Polygonal 20 (2010) Digital Arts by Richard Horvath

The sepulchral lighting of this scene is not too far removed from the moody photo of an older part of Ballarat on a deeply overcast day that inspired this work. Although the Victorian architecture of the gold rush town was particularly compelling in that atmosphere, the flattening affect of the lack of shadows and the greyness of the monotonal light needed to be poetically lifted by the addition of a biliously coloured yellow light bulb.

It was also necessary to severely foreshorten the perspective through the use of a 'telephoto' lens in order to squeeze even a short row of buildings into a 4 by 3 picture ratio because a more frontal composition would have been far too insipid. The other advantage of this conceit is that it allowed the looming figure to be framed against the lowering sky.

The light, the architecture and the nineteenth century figure gives this image a sense of being frozen in a transitional hour of day in a melancholy past.

Related themes

Richard HorvathDigital Prints3D ModellingUrban Landscapes