Tony, who is not only a puppet maker but also an x-ray artist (visit his blog: xraygraphics), commented on my post yesterday that the artwork I put up is very tactile. He put his finger right on the core of my art. To explain where it comes from I have to dive down into my personal history. In a nutshell: back in the day I took to Photoshop like a duck to water and have been teaching digital imaging for 20 years. In the beginning I really enjoyed working with blend modes and masks to create amazing textures. But along the way, I realised how much our brain tricks us into perceiving surface properties. When you touch a print it is always flat. The appearance of texture is created by our brain interpreting what we expect to be there. So we see texture that really isn’t there. Over the years my yearning for honest textures grew stronger and stronger.
I created the picture I’ve put up today in 2007. This is one of my favourites from my Photoshop era. In this triptych I used 4 different background photographs (a wooden door with flaky paint, a stone wall with a window, an iron watch tower in a forest, and a 200-year-old lace curtain) and combined them in different ways to bring different properties to the fore. My work is generally about relationships. This one describes that in a good relationship you should be allowed to be strong or weak at times.
dedepuppets 
Thanks for the comment, much appreciated. Maybe I too will evolve, or perhaps devolve back to tactile textures. Meanwhile I wish I had your experience with Photoshop. I fully agree about perception of surface properties
With your x-ray art the stories are so important. Am I wrong when I assume you enjoy the process and train of tbought that goes with it more than the endresult? Seeing the work evolve is such a brilliant way of getting tbrough issues, isn’t it?
Am in Queenstown at the moment – family reunion. Have only just managed to get to your reply, thankyou. You are right, the process is so important, the train of thought and mastering the process to achieve the end result is so important. For me this is a catharsis and therefore helps to clear baggage. I write the sorry for two reasons, firstly to explain the reasoning behind the image, and then to clarify my own thoughts.
I am wondering if with time humans loose their tactile sense. How do we know whether something is soft or hard? I for example have already lost the sense of temperature when I look at images of textures.