My Opinion: March 2007 Archives

A personal statement. If you agree with the war in Iraq or not millions of lives depend on us finishing what we started. Millions were slaughtered when we surrendered Vietnam and millions will be slaughtered if we surrender Iraq. If you agree that the war in Iraq is part of the war on terror or not if we surrender Iraq we will embolden our sworn enemies.

Failure in Iraq is failure for The United States of America. A failure we will pay for for generations to come. History makes that clear.

We must support the fine Americans who have volunteered to risk their lives in honor of this nation and help them WIN this war in Iraq and the war on terror. Our lives and the lives of our children and our childrens children depend on them.

I have had 2 prints designed to honor the men and women of our military. I have reintroduced having these images available to download and print your own for free. There is also a discount for the current and former members of our military and their families who would like to have one of our professionally printed archival prints.

The print with text has "The United States of America Land of the Free Because of the Brave" lightly printed over the image of the soldier in Iraq.

These prints, as are all of our prints, is 100% art gallery archival quality. They will not yellow or fade for over 100 years if displayed properly. The prints are all produced at the time of the order and each print is hand signed and numbered by Douglas.

There are more than 200 original Douglas contemporary art prints / modern art prints to select from. Everything from wine to nudes to Harley Davidsons to barn doors.

Some people denigrate the art coming from digital photographs and being generated from a computer. For decades some refused to consider photographs as art. That is no longer the case.

Let's take the photo art of the famous Ansel Adams that we have all seen. Mr. Adams would spend hours or even days manipulating his original photograph into the final art we know today. He used the tools he had available at the time, his camera and his darkroom. He had to talent to see art through his camera as well as the talent to take his original image and manipulate it into something special in his darkroom.

Andy Warhol was a very talented graphic artist. That isn't what he became famous for. Andy Warhol is famous for Polaroid pictures. Photographs that he manipulated through the use of silk screening to produce his final works.

Ansel Adams and Andy Warhol became famous because they manipulated photographs using the tools they had at the time. The truth be told many artists work from photographs or even project photographs onto a canvas and copy them using paints or pencils. Don't think for a nano second that if Ansel Adams and Andy Warhol had the computer technology they wouldn't have used it.

In fact odds are that unless you have the money to buy an original painting the print you buy is digital art. The original was scanned by a computer, turned into a digital image and the prints were produced by a computer. Unless it is an original that painting you have hanging on the wall is a digital image.

If you don't care for the art that's fine. Don't discount it's value because it is digitally manipulated digital photographs.

As a commercial photographer I get paid to manipulate the photographs you see in ads.