Contemporary Art by R. Schofield
Digitally Altered Photographs
Welcome
Take your time exploring the artwork.
I hope you enjoy this view into my reality.
About the work
Artist's Statement
In today's world, photography has become inseparable from our daily experience—nearly everyone carries a camera, and the images we capture are continuously shared across global platforms. As an artist, I embrace the power to transform this collective reality into personal fantasy. Through photo-editing software, I reimagine fleeting moments into timeless visions.
This digital realm, composed of countless pixels, reveals a striking purity when expanded to large-scale dimensions such as 52" x 78". The textures, tonal values, colors, and lines—unique to the digital medium—are constructed from minuscule squares, even finer than the tesserae of ancient mosaics. I find this pixelated architecture endlessly captivating.
Digital tools offer an expansive palette of possibilities, allowing me to manipulate and combine elements into imagery that is both surreal and richly layered. My creative process thrives on spontaneity—what is called the “happy accident”—which ensures each exploration remains fresh, unpredictable, and alive.
I do not produce editions. To preserve the singularity of each piece, I delete all high-resolution files once a work is sold, retaining only low-quality versions. This practice reinforces the uniqueness of each image, imbuing my digitally altered photographs with the aura and authenticity of Fine Art paintings.
Technique
Starting with everyday photographs, Schofield reshapes each image to varying degrees, guiding them from the realm of the ordinary into deeply personal expressions. Her source material is eclectic: travel snapshots, social gatherings, photojournalism from her time at a local newspaper, her own paintings, and even images of documents. Through layered manipulations, each photograph evolves into something entirely new.
The digital worlds she constructs are imbued with a sense of both immediacy and timelessness—modern in their medium, yet evocative of classical artistic traditions. with painterly and fantasy qualities that reveal her artist’s vision for color, line, volume, and texture. Beginning with ordinary photos Schofield manipulates these to varying degrees, until each becomes a product of her personal vision. Her photos are drawn from many sources; travel, social functions, her work as a photographer for a local newspaper, her paintings, even photographs of documents. With manipulations applied to an image until it becomes something new, the worlds created in the computer take on a reality of their own, both modern and timeless.
Biography
Schofield earned an MFA in Painting and Photography in 1979 from the University of South Florida. Since then, she has exhibited her work all over the US in solo and group shows, appeared in international magazines, and had a 2-person show in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Her work was included in “The Heroic and Sublime: Large-Scale Work by Contemporary Women Artists” at the Gulf Coast Museum of Art in Largo, FL and in “Peoples Choice” exhibition at the Polk Museum of Art, and was included in a seminal 3-person exhibition “130 Years: Lynn Fostkett / Leslie Neumann / Roberta Schofield” at Gallery 221 at Hillsborough Community College. She has held faculty appointments at the University of South Florida, South Florida Junior College, the University of Wisconsin in Eau Claire, and at St. Petersburg Junior College, and has lectured extensively. Schofield’s digitally altered photographs have won many awards and her biography is in Who’s Who in American Art and Who’s Who in America.