Mark McAfee Brown is an Artist, Photographer and Designer working in the space where fine art and technology marry, merge and multiply. He has spent over 25 years combining traditional media and photography, and the last 15 years working digitally on Macintosh computer imaging systems, pushing pixels around for art, spirit, fun and profit, using a palate of 16.9 million colors, creating images by writing ones and zeroes on rust with magnets and lasers. Whoever imagined that Art could or would come to this? Born in New York City, he has lived in Minnesota, New England, West Virginia, Scotland and France. He is now a resident of the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California.
He received a B.A. in Art at Stanford University, a Master's Degree in Printmaking from San Francisco State University and has taken numerous courses in Graphic Design and Digital Media at The University of California at Santa Cruz and Foothill College, trying to stay just ahead of the cresting wave of technology. His art first appeared internationally in a gallery in India at age 5, as part of a world-touring show hosted by the United Nations. He took his first photo at age 6 (of an ostrich) at the Bronx Zoo. Since then his award-winning prints have been shown on the East and West coasts of America, in America’s Heartland as well as in Germany and Australia. His work was featured in the New York Time’s 2002 year end ideas issue as well as in the June 2003 issue of Photoshop User.

All Images Copyright
© 2008-2010,
Mark McAfee Brown.
All rights reserved worldwide.

See more of Mark's creations
Go to his site >

You can also go to
his Flick'r page
Go to his Flick'r >

Artist's statement

NIGHTBLOOMS are a series of digital art works that explore the space in which Nature and Technology collide, merge, marry and multiply. These are conceptual artworks in which I re-imagine, re-assemble and re-image the natural world, in a new visual world order. Nature newly unnatural - familiar yet unknown. These images are concerned much more with form, shape, allegory, visual and anthropomorphic relationships, composition and the emotional range of color than they are with flowers in a botanical sense, although without flowers none of them ever would have been made. They have a distant artistic antecedent in the works of Jan Brueghel the elder, who loved to paint flowers against a black background. They are more akin to paintings than to photographs.
These works are filled with time, seasons, forms, saturated colors and deep black space. From my garden I harvest what is blooming, budding, dying, colored, textured, warped or wonderful – depending on pre-conceived ideas for an image or natural inspiration. I scan these flowers, fruits, plants and vegetables using a flatbed scanner until I have the image or portions of an image that I want. In these works I use the scanner as a camera, shooting each “picture“ from below. Flowers are placed on top of the scanner with the scanner lid left open. I do a large number of scans until I have all of the picture elements I need for an image, depending on what the image, emotion and notion require to bring the picture to life. I then compose the images using Adobe Photoshop, a high-end image manipulation software program.
Photoshop enables me to alter an image’s colors, saturation levels, brightness, contrast, texture, sharpness, clarity, obscurity and almost anything else. If I can imagine and scan something, I can create, manipulate and image it. I remake and refine these images until they are done, at which point I print them on a high resolution, eight color archival photo printer. They can be printed at very large sizes without losing resolution or sharpness.
I am surprised and delighted by the promise and potential of this disparate mix of mediums; (high-tech/grow-tech/no-tech) and it is a rare treat indeed to have one’s studio and computer system filled with the sweet and heady scent of freshly cut flowers.