Recent Explorations – Pulling Back the Curtain, Part 1

I have been very quiet publicly over the past decade artistically speaking, producing work in the background, but not being very happy with the majority of it and sharing very little. Additionally, until very recently I was in a job that was draining me of valuable mental and physical energy and was not supporting my creative endeavors. I am happy to say this has not been the case the past 3-years at my current job, and that has a lot to do with this website and everything I have been doing the past year in particular creatively – my current employer does an admirable job of supporting my artistic research and creative pursuits. It took me a couple of years to adjust to teaching at a new school (having a pandemic hit at the start of my second year didn’t help), but now that I am acclimated my energy has shifted back to my artwork and creative research.

NFT Equivalents Series

It may come as a surprise, but I have been extremely active the past 9-months, creating dozens of finished artworks across multiple projects – and selling the majority of them to collectors. All of this has been occurring under my newly established alias, Art Block. Art Block is the name of my NFT project that I have been using as a tool to explore newly emerging technology, blockchain ledgers and non-fungible tokens specifically. I created an alias first and foremost because of the culture of blockchain which treasures anonymity and where the vast majority of participants are also using an alias. Although I am now choosing to ‘doxx’ myself here, I will continue to use my alias on the blockchain and maintain the associated website, blog, and social media for the foreseeable future. If you decide to follow me in that space, I simply ask you to play along with me and use my alias there, not my legal name. Creating art using an alias encouraged me to take new risks with my artwork that has allowed me to grow as a creative in a short amount of time, but now I am ready to pull back the curtain for the rest of you to see what I have been doing. Art Block Link Tree

Part 2 of my ‘unmasking’ will be posted next Sunday at the same time!

New URL – New Directions – Same Artist

The decision to create a new URL for my Fine Art work has been long in the making. The dobbsphoto.com domain I have used since 1999 will continue to live on, but I plan to use that domain exclusively for my commercial freelance work. I needed a place for my fine art work to live separately from my work for commerce, enter todd-dobbs.studio. I also didn’t want to limit myself with the term ‘photo’ anymore, as my workflow has become hybrid and fluid in nature, and technology continues to exert its influence on what I create. The majority of my work is still photographic in nature, or at least at its core, but I frequently incorporate digital illustration and hand drawing techniques into my workflow, it seemed a good time to simply create a location for my artwork, whatever media it may be.

Photo by Marc Denis

Essential to all of the work I create is a desire to combine analog and digital methods to push the potential of what each offers, while using the unique characteristics these combinations create to enhance concepts in my work. This studio is where I create all of my work that is intended for display in a gallery space, crafted in limited editions, and sold directly to collectors. Although you are viewing the images on my website digitally, they are only a reproduction of the object I created, which can only be appreciated fully in an analog way.

More to come as the official launch of this new site approaches – planned launch date is May 2022 (updated 4/23/22).