Digital Oil is the Art of turning digital photographs to stunning digital paintings!
An idea conceived by Joseph Suede and Essam Fatrony!
Joseph was born in 1950 in Lebanon and migrated to Australia in 1988. He was educated by the French Jesuits in Beirut at their highly selective private college where he studied French and Arabic philosophy. Joseph is multilingual, speaking fluent English, French, Arabic and Lebanese.
He went on to study at the Lebanese University of Beirut where he completed his degree in Higher Studies in Interior Design. He then undertook a Diploma in Graphic Arts at the Ecole Estienne de Paris in France in 1978.
Joseph returned to Beirut to work in one of the best interior design firms there which catered for wealthy Lebanese in the Arab countries and France as well as in Lebanon.
After his father’s death in 1980, Joseph was elected Managing Director of the family curtain and upholstery firm in Beirut. The business had prospered under astute planning and guidance for many generations but war and inflation combined to lead to its almost total collapse. The war also led to Joseph’s decision to migrate to Australia. He started his new life with very little money and the need to survive ensured he learnt English quickly.
Joseph’s hobbies are photography, computers, travelling and movies. Photography has been a passion of his from an early age. Self-taught photographer, his photographic work is popular.
He always admired people who could both draw and paint and he mixed with such artists at university in Lebanon. Joseph himself was not good at drawing freehand but he was adept at using the tools of an architect or interior designer. His desire to draw was at last satisfied when he discovered computers and editing software. From there he progressed to the art which he practices now.
Joseph’s artistry involves capturing some nice sceneries with his camera and enhancing them using computer softwares and virtual tools so that they look like paintings. He starts with a digital photograph as a base and then uses the colour pixels like paint. He works with each photograph, altering its colour and form, sometimes adding a few elements or enhancing some others.
Each photograph dictates Joseph’s painting style and is digitally ’hand-crafted’ to achieve a unique appearance.
Essam Fatrony, an IT engineer, has taken a keen interest in Joseph’s photography and has helped him overcome any problems he met with in photo editing. Essam has always had confidence in Joseph’s skills and artwork and persuaded him to open Digital Oil as his business partner. Joseph is the artist while Essam works behind the scenes taking care of the technical side.
Digital Oil joined Fine Art America on October 9th, 2010.
