Born January 1962 in London, U.K.

Michael Autumn is not a typical artist because he brings together three disciplines - art, photography, and computing - when he could have made a very successful career in any one of them (and has during different stages of his life). Moreover, having studied philosophy, psychology, and economics at one of our top universities, his work has a certain intellectual clout.

“I have being doing quite "serious" art since I was sixteen. I was doing things school couldn't cater for, like oil paintings, outside of school. I just found out what I needed to know from books, bought what materials I needed to buy, experimented until I'd mastered the medium, and just got on with it. There was no question that I would go to art college: it was university for me to read philosophy, psychology, and economics. That was just expected, assumed, natural. I could do all the art I wanted to in my spare time. Art for me was an expression of ideas and feelings - a means of communicating more directly than words could - for the things I wanted to say. I am really not sure what art college could have taught me anyway: from what I have seen that has come out from them in recent times I would almost certainly have rebelled and quit - so bad is most of the "art" that is being produced these days...”

So here we have a man who eats, sleeps, and drinks art; who thinks the art-teaching fraternity has nothing to offer him; who has got himself into a financial position to do his own art to the highest standards possible; who has taught himself everything he knows about art, photography, and computing; and who has held his own as a professional in each of these fields at the highest level. There can't be many people alive or in history who have such self-belief and self-confidence...

30 years as an artist. “From a very early age (mid teens) I engaged in art as an expression of ideas as opposed to simply re-creating something in 2D."

25 years in photography. “There are very few types of camera, lenses, lighting, and techniques I haven't used. With quite a successful computer career I have been able to develop my photographic interests to the highest level (photography and digital art at the top level is extremely expensive!).”

22 years in IT as a programmer, designer, consultant, architect, digital art/graphics.

In his own words:

“I’ve always been very visually orientated, in awe of visual perception and optics. It could be the cause of my dyslexia, or the result of it. I don’t read for pleasure, I read to get information. I love to look at pictures, and to just look. On a train journey I’ll look out the window and at people in the carriage the whole time – I couldn’t possibly read a book or a magazine for fear I might miss something interesting! I’ve studied in great detail the philosophy, psychology, physiology, and physics of sight and vision; and my interest to this day is as strong as ever.

One of my earliest and most vivid memories is wondering about the sand dunes on a glorious sunny summer’s day on my own by the sea on the east coast of Ireland. I would have been about four, and was mesmerised by the colours and shapes of the wild flowers, the yellow and black stripped caterpillars, and the butterflies and moths. That has had a lasting impression on me, and possibly sowed the seeds of my interest in Natural History and colour. From the age of 9 through to 16 I lived in a big house with a lot of land, but, best of all, it backed onto a vast forest and heath. It seems incredible, in this day and age of paranoia, that I used to wonder freely (often on my own) for hours over this vast Natural History playground - encountering snakes, slow worms, frogs, toads, newts, lizards, fish, bracken twice as tall as me, birds of all kinds, insects of all kinds, deer, hedgehogs, squirrels, bats, stoats, weasels, streams, lakes, trees, wild flowers, a quarry, an old mill, an old iron smelting works, and much more besides. Indeed, I used to walk through a part of it on my own every weekday to get to primary school! It was a fantastic childhood and I love to see Nature through all the seasons. This undoubtedly laid the seeds for my interest in Natural History. And befriending the new boy, David, at school - who was an avid bird-watcher (a “twitcher” in fact – someone who primarily wants to see as many different species of birds as possible, and whose whole lifestyle revolves around hearing news on the “grapevine” of rare sightings somewhere in the British Isles, and dropping everything to go and “tick” them off) - was definitely the catalyst for my very keen interest in birds.

I had a very unconventional upbringing. In 1962, shortly after I was born, my parents (Irish mother and African father) put me in a convent in Eire (Southern Ireland), near the border with Ulster (Northern Ireland). It was an idyllic place: the nuns were very nice, there were lots of children to play with (although I spent a lot of time on my own as well), I felt special – being something of a favourite; and I really enjoyed school. In 1969, at the age of seven, a letter arrived out of the blue saying my “parents” were coming to take me back to England in a week’s time. This move may have been connected with the troubles flaring up in Northern Ireland (we were just a few miles from the border) – which I remember to this day as being on the news all the time. On arriving “home” I discovered I had three younger siblings – with another one on the way! I left my “parents” after a year because they were so cruel to me, and went into a children’s home a few miles away.

At the age of eight I remember doing some needle and stitch work at the children's home school and being quite pleased with it – I’d never done that sort of thing before. Shortly afterwards, when leaving that place (to move to a permanent children’s home), I asked my teacher if I could have it. She flatly refused despite my nagging and pleading. Was this because it was good and she wanted to keep it as an example of what an eight-year old could do...?

In the next primary school I went to, the teacher was an artist and we did many creative things. One day he announced that we were going to be put into small groups and each one was to produce a big painting to put on the wall. After a while I wondered over to see what the other groups were doing. The best one by far was a painting of a ship coming out of a harbour with a city skyline behind it. I remember thinking it was absolutely brilliant: I’d never seen a picture that good before! It had great perspective and colour, and there was white surf gushing from the front of the ship as it cut through the sea. It was very realistic. I saw the boy who did most of the work, Christopher, and remember thinking how clever he was. I was in awe of him: he was good at most things, was an only child, had a nice house, and doting middle-class parents. I probably tried to reach his standard over the following years. (Some how I managed to get higher grades than him several years later - even in art …)

During my early teens we held bazaars at the children’s home to raise money. The head of the home was very practical and artistic, and he introduced me to many such things - including pin-art (rows of pins hammered into a wooden panel then the straight lines are sequentially threaded together to produce curved patterns). I did a few on simple coloured velvet backgrounds, but later had the idea of painting something appropriate on the background: for example if it was a ship (galleon) I painted quite a realistic seascape. Unlike the velvet, I felt the painted ones needed a frame to hide the ragged edge of the chipboard. So I framed them (this was my first attempt at framing) and they all sold. I also did some quite detailed still-life pen and ink drawings and was slowly growing in confidence.

I wanted to be an architect for a long time as a schoolboy, and thoroughly enjoyed art and technical drawing (which I took to like a duck to water). I saved up my pocket money and bought a professional compass set (it was something like twenty weeks' pocket monet - quite a significant purchase for a boy) - which I still have to this day. I didn't “study” art beyond O-level because I was caught up in academia (art wasn’t considered a “proper” subject by my peers), but I learned from books and continued doing it in my spare time. Indeed, I don’t think we were actually taught art at all – we were just given the materials in a classroom, told what to draw or paint, and just got on with it! The teacher would set tasks, pass comment, and answer any questions – like “how do you make brown”. I felt art at school was too limiting - restricted to cheap water colours (of the big tablet variety that you had to rub with a wet brush), pencils, charcoal, and cheap shiny paper. I wanted to explore oils in particular, but other mediums as well. And big pictures – I’ve never liked small pictures for some reason. Art was somehow more important to me than school could accommodate, so I began to teach myself: I bought books and materials, and just experimented.

In the children's home the head man was an ex-chemist and among many of his interests was photography. I remember vividly the time he bought a Pentax ME-Super and the the joy and pleasure he expressed showing me it. It had a lovely solid precise feel about it and was lovely to handle. He also did quite a lot of his own developing and printing which seemed quite magical to me. I suppose I took up photography properly at the age of 17. I was living with my best friend at the time and he was very keen to show off his camera and pictures: he was new to it and had a child-like fascination and enthusiasm for his new hobby. I just loved the feel and technicality of his camera, enjoyed the challenge of trying to understand how it worked and how to get it to do what I wanted. I also liked the sharing, social, side it clearly brought. He was trying to understand the basic concepts and shared his experience with me. I was very receptive and interested – much more so than his son. I decided to get my own camera, and between us came to the decision that it should be a Canon A1 (well it was I who decided, he thought it would be tool complicated). It was quite a sophisticated and capable SLR (single lens reflex – what-you-see-is-what-you-get) camera with a huge array of controls and it could take different lenses and other accessories. It was better than my friend’s dad’s and far beyond what I knew about photography at the time, but I wanted a camera that could do more or less everything; a camera I could grow into and get more lenses and other accessories for. I knew this was going to be a keen and long-term endeavour…

I used to love shooting Kodachrome and projecting the slides on a big screen. I don’t know why, but from very early on I wanted to achieve the best quality results: Kodachrome was the best film and so that’s what I used. (The next twenty five years represents a gradual striving for perfection…) I lived with young children at the time and we loved to see the results of the shooting, especially if it was of us. I think this is one of the many things I like about photography – the sharing of it with others – it’s very much a social activity, even if I’m usually on my own when shooting. I get a real thrill out of showing people detail and beauty that they may not have seen before, and presenting them with ideas that they may never have considered before.

I adapted a fishing trolley to put the growing and groaning amount of gear in, and I used to drag it miles into the Sussex countryside around where I used to live - taking pictures of landscapes, natural history subjects, and lots more besides. I used to hang a bird-feeder outside my bedroom window and “shoot” the birds at close range. This was enthralling for me and the children – to see Nature so close up and to get what were - modesty aside - quite good photographs of them. I’ll never forget the anticipation we felt for getting the slides back from Kodak and the excitement of seeing them projected large on the screen. The size and colours were breath-taking to us; however, the prints never lived up to the projections. This was the catalyst for me wanting equipment that would enable me to get bigger and higher quality results – but, due to the enormous expense, it would be several years before I could realise that ambition…

In 1980, at the age of 18, I went to London University (LSE) to read philosophy, psychology, and economics. I used to be a regular visitor of the National Gallery and the Tate – since they were so near. There was a period where I used to go to the Tate lunchtime lectures nearly every day. I got the lecture schedule and went along to anything that interested me - which was nearly everything! Also it was a lovely walk along the river. I quickly got the impression that I could do this. The art of the old masters like Constable, Gainsborough, Ingres, Titian, Leighton, Botticelli, etc. - was incredibly impressive, but it was not necessary to produce art like that any more. I felt I could do it, but the question was why? Most of what the old masters did was to capture reality - people, landscapes, buildings, Nature. In their time there was no other method of capturing these things, and the old masters did a brilliant job with the tools they had available to them.

I was getting very good exposure to contemporary art and artists from the visits and lectures, and it quickly became clear this that kind of art was more about ideas, especially new ideas, and concepts (which is what I had been doing for a few years without realising it or knowing there was a name for it!). It was, among other things, about how we see, how our mind interacts with the visual world, how light and colour work, and how we respond to it. I’m referring to artists like Picasso, Mondrian, Rothko, Pollock, Seurat, and Matisse. It was visual (as opposed to written) philosophy, psychology, and physiology. This gave me the confidence in my own art of not trying to capture reality as best as I could (without good reason) – but to concentrate on the message I was try to convey. And, in parallel, I came to the conclusion that for realistic images photography was by far the better medium. I would even go so far as to say it’s the best medium because Nature is so incredible and apparently infinitely detailed: the very best a traditional artist can do is to paint the same level of detail as in a photograph - and anything less would be doing Nature an injustice…

That’s not to say that art shouldn’t include photography, or shouldn’t actually be photographic. Photography could be a tool of art, a tool of expression. Art doesn’t just have to be paintings or drawings or sculpture of naturalistic subjects. It’s the ideas that matter, and the medium or tools used are entirely up to the artist to decide.

When I left university I didn’t know what to do career-wise (for a long time I thought I would follow an academic career, but I guess that wasn’t my destiny). Since I enjoyed art so much I decided to try and earn some money from it. I had a portfolio of work and went around the wealthy areas of where I lived canvassing for commissions. I was 22 at the time. I left what had become my home, and rented a stable – the top of which I used as a studio. It was hard and quite demoralising at times. I walked or cycled everywhere (I couldn’t afford a car). I took on commissions for things I’d never done before – I accepted any work: pub signs, painting on mirrors, water colours, oils. If I hadn’t done it before I learnt on the job. I had no fear of failure! It gave me the confidence to do anything artistically. I used photography quite a lot since I was happy to draw and paint from photographs rather than spending hours sketching and painting in front of my subject (which were invariably outside).

I gave up “professional” art after a year. It was too insecure and lowly paid, the work had no meaning in terms of what I considered art to be. I didn’t want to sell any personal work which I managed to do in parallel with commissions. Since I enjoyed computing at university so much I decided to try and make a career out of it. I was lucky enough to get a trainee job working with physically less-abled people in what was effectively a hospice - although no one ever referred to it as such. The work involved designing hardware and software that could assist the patients in any way – in terms of recreation (games, crosswords, etc.), communication (letter writing, speech synthesis), and self-expression (art programs).

During this time my art became dormant because I was learning computing and developing programs in my own time (I got a loan and bought one of the computers we used at work) – there was little or no time for either of these at work itself - especially as I was made manager after a year and was heavily involved in training some of the other staff.

Of the many programs I designed during that period the one that was most satisfying and ambitious was an art program (appropriately enough!). It enabled anyone who could press a single switch with any part of their body to draw/paint quite sophisticated images on the computer screen and print them out unaided. (If you could press more switches or use the keyboard then it enabled you to achieve the same results more quickly). It allowed you to use different colours, different geometric shapes and lines, text; stretch, shrink, rotate, and move things; colour an area in; save to floppy disc, etc. For the capabilities of computers at the time (mid 1980’s) this was no simple feat, and disabled communities all over the world started using it.

There was a delightful and very intelligent foot-artist in the place I worked called Mary, who had quadriplegia. She only had reasonably reliable control of her right foot. I designed the art program very much with her in mind, trying to take on board all her suggestions. She came out with some amazing art with it and used it in ways I’d never even considered. I think it’s the sign of a good program when people can do more with it than even the designer anticipated – if it is a true enabler…

After four years or so in the “caring” or “social” side of computing, I found myself out of a job. Funding for our organisation expired and so I entered the “commercial” computing world. There is an amusing success story of the training organisation I was working for (we were training less-abled members in the community in computing - specifically to help them get “real” jobs). A manic depressive artist called Mark came to us not having touched a computer in his life. I was assigned to him because it was clear he should explore computer graphics and desktop publishing – one of my specialties. We really gelled, and six months later, with his training complete, he left us, got a job in computer graphics and desktop publishing - and his starting pay was more than I was earning! I was extremely pleased for him (really!), but it made me realise how lowly paid I was (and unable to afford many things in life), and how much my sort of skills were worth in the big wide commercial world…

When I started to earn better money, my passion for, and expenditure on, photography grew and grew - to a point where I took out what was for me a huge loan at the time (£17k in 1989 when my salary was only about £22k) and bought the best large format camera (I started with a 5” x 4” Sinar P2, but within a couple of years exchanged it for a 10” x 8”), lenses, lighting, and accessories. I’d come to the point where I wanted to produce big high quality works and the quality I could get from the small 35mm cameras just wasn’t good enough. Moreover, I was pushing the limits of “Tilt and Shift” photography on my Canon 35mm TS lens and I wanted to explore the extra creative possibilities a very precise technical large format camera could offer. I’d taken my transparencies to the best professional labs I could find in London and the South East where I lived, but could never get the quality I was looking for. (It was obviously because I was enlarging something quite small to begin with, to too high a degree.) I was also interested in the unique technical capabilities of the large format camera, being able to take big Polaroids, and being able to use different types of film. I was very excited by the results. My intention was to go professional, and that’s what I did soon afterwards – but only on a part-time basis. I didn’t want to throw away a good computing career for the uncertainties of a professional photography career – not until it was quite successful at any rate.

However, just like with the art earlier, the sort of things people wanted photographing were important to them, but just not very inspiring to me. I saw them as straightforward technical assignments and quickly grew tired of it. I made the decision to bow out and concentrate on things that interested me – landscapes, architecture, Natural History, etc. This was photography in the true sense of the word. I was honing my skills in this largely technical area. I never went into developing and printing because, a), I didn’t have the space for a darkroom; b), it was very fiddly and you don’t get much control of the final print anyway (technical limitations); and, c), to do it for large format (10” x 8” negatives and transparencies) would have required a huge lab costing hundreds of thousands of pounds!

During the following fifteen years I overcame my fear of flying, bought a 4x4 car (to take me and all my heavy gear all over the place), and started traveling extensively - taking straightforward high quality photographs – albeit through the eye of an artist. But this wasn’t art, and I’m very clear about this, because I was not totally in control of the subject matter and the medium – and so I was not free to express any ideas I wanted to.”

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Michael Autumn
Cambridge, UK
March 2001

“It is now 2004. In the last few years there has been something of a revolution in photography. Basically the need for a darkroom has gone and all the processing of images can be done on computer. Negatives and transparencies can be scanned into the computer, manipulated like it’s never been possible before, and printed out on digital printers. But what is most impressive is that this can now be done at a quality that rivals or even surpasses conventional darkroom printing. Four years ago when I was considering setting up a darkroom in my house, I made a deliberate decision not to - preferring instead to wait for a digital darkroom. I knew it would just be a matter of time when it would be better than conventional darkroom printing…

A second revolution has occurred in the last couple of years. In my opinion 2002 saw the first truly professional digital cameras appear: most people “in the know” would agree that in a like-for-like enlargement, images from the best digital cameras are subjectively (and possibly objectively) better than from conventional cameras. Film has been superseded by silicon. Now we don’t even have the hassle of scanning negatives and transparencies.

These are really exciting times for me because it means that I can literally do whatever I like to photographs (with the possible exception of putting in more detail than was there originally), and/or I can do anything freehand. I have a computer screen that I can draw on directly (it’s even pressure sensitive!) - so I can draw and “paint” directly on the computer screen – but at a level of control unimaginable to previous generations. If you think what a word processor has done for writing – simply in terms of the ease with which you can make changes – then that is what some extremely powerful graphics programs and computer hardware have done for digital art. I am now in complete artistic control because I can bring conventional freehand art techniques and photography together – using the strengths of each.

It must not be overlooked that these are just tools, and they cannot create great work in themselves - just like a good piano won’t make you a great musician, and a word processor won’t make you a great writer. There was a time when artists made their own oil and tempura paints, however tubes of paint made our lives easier – leaving us more time to be creative. So too with digital imaging/photography…

So I have come full circle: I’m back doing art! I’m not painting in the conventional sense of the word – I’m digitally painting. Earlier I made the point that there are three key criteria of what constitutes art: starting with a blank, a very high degree of control over the medium being used, and the freedom to create/express whatever you like. I don’t think this is possible with conventional photography – control is very limited indeed, and you’re certainly very limited in what you can express.

I feel I have mastered the craft of photography and digital image manipulation (however, one hopefully continues to learn and improve). Now I feel totally liberated to do anything at the highest quality and imaginative freedom. I can achieve the best of both worlds: pure art and pure photography can now be combined to give me complete creative freedom. I can now literally do anything in terms of a still image (moving images might follow…), and at a quality I have never been able to before: but, more importantly, at a quality I am happy with. My creative, photographic, and computing skills can now be used for one common goal – art. I am at the height of my creative, intellectual, and practical powers and am in a financial position to realise a lot of my creative ambitions. Technically, and in terms of technique, I try to keep abreast of all major innovations and developments. My three main practical skills and interests – art, photography, and computers - can now all be combined. There can’t be many people who are so well placed to explore these new artistic opportunities…

I live on my own and have done for most of my adult life. This has given me a great deal of time to focus on my interests. I don’t want to live an ordinary life; I want to achieve something of my choosing…”

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Michael Autumn
Cambridge, UK
23rd July 2004

“In November 2005 I gave up a successful IT career (my salary was well into six digits) to explore full time my passion for making art.

This is the artistic freedom I've wanted for most of my adult life. The big question is can I make a living out of it...?”

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Michael Autumn
Cambridge, UK
17th May 2006