First Light is a site-specific artwork based on light and was commissioned by the Photonics Center, Boston University.
First Light is a computer-generated image printed as a photographic transparency using a LightJet Direct Digital Laser Printer. The Light Jet printer employs a red, green and blue laser that can transfer an image made in RGB color mode in the computer, pixel by pixel, onto Cibachrome transparency film.
The installed image is mounted on glass and backlit with fluorescent lights. The image was made to deliberately reveal units of light and color as the building blocks of the design. As with the pointillist painting technique, dots, or as in this case pixels of color, are on close inspection clearly visible. Stepping back reveals an impressionistic fusion of light and color. The impressionists wished to separate the colors of the spectrum in order to trap the innumerable shifts of natural light. Natural light, however, is not the subject of this work. Luminosity in this case refers more to a sense of awakening and of poetic illumination.
First Light is one of a series of digital images entitled Instrumental Variations on a Theme in Dylan Thomas. This body of electronic work parallels a group of O’Donnell's paintings that since 1993 have made reference to Thomas’s poetry. Just as a poem can be the basis of a vocal song, which in turn can be transposed into an instrumental arrangement, so can a drawing be transposed by the computer into an orchestration of light and color. The poem by Dylan Thomas, "The Force That Through The Green Fuse Drives The Flower,” is the main inspiration for the Photonics commission. Thomas created poems of instinct and power to make sense of, and to give voice to, impressions both seen and unseen that filled his world. First Light does not illustrate Thomas’s poems. Instead, it pays homage and acknowledges the same need to explore ways in which the artist can visit those places where, ‘light breaks where no sun shines.'
(Hugh O'Donnell, 1994) "For me creating fine art on the computer represented a radical departure from the hands-on methods of drawing and painting I typically used. 'When you drag a brush across the paper, you can never really predict what the brush will do. You know the direction of the line, but you never quite know what the character of the mark will be.' For my digital art, 'I wanted the computer to create its own dirt - its own interference.' So Jon Cone developed special filters to help me digitally create images that retained freshness and the autographic immediacy of a traditional drawing. I used a stylus, a digital pen, to draw the image in Photoshop. At the time Jon Cone wanted to show the machine in action. In an interview with Eileen Fritsch from The Big Picture Hugh O’Donnell is quoted as saying: "…The medium is not ink, but rather pixels, which were intentionally kept large and individualized. I never intended to mimic the effects of oil paint or brush marks at this time because computer generated art doesn't have the sense of direct touch. You do it by remote control. The instrument of the computer has a character of its own - it's as different as an electric guitar is from the human voice…."
