Sheila F. Crawford: A Spiritual Journey through Photography

Sheila Crawford has been a professional artist in competition since 1981 and is a retired art instructor who taught drawing, painting and sculpture at Flagler-Palm Coast High School. For almost twenty years, Sheila has been a painter, specializing in a style she describes as photo-realistic collage, or a surrealistic style, using acrylics and the airbrush as her tool of choice to execute the paintings. Today she uses the same style that she used in painting and applies it to digital photography.

Each of Sheila's digital photo collages or surrealistic styled photographs starts out as a traditional photographic image. When using film, she scans and downloads the photographic image into the computer. In the case of photographic prints or 3-D objects, she uses a tabloid size flatbed scanner. Once the images have been selected and down loaded into the "Digital Dark Room", Sheila uses her many years as a painter to work out the composition, using thumbnail sketches in order to create a visually interesting composition.

After transferring the images into the computer, she uses special graphics software programs to optimize each image and then selects photographic elements of those images to create the final composition. She also uses traditional photographic darkroom techniques such as solarization, cyanotypes, or selective colorization and applies them to the composition. She prints each of her photographic compositions on a wide format printer using 100 year, archival-pigmented inks and a variety of photograph papers of various surface qualities. Sheila chooses to print the photographs herself rather than having them printed commercially so she can exercise complete artistic control of the process.

Her mission as a digital photographer is to use this new technology and create images, which are a visual spiritual journey, beyond the boundaries of traditional photography.

Sheila has a B.A. in art education from Bethune-Cookman University and has additional studies at The University of Florida through the Carnegie Program. She is a frequent award winner at many of the finest outdoor art festivals in Florida having won Best of Show and numerous other awards of distinction and excellence. Her work has been shown in individual and group exhibitions at such prestigious museums as the Harn Museum in Gainesville, the Polk Museum of Art in Lakeland, the Museum of Arts and Sciences in Daytona Beach as well as the Museum of Florida Art. She has work in many public and private collections across the U.S.

Sheila is always one of the most popular artists at the DeLand Fall Festival of the Arts and we are excited to have her as our Featured Artist this year. She will participate in several programs and events prior to the festival and will create an image especially for the festival for use on all official festival merchandise. We welcome Sheila Crawford as Featured Artist for the 16th annual DeLand Fall Festival of the Arts.