Lets Get Digital: Early Experimentation

In 1995, I could no longer afford a studio, and decided to make sketches on my Apple Quadra personal computer with the intention of painting them later. The longer I worked in this way, the more complex the work became, and in time I realized I was as excited about making work digitally as I was with traditional materials—in fact, even more so. I had found a way to create an illusion of oil paint with smears, smudges, and swoops that were and were not similar to oil painting. Creating this work was a stimulating new experience for me: of seeing, of playing with a new tool and of pushing its boundaries; of turning mistakes and glitches into purposeful trails of detecting and discovering hidden pathways for making art! When my large digital files challenged the computer, making it crash and leaving me with error patterns that erased the image I had been working on, I captured those patterns and manipulated them, and incorporated them, adding the computer's native tongue to the image. This was a wonderful way to transform mistakes into intentional marks. Substantial resistance to the digital work was challenging:many critics did not want to see this new work, they were not open to a different way of image-making (which they viewed as less physical, less man-made). These new avenues for painting excited me, and continue to. These works reflected the increasingly simulated space we were inhabiting, new worlds ripe for exploring.