satisfied with the results. As I attempted to teach myself painting from books at a young age, I had the mistaken notion that a painting was painted in a complete state from one corner and spread across the canvas until it was done. Of course this is not how one paints. Rather, one builds it up in layers of refinement.

During this period of frustration with painting, I became entranced with the view through telescopes. I went through several telescopes as a kid until I had a decent one. It was for this that I was given my first camera, a secondhand Petri SLR. My first shots were both through the telescope and using the camera on a tripod to take wide shots of the night sky. Over time my photography came down to earth.

Strangely enough (and in parallel with the photography), my introduction to computer graphics was also through astronomy. As part of my undergraduate work, I chose to produce an astronomy planetarium program for a computer graphics project. While computer-graphics technology in 1979 was primitive, I was completely hooked and progressed to a steady focus on computer graphics. I loved the precision, the control and the challenge of making it work. I wrote all my own code, using a variety of languages and different types of computers.

After almost 10 years of pursuing both photography and computer graphics, I had achieved a happy schizophrenia. I was pursuing both interests, but hadn’t yet brought them together. A new woman in my life, an artist, helped me to see that both these interests, plus my ongoing, but low intensity, interest in painting, were just all different facets of the same thing--my desire for self expression and fascination with the created image.

That was 20 years ago. Since then, I’ve had time to reflect more on how photography, painting, art and computer graphics are related. At the obvious level, they are all concerned with the visual image and personal expression. In their most common forms, they all result in a two-dimensional image. And they all offer a huge amount of control over the process.

Even more significant--just as I learned from my early experiments with painting--they all require “layers of refinement.” Layers of refinement are the key to greatness in photography, painting and other forms of art and computer graphics. When everything is on the surface and obvious, the work is shallow. It may be effective commercially, but it does not engage.

Great paintings, photographs and digital art all have layers upon layers within them. These can be layers of symbolic meaning, layers of detail (so that there is always more to find no matter how close you get), or layers of emotional response just waiting to be revealed.

These layers give an image lasting engagement value, making the image worth hanging on your wall for everyday viewing. Just as with a long-term personal relationship, a long-term relationship with an image only deepens over time as familiarity washes away the surface, superficial detail and allows us to relate at a much deeper level.

Hence my standard advice to photographers and artists is to get your work in progress up on the wall and live with it for awhile. Only then can you get a feeling for whether the piece has enough depth. Don’t confuse depth with busyness. A busy image may just be superficially detailed, with little depth. On the other hand, the most abstract, superficially simple image may have great depth.

So that is the basis of my love of the image: depth or richness. In astronomy, depth comes not only from the beauty of what can be seen in the night sky, but also from the physics, chemistry and math underlying what is visible. That same level of depth and richness applies to photography, digital art and painting.

I guess you could call me a deep image diver.