I started out as a purely as a digital artist, first as a web designer and 3D modeler and then as a commercial artist. In almost nothing I did, did I ever touch brush to canvas or pencil to paper. I could draw, but it wasn't my job and anyway, anything that could be drawn could be 3D modeled better, or so I thought.  With the advent of powerful computers, possibilities opened for perfectly photorealistic 3D worlds which saw neither the photographer's camera nor the painter's brush. If your tools were powerful enough, you could do it all with pixels alone.  I have a vast portfolio of my art that I never drew, which only existed on computer monitors and printed out by CMYK laser printers.

Eventually I burned out in commercial art and took a job in technical support. After awhile though, I realized that I had not so much burned out on art as burned out on being an art slave for other people, for corporations and bosses. I wanted to do my own art. If other people bought my art, that's super, but it would be mine alone to dictate. I could wander wherever I wanted, it's my art now.

I started assimilating huge amounts of information about, not the current fine art scene, but the fine arts underground, the kind of people who make what will be tomorrow's museum pieces, after the stale dead modern art of today is finally overthrown and the Frank Stellas and Jasper Johns rot in garages. The real art happening now, not art looking back on the necrotic tissue of an irrelevant postmodernism.

And the more I looked and the more I experimented, the more I came back to art applied with real hands on real paper and cloth with real ink and paint. One thing a picture on a monitor will never do for you, it will never be a real physical object. It has no dimension, it has no texture, it has no gloss or cracks or feel.  Something that you can reproduce a billion times with a billion exactly identical copies will never be the same as something you have to apply by hand, on paper, in person.  

This is why you will never catch me selling what is known as a giclee print. A giclee is a fancy marketing name for a print printed out on an expensive inkjet printer. You could make a hundred copies or a million, they would all look the same. It is a reproduction of art, okay. It is not itself art. It is a digital copy. It is worth... slightly more than the paper it is printed on.  My prints are hand-pulled silkscreen prints, every one is different, every one was made by hand.  The stencils are wiped out once the print run is done, they can never be exactly reproduced again.

How much would you pay for a digital image of a completely unknown Van Gogh? But how much would you pay for the unknown Van Gogh itself? :)  It is an artifact of a unique physical act; even if it is a bad Van Gogh, it's worth more than a universe of digital reproductions of Van Goghs. The master touched it physically, he did it. It wasn't sprayed by machines while he drank a double latte.

I am also committed to making my art as accessible and relevant to ordinary people as possible. This is why T-shirts are a major part of my work. Everyone wears T-shirts and most people won't think twice about spending $20 on a nice tee. Spending $1100 on a painting, on the other hand... well, that's more than most people can afford and more than most are willing to spend even if they can afford it. If we want to take art out of museums and onto the streets and into the lives of regular people, and if we want to expand the world of culture to include and involve people as versus only including wealthy art cliques, then our work must be affordable and accessible to people. The wealthy art cliques are why the museums are full of dead irrelevant inaccessible art to begin with.

Back when painting was the only way to get your portrait done, most paintings were just that - portrait paintings, stand-ins for a photographic camera that hadn't been invented yet. They weren't so much art as ersatz photographs. When the first photographs became available, everyone predicted the death of painting. It didn't die, instead it was freed from the mundanity of it's practical purpose and became art.  Digital art will not replace hand art, it will replace commercial hand art and has already done so for the most part. Digital cameras will not replace film, they will replace film snapshots. For your holiday snaps or taking pictures of junior's birthday party, digital is great and way more convenient than film. For art, for the most part, forget about it. There will always be film, it has merely been liberated from most of it's mundane function.

As a commercial digital artist, I was a highly effective function of marketing. Now I am not. My art has been freed for better purposes.  :)


If you wish to contact me, you can use the friendly spambot-resistant email address graphic below. :) One day perhaps I will find a better way to do this, but in the meantime you can reach me at...



I do sell my stuff, right now I don't have a yahoo storefront or anything so my online sales are a bit stymied, but you can always inquire directly.