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Submitted by Piner 01/15/06 5:34 PM GMT
Our 9th Artist Spotlight is on the talented photographer and digital designer known as philcUK. So go take a look at his gallery and provide feedback and encouragement to this deserving member. He has provided the following biographical info for us.
Firstly, may I say that I am very honoured to receive this recognition. I find myself in excellent company both with the very talented members who have preceded me and those that are to follow. I guess I'm pretty typical of most users here in that I kind of stumbled across the Caedes site by chance and subsequently got hooked into it. It's been an invaluable find, albeit a slightly addictive one and I have learnt an awful lot from people here in the couple of years I've been hanging around.
I live in the same town in Yorkshire that I was born in but in the intervening time since I left school twenty years ago I have lived and worked all around the UK usually moving on once every four years or so, variety being the spice of life and all that. I'm (very) happily divorced - no children or pets (lost them in the divorce too) and not many plans for replacements. I have a typically large extended northern family and we all manage to (barely) tolerate each other from a safe distance.
My school art teacher fixed me up with a job as a carpet designer before I'd left school - must have really hated me as it was, without doubt, the most boring job known to man. Since then I've worked as a typesetter, art-worker, prepress operator, retoucher and studio manager. For the last five years I have been running a small design business of my own. I have got into photography a lot more recently and as a consequence I have started to incorporate that into my business. My first camera was a Polaroid SX-70 back in my very early teens which was followed by many obscure cameras including a Praktica MTL5, a Kodak Kodamatic 980L and even an APS (hangs head in shame) camera. My current collection is all Canon and comprises of a couple of EOS 20D's, an EOS 350D and an EOS 300X - most of which will, I'm sure, get traded in as soon as something new and shiny gets released in the spring.
I've always been a fan of the classic artists with my favourites being Caravaggio and Rembrandt. Perhaps my biggest inspiration though would have to be my high school art teacher, Molly Midgeley, who took it upon herself as a mission to refine my skills and expended a lot of her free time in guiding and teaching me all that she knew. So to her more than anyone else I am eternally grateful. Apart from that god awful job she stitched me up with. Obviously. I don't really have a particular piece of my own that I would call a favourite as I'm always looking to try something new and different that will improve on what I've done before. It's easy to find a niche and become a one trick pony so I'm trying to avoid that. Seeing the ever increasing standard of work that gets posted here is a good motivation for improvement indeed.
In closing, I'd like to reiterate my thanks to you all and in particular to Caedes and his tireless team for providing and maintaining this site, hopefully this coming year it will be less of a thankless task for them and the focus will be more on the work itself and less on the pro's and cons of it's administration. :-) philcUK
