The Icelandic Canadian - 01.04.2009, Qupperneq 11

Vol. 62 #2
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
53
Ellen Scobie: Artist of Digital
Imagery and Photomontage
Interview by N.C. Guttormsson
“I aim to create art that is as beautiful
as it is visually arresting. My current work
focuses on exploring compositional
possibilities of digital data. ”
As a visual artist, Ellen Scobie works
with digital print technologies. Following a
successful career in graphic design, and
later, in marketing communications with a
prominent architectural firm, she turned
her attention to her own art in 2006 when
she embraced the opportunity to pursue
personal artistic goals. Ellen established a
studio for her company, Verosimile
Design, in her home in Burnaby, a suburb
of Vancouver, where she works full-time.
Born and raised on Vancouver Island,
Ellen was encouraged by her parents to
pursue her artistic talents from a young
age. She began taking art classes as a child
and has continued her art education
throughout her life. Her maternal grand-
parents are Dr. Petur Guttormsson and
Salm Reykdal. Their parents were settlers
in New Iceland and in the Argyle district of
Manitoba: Vigfus Guttormsson, Vilborg
Anderson, Kristjan Reykdal and Sigurborg
Petursson.
Ellen graduated with a Bachelor of
Fine Arts in Art History from the
University of Manitoba where she was
honoured on the Dean’s List. While there,
she also studied literature with David
Arnason and painting with Dale
Amundson. Further training in lithography
introduced her to the process of fine art
printmaking. She continued her art studies
at the historic London College of Printing
in England. She completed her year with
distinction.
After several years in Spain, Ellen
returned to the West Coast where she
experimented with a wide variety of media
including water-based paint, sculptural
form and collage assemblages. All of these
influences have shaped her current artistic
practice of digital photomontage. She
explains that the art of photomontage, a
composite picture made by combining sev-
eral separate pictures, is a technique that
artists have used since the late 1800s.
Historically, it involved placing one or
more negatives into an enlarger to create a
multiple exposure. Now, digital techniques
allow the artist more freedom to experi-
ment by greatly reducing traditional dark-
room time while allowing for an unprece-
dented level of image control.
Ellen has developed her own process
of ‘visual digital sampling.’ She explains
that just as some composers select sounds,
beats and rhythms from various sources in
order to create a new piece of music - a
technique known as ‘sampling’ - she also
samples photographs for her own creative
work. Her methodology starts by pho-
tographing the landscape and scanning
ephemera and found objects. She has
amassed an archive of over 12,000 files of
this digital material from which she draws
for her art. Laughing, she admits, “My
archive is growing, but I still don’t have
enough!”
In the same way that an oil painter
applies colours and textures to a canvas
while working with a brush and a palette of
paint, Ellen selects colours and textures
from her archive and applies them to her
digital canvas. She begins by layering sec-
tions of photographs, one by one, to create
her image. Typically the art consists of 25
to 75 layers of juxtaposed and digitally
altered photographs. When completed, it is
printed by a high resolution inkjet printer
onto paper or canvas, or onto photograph-
ic paper in a lab.
Using the computer to create pho-
tomontages, Ellen has adopted the capabil-