I’m interested in the marriage of digital technology and painting. I aim to create abstract paintings that reflect the digital filtering process and lose the reality of the original sampled and photographed material. In my work photographic references help me to capture and abstract interactions from places I habitually encounter and sporadically find in my travels. Painted, worn surfaces and the spontaneity of marks are filtered through photography, processed through the digital, and reinterpreted through the materiality of paint and language of abstraction.

I am drawn to the subtleties of cities’ urban wear and tear that demonstrates a history of human’s gestures and exchanges with surfaces. This is a continuously controlled and uncontrolled turnover. Contrasted with elements of deterioration, synthetic, fluorescent colors stand out to me through the variations of intentional, gestural mark making and the unintentional, time-lapse of decay. I’m attracted to the bright, fluorescent colors that carry the notion of technology and synthetic production in ready- made materials that allow an immediacy of application. I look upon these elements in the urban landscape as marks waiting to be appropriated, processed into a new existence through abstract painting.

The contemporary digital processes I use help to make connections to the contemporary discourse of abstraction and the historical lineage of painting. In making this connection to abstraction, my paintings investigate the illusions of space while disconnecting place through the digital, and creating space within paintings.

Technology today is commonplace because of its use on a daily basis. I embrace and use the digital camera, and computer technology as a means to filter the sources I document. The material of paint has a tangible, physical property that allows manipulation in ways that the non-tangible information of the digital and use of screens does not allow. Paintings have objectivity, whereas nothing can be physically grasped in the digital. The area of mediation when working from the medium of the digital moving into the area of painting creates a media gap and space of crossover, allowing for problem solving from one material into the other.

The digital filtering in my work creates a lens of removal and anonymity. Specificity of place and time are removed, creating a placeless-ness of the pictorial space. There is a removal of the real, and void of the digital expressed. Placeless-ness is demonstrated through the combination of the digital space meeting the illusionistic space of painting. Digital effects show through as Photoshop filters, but pull back into the medium of paint through optical illusions, and uses of color and textures that cannot show through on a screen.

Transformation through the space of the digital allows for areas of information to be lost in translation, which occurs in my work through the use of flat, graphic shapes and clean edges. This accounts for the loss of information and for the manipulation occurring in a new medium, on a new surface. I use Technology as a mechanical tool, by the way it also fools the use of my hand, but paint exposes it through the acknowledged materiality of what is achieved through the use of paint. The utilization of my hand is important in every step of my work through the way each layer in my process transitions from the original found material, to a photograph, to an abstracted form.