Featured Painting

It says "Featured Painting" on the top of this page but this isn't a painting, it is a digital image. More precisely an archivally sound digital photgraph. Let me explain...

Aurora was created mostly in PhotoShop, a computer program used to work with images. Nothing was scanned in - I wanted an image that came out of the computer itself like a plant flowering from its roots.

The first images I made for the web were a series of desktop pictures for the Mac. "Aurora" was created as part of one such group of digital images. They were downloadable from the internet as shareware. I felt it was a wonderful way for a very wide public to see my work and have my images on their computers.

In doing this, the long tradition of the fine art print was in the back of my mind. There is also a long tradition in Japan, called the "Floating World," of wonderful woodcuts sold for a nominal amount to the general public.

The Aurora series became popular, way beyond what I had expected, so I created several other series of desktop pictures available for Mac and PC users as shareware. You can see them at this link which is devoted solely to this aspect of my work.

I received so many requests for prints of these images that I've made Aurora #16 available as a photographic print.

Aurora was inspired by the spectacular Hubble Space photographs. Those awesome, mysterious images are riveting.

The images in the "Aurora" series look superficially different from my paintings. Digital images show the results of their journey from a place different than paint and canvas, but their roots are the same - the artist's sensibility.

I don't feel digital work should replicate other mediums any more than a watercolor should try to look like an oil painting. Digital images belong to my body of work just as my photo-lithographs, drawings, etchings, silk screens, watercolors, and of course, my oil and acrylic paintings do.

Sometimes people think of an artist's work as being "about" something as if artists illustrated ideas the way illustrators decorate magazine articles. Sometimes people think an artist's work should have a singular look, like a corporate logo or designer label. I feel this has little to do with the inner perspective that is reflected in good work - the underlying passions and interrogations the artist is making of life. You could use the word "vision" to describe what I'm talking about but I prefer the artist's "sense of things." This sense of things is something expressed on a deeper level than subject matter or surface look.

Art is a language of more than simple denotation or decoration - it requires an subtle and sophisticated audience as well. TV and the movies are for passive enjoyment and the pleasing reassurances of received notions. There's just more "there there"; more to see and think about and more satisfaction for the viewer in the fine arts.

For me, painting is what it is all about. It's the most personal, sensual and meditative of mediums. The unique physical object creates its own world. This digital image was born of painting for many years.

-Ira Altschiller, 2000 (modified 2002)