Only 10 years ago, artist Hannah Gal was cutting bits out of photographs and sticking them together with glue. Today, using Apple hardware and the latest creative software, she is one of the UK’s top digital artists, writes Eleanor Stanley.

If you were to imagine a digital artist, what kind of person would they be? Perhaps someone rather serious; a bit of a techie; someone who likes to spend their spare time fiddling with computers? Hannah Gal is none of these things. This vibrant woman, with bright red lipstick and big hair, is animated and passionate when she speaks about her work. She gesticulates a lot. She calls herself ‘a creative’ and likes to speak of using her art to ‘touch people’. Hannah Gal may use cutting-edge technology, but she is an artist through and through.
 
 

She’s also passionate about her Mac, and for one simple reason - it’s the most important tool in her studio, functioning as her canvas and her palette and a thousand other tools in between. “I can definitely say that my Mac is the centre of my universe”, she says. “For most people it’s like that these days. The computer controls everything we do - and not just addresses and phone numbers. If you’re a creative person, everything is taught there, everything is generated there, everything is output from there”.
 

As a leading digital artist, it is essential that Hannah has state-of-the-art equipment. “Because of what I do, I have to - it’s a necessity”, she agrees fervently. Hannah currently uses a Power Mac G4, a Titanium PowerBook G4 when she’s on her travels, and a Umac Flatbed Scanner, as well as traditional and digital cameras. No PCs, then? She shakes her head firmly. “On the computer side of things it has to be a Mac, and it has to be the fastest and best I can afford to buy at the time”.
 
 

She uses this technology to combine raw graphics with other images to create layers on screen. Products like Photoshop, Illustrator and Final Cut Pro enable her to morph these different images to create beautiful pictures 
 - and, more recently, short films - that often leave people asking: “How did she do that?!”

Like many of her contemporaries, Hannah is adamant that Macs are better suited to this type of creative work. “Some people are PC people and some are Mac people, and I am definitely a Mac person”, she says. “I appreciate absolutely everything about my Mac... from the OS to Final Cut. It’s the whole philosophy behind it which I appreciate, which I’m really tuned into”.

But this pioneer of new technology has not always used such advanced equipment in her work. At art college in her native Israel, Hannah studied fine art before becoming interested in photography. It was only when she came to London and had already 
 established herself as an artist that she stumbled upon the possibilities of new media, at a trade show. “I saw a demonstration of Photoshop on a Mac and I thought, ‘This is amazing!’ The idea that you could scan an image, and then take it further... to me that was a turning point”.

From that moment, Hannah’s work changed dramatically. “I realised that it didn’t have to stop at the printing of the photograph”, she explains. “I could mix the painting and drawing side of things with photography”. This is what she was already doing, except she was literally painting and drawing on the print, or using scissors to cut images out of magazines and glue them on. “When I saw the Mac, I thought, ‘This is not only a neater way, but also a more powerful way to do the same sort of thing’”, she says. “Anything else is primitive in comparison”.
 
 

“To me, it’s Apple’s awareness of design and the fact that they go to so much trouble. It’s not just that they’re pretty - it goes beyond that. Apple’s whole approach to digital technology and interface design is so intuitive and so intelligent. These are the things I like about Macs”.