About the Art

IT’S NOT PHO­TO­SHOP. IT’S McCLINTOCK!

Robert’s McClintock’s art­work is cre­ated in one of the newest medi­ums in the world.

His work is a hybrid mix, com­bin­ing his orig­i­nal pho­tographs and hand manip­u­la­tion and paint­ing using a dig­i­tal palette and a dig­i­tal brush while work­ing exclu­sively in Adobe Pho­to­shop on an Apple Computer.

His lively and loose brush strokes and choice of col­ors are not com­puter gen­er­ated, there is no com­puter effect that can pro­duce his style in this way.

Robert feels very strongly that the auto­mated fil­ters in Pho­to­shop can be a lot of fun to play with but are just too heavy-handed, too ran­dom and too eas­ily rec­og­nized as a canned dig­i­tal effect.

He takes great pride on the orig­i­nal­ity of the work and the hands-on work­flow is inte­gral to his process in cre­at­ing the vibrant and lively qual­ity of his art.

Remem­ber too the art­work is first and fore­most cre­ated from Robert’s orig­i­nal pho­tographs wherein his choice of sub­jects and strong com­po­si­tion skills are unique and exclusive.

Sim­ply stated, Robert com­pletely paints directly over his pho­tographs using a hand­held dig­i­tal paint­brush. He loosely sketches in com­pli­men­tary col­ors and high­lights select areas, using con­trol he sat­u­rates col­ors while increas­ing the con­trast which “amps” up the exist­ing color palette. The col­ors “pop”, the nat­ural col­ors of the street­lights glow brighter and the sky is bluer. The next step is the most time con­sum­ing part of the process in which Robert soft­ens the pho­to­graph still with dig­i­tal brush in hand by blend­ing the edges and mix­ing col­ors together directly on the image as he looks at his mon­i­tor which is in effect his can­vas.  This adds the move­ment and sig­na­ture style seen con­sis­tently in all his work.

A fin­ished work takes him vary­ing amounts of time to fin­ish from 5 hours to 3 to 5 days depend­ing on the detail and size of an art piece. That’s not includ­ing the time it takes to cap­ture his images in the camera.

All of Robert’s images are cre­ated in large scale, aver­ag­ing in size from 30x40 inches to 30x60 inches and as big as 5 x 8 feet.

The final works are not actu­ally con­sid­ered “re-productions” but rather they are “orig­i­nals” since it was cre­ated dig­i­tally. They are being pro­duced using a method of print­ing which is also com­pletely dig­i­tal, com­monly known as “gicleé” print­ing. (If an artist’s orig­i­nal is scanned to make the gicleé, that’s a copy.”) This new stan­dard in fine art print­ing, which uses dig­i­tal inkjet print­ers using archival pig­ment inks with archival papers and can­vas is widely accepted as the best method to pro­duce the high­est qual­ity art­work. The longevity of these pig­ment prints is esti­mated at over 80 years before any notice­able degree of fad­ing may occur. All of Robert’s work is color cor­rected and printed in house.

Robert’s col­lec­tion is avail­able in a wide vari­ety of sizes from small open edi­tions to higher priced lim­ited edi­tions as well as sin­gle one of a kind pieces. All of his lim­ited edi­tions are made one at a time and Robert per­son­ally hand embell­ishes them using pas­tel pen­cils on the paper edi­tions and hand brushed acrylic gels on the can­vas edi­tions. It is Robert’s way of adding more value to the piece in that it is not only a gicleé but it is one which has hand work actu­ally applied by the artist.

His pop­u­lar col­lec­tion of over 300 images titled “Bal­ti­more Seen” spot­lights rep­re­sen­ta­tive land­marks, mon­u­ments, neigh­bor­hoods, and the well-loved restau­rants and bars of greater Bal­ti­more and may be viewed in his expanded, recently relo­cated studio/gallery in the beloved Hampden neigh­bor­hood.

McClintock’s col­or­ful, hybrid art com­bin­ing pho­tog­ra­phy and paint­ing has gath­ered national and inter­na­tional acclaim-most recently he was a final­ist for the third time at MacWorld’s renowned annual juried dig­i­tal art com­pe­ti­tion. This self-taught visionary’s images have also recently been added to the Smithsonian’s Pho­to­graphic His­tory Col­lec­tion at the National Museum of Amer­i­can History.

Cap­i­tal­iz­ing on the suc­cess of “Bal­ti­more Seen™”, McClin­tock has trav­eled out­side the metro Bal­ti­more area to cre­ate images of other U.S. cities includ­ing New York, Wash­ing­ton DC, and Philadel­phia. Also pop­u­lar with fans and col­lec­tors are his appeal­ing indi­vid­ual and col­lage images of dogs and cats.

McClintock’s orig­i­nal work and gicleé prints are cre­atively dis­played on the walls of his airy, light-filled, studio/gallery. They are avail­able in a wide vari­ety of sizes. Prints are sold framed or unframed and the unique, afford­able art is priced from $12.00 to 1800.00 dollars.