Caption: “Oakland” (2004). Bert Monroy got the idea for this independent work while taking reference photos for a Broadway poster he was to create for Andrew Lloyd Webber.
It’s amazing that this man is so easy to get hold of. Bert Monroy is a man in great demand. The Photoshop artist regularly gives seminars, traveling to two or three states in a month. His Pixel Perfect podcast goes out once a week, he writes columns for several magazines, lectures at various colleges.
At Saint Mary’s College in California, an exhibition with a cross-section of his work up to now has recently opened. Three hundred fifty visitors, far more than expected, came to the opening alone. “A spectacular show,” says Monroy, who himself is quite inspired—and visibly moved to see his life’s work honored in such a large-scale retrospective. Beside the selection of his works, one finds his first Mac, as well as other hardware and software that has accompanied him along his artistic and professional way. It’s a trip through time: beginning with his first MacPaint pictures, up to his largest finished Photoshop painting so far, the panorama of the Damen railway station in Chicago [orig.: der Bahnstation in Damen]. He worked on it for eleven months, almost 2000 hours in all, until he was able to assemble the work from 50 separate Photoshop files, 500 alpha channels, more than 15,000 individual layers, and 250,000 paths.
In the past year, visitors to the Photoshop Convention in Munich could experience Bert Monroy live. A brilliant speaker, friendly and outgoing in person, captivating on stage. Spellbound, the crowd followed every one of his mouse clicks, as he shared his tips. Monroy gets across the meaning and purpose of his layer methods in a way that makes his listeners put aside for good any thought that this is some superficial pastime. A little shadow here, a bit of Beveled Edge and Relief there, and the two-dimensional is soon transformed into what looks like three-dimensional space.
When you listen to Bert Monroy, you notice quickly that he’s madly in love with technology. Software companies are always using his work to introduce new products to the market—besides Photoshop, also VideoWorks, PixelPaint, SoundCap, and ImageStudio. He hasn’t always had to get on stage for them himself, Monroy smirks, pointing meaningfully at his head: “The long hair, you know.…” His competence and adventurous spirit, though, are much valued. As an alpha tester for Photoshop, Monroy has long had deep looks into the current development before new versions are ready for market. So too with CS5, whose first details he was able to see when CS4 hadn’t yet been released.
Above: Much inspiration is found in passing. Bert Monroy got the idea for “Old Chair” (2004) while on a shopping trip.
Caption: Cover for the MacStreet Journal (January 1985). Early MacPaint work for the newsletter of the New York Mac User Group.
At Adobe, someone must have practically read his wishes from his lips, he says with a wink, and he has a lot of wishes. He’d gladly explain a little further, but unfortunately of course there are strict confidentiality agreements.… Only this much: “The next generation of Photoshop promises some new tools that’ll make artists’ hearts beat faster. They’ll have us illustrators lining up to upgrade.” All he’ll say about the future of digital illustration is that Photoshop as a medium will become ever more transparent and more closely approximate the traditional tools. As machines too are becoming more capable, he hopes someday to be able to work at higher resolution and bit depth, for still smoother transitions and more detail.
There probably aren’t many people who love their work as much as Bert Monroy does. When he’s painting one of his pictures, it’s like a meditation exercise for him. He literally loses himself in his paintings. To the question of whether he was ever interested in another career than that of an artist, he answers a definite “no.” Painting is his calling, whatever the medium. Today he paints almost only “with light,” as he calls it when he uses the monitor to work with red, green, and blue light. The constant development of hardware and software obviously inspired him much more than painting with red, yellow, and blue pigments on a real canvas.
It was in 1984 that the pixel world captivated him. It all started with a Macintosh 128 and MacPaint, virtually the only graphics application for that system—followed closely by almost every pixel-based program to come on the market thereafter. Because at the time he was already among the little-known computer-screen artists, the companies often sent him their software developments unsolicited. Monroy was to test them and provided pointers to help improve them. In the media he was soon called simply “Mr. PixelPaint.”
Above: “Bodega Shadows” (2000). From a relaxing weekend in California’s Bodega Bay.
Left: “Bean Bins” (1994). In a market near the Tokyo fish market. The experiment: Applying patterns that aren’t seen to be patterns.
Even now, he speaks animatedly of the possibilities the technological developments have brought with them since then. “Before, an accountant would probably spend his whole life with his books. He didn’t simply go out and buy some tubes of paint and brushes, just to try it out. Today, the same accountant needs a scanner to scan his documents. The scanner comes packaged with software that already provides him with tools he can get creative with. We live in a different world. I think it’ll get very exciting.”
Above: “Damen” (2006). Excerpts from Monroy’s first panorama, a painting of the “Damen” railway station in Chicago. It took Monroy eleven months to assemble the work from 50 separate Photoshop files, 500 alpha channels, more than 15,000 individual layers, and 250,000 paths.
Caption: The illustration below shows the current state of the Times Square project (February 2009). All the black areas are still unfinished. The new panorama’s planned final size: 1.5 × 7.6 meters. Estimated time: 2½ years. Expected completion in Spring 2010.
All the same, he still relies on the knowledge gained from his traditional training. There is no picture for which he doesn’t first prepare a sketch on paper and make additional notes. The eye sees more than the camera. In the many reference photos he takes, Monroy says, distortion by the lens bothers him. Still, he won’t forgo the camera’s help. He prefers to work then with his Canon G9, with which he can zoom in as closely as possible on all the details—even those that can’t be clearly seen from his point of view.
Anyone who wishes to represent reality as accurately as Bert Monroy has to be a precise observer. His guiding principle: “Never assume how something might look. Look at how the shadows move over the object with the light, then you can also reproduce them accurately.” If need be, he quickly builds himself a model to do this, but preferably he studies the original subject. Then, the key to transforming it into Photoshop is to experiment. He takes the time for this in independent pieces; for commercial projects he employs the new technologies later, for specific purposes.
Bert Monroy loves passing along his knowledge to others and inspiring them to new creative work. He enjoys it immensely when he gets mail from a former student, and is inspired when thanks to his explanations someone can realize an idea that he might not even have had otherwise. His tip for all novice Photoshoppers: “Don’t think of it as work, but play. Experiment! Push all the buttons, until the medium takes over. Then you can give free play to your fantasy.”
Many well known Photoshop greats are among his former students. Katrin Eismann, for example, once worked as his teaching assistant. Today she is a famous author and director of the master class in professional digital photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York.
Known, established artists also get tips from Monroy. The legendary graphic artist Stanley Mouse, who became famous as a designer of album covers and posters in the 60s, recently sat in on one of his courses.
Bert Monroy is well on his way to leaving a lasting impression outside the Photoshop world as well. Thanks to its enormous wealth of detail, his new project is bound to create a sensation everywhere: a panorama of Times Square in New York at night, on a 7.6 by 1.5 meter canvas. Monroy’s goal for himself: he wants to depict everything that the human eye can see—without objective distortion and with a quality that surpasses modern HD photos. For this reason, he’s working with Adobe and Epson on a 16-bit print on a novel material made from backlit vinyl. The scope of this work far surpasses the Damon [sic] panorama’s: Monroy has set something more than two years and around 500,000 layers for the finished product. “My computer’s already breaking down!” he grins. Small wonder: the planned 600 individual files, he estimates, will come to a good 13 gigabytes even in zipped form. But Monroy hopes to be able to show this project in early 2010—preferably, of course, in New York.
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DigitalPHOTO Photoshop: 2/2009
Translated from German by David M. Weeks