Pat Watson

This segment, titled “Shards,” references a seventh grade student I encountered when I taught middle school English for a year. The boy in question, Eddie, was quite obviously a victim of significant trauma and was mostly unfunctional in a school setting and pretty much unreachable. As a teacher, I felt helpless in trying to get him to adapt and accommodate life in a school setting as did the administrator and school psychologist. As a person, I felt a kinship, knowing full well that I had attempted to seal myself off from feeling my past, refusing to talk about it and unable to deal with what I’d seen and shouldn’t have seen. LINKED HERE is the story in an easier to read format.

The adjoining image at the top is a photographic copy of the two panels that make up the original version of this segment. Each panel is 16x20 inches and hinged at the middle to make the two panel spread. The main image is a Cibachrome print, done through an experimental darkroom technique involving multiple exposures and masking. The other incorporated images are largely digital creations, done with very early versions of bitmap art programs and first generation page layout software.

The two images below it, to the left are the same basic content, updated using more sophisticated software approaches and more painted and hand-drawn elements that don’t rely so much on digital imaging techniques. Many of the updated elements are revisions of the original ideas.

In the first version, I was using early versions of page layout software, which was new at the time and a bit revolutionary, so it represented a new frontier of digital design. Currently, software like that is no longer new or revolutionary, so I felt it appropriate to rework the design to make the written content more readable with larger type, larger spacing and a layout that’s not so cramped, hence the expansion to four pages rather than the original two.

When shown to viewers, each panel will be 16x20 inches and hinged into an accordion fold document, an updated artist’s made book, measuring 65x20 inches.

For copyright and intellectual property considerations, a larger image won’t be shown online.