My computer artwork begins in 1995, the year I purchased my first Macintosh. In one sense, this was a practical decision: I was considering a career in graphic arts and publishing. But more significantly, what I saw was a fantastic tool for rendering my own images relatively quickly. Indeed I witnessed an early example of it in my teacher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, George Cramer. This was the 1980s, when relatively few artists were using computers for image-making. But George was doing it at this time with great style and sophistication. The works that emerged out of his Amiga were some of the most impressive images I had ever seen made on a computer. Simply put, I was stunned by what my teacher was able to achieve. His computer artwork possessed such a remarkable virtuosity, clarity and boldness of form and color. 

It was with this inspiration in mind that I approached the work above. These are among my earliest attempts to capture a certain quality of content unknown before my student days. But early on I also felt a certain limitation with this process. Because I was unable to make physical reproductions of them, they could only remain images on a computer screen. For me this was not enough. I needed a higher quality inkjet printer, something not so widely available or affordable until the late 1990s. Of course today all this seems so distant. What is perhaps still very present in my mind, however, is how much this process has influenced my work in oils and watercolor.