PAINTING IN PIXELS: CONTEMPORARY DIGITAL ARTWORK

In quantum physics, the Heisenberg Effect describes how a researcher’s own observations literally change the thing observed – i.e., reality. I believe an artist’s observations go one step further. They can change reality, but also create new realities.

My current visual art process is entirely digital, i.e., I paint on a computer. Nevertheless, my pieces are hand-painted. I use a stylus as my brush, and pixels as my paint. To begin, I might snap a reference photo of a particular moment of time-space. I interpret it using painting software (Corel Painter or Procreate) that lets me determine the brush strokes’ position and character, its colour and flavour. I then alter those brush strokes, much the way I use Word to amend text, adding and combining multiple layers to create depth and ambiguity.

On the macro scale, digital painting fits somewhere between art photography and classical painting techniques – the synthesis of O’Keeffe and Stieglitz, if you will. On the micro, my own digital artwork also exists in a liminal in-between space, shifting back and forth between abstract and representational, concrete/physical (the Print) and metaphysical (the Pixel).