I have always loved to draw, to the point that I almost earned and Studio Art Minor in college, but I was short a class. Bad planning. I never thought of myself as an artist in that way, one who would make drawings and paintings, show them to people, and sell them, even. Not then. Art classes were something I did to stretch my brain in a different direction than writing and literature, which was my passion at the time.

All of this remained true until I ran into Adobe PhotoShop 3 and a Kodak digital camera. Not only would I click away at this fascinating landscape unfolding before me “for free,” I started to cut up and reconfigure the results, placing isolated trees, buildings, all manner of things on their own layers and filling in with photographs of model RR scenic components, other textures, whatever I wanted to make a new scene, a world between what is there and what I staged. I had the feeling of crazy possibility we all felt about recomposing the world in the 1990s with Adobe.

I also loved the exploration of my neighborhood with the camera. My picture taking changed. I shot more for the remix than the photograph. My ultimate goal was to make paintings out of what I found. Fictional paintings. I hardly thought of what I was doing as digital collage or digital artwork. Adobe seemed like this tool that necessarily existed among the waves of new things coming our way at that moment.

As time went on, I began to work with physical art supplies and PhotoShop became like a brush in the coffee can. Something to use when needed, and I still use a raster image processor a lot (GIMP now that PhotoShop is so expensive). I’ll make acrylic transfers or cut up printouts and glue them down. Almost all of the time, though, a physical image is the end product, not a digital one or a print of one. Gimp is squarely a tool rather than a means to an end. I use it a lot to size images for this website, for example. My Earth Memory Paintings use the digital a good deal as does The Journey of the Moth.

In the late nineties, I produced a batch of my first digital images as small stickers which I then plastered all around downtown Asheville, NC. A friend of mine who still lives there tells me there may be a few left here in 2019, almost 20 years later. At the time I thought of the images as portals to a world where a character I was developing lived. I think that the stickers were the last strictly digital project that I did, and even they had a real-life component. But, out of those particular images would come visual themes that would permeate my work to the present.