A recent series of my mixed-media pieces contain wireframe chalices, created by rotating gestural marks made on a graphics tablet in 3-D space. I showed these works to an advisor of mine in graduate school, art historian Andrew Hershberger, and he asked me if I was familiar with Paolo Uccello. I said I wasn’t. He showed me a Uccello drawing depicting, of all things, a wireframe chalice, drawn by hand in painstaking detailed perspective around the year 1450. This reminded me of the circularity of time and thought.
The digital age will not, as many believe, supplant the traditional arts, but expand them. I believe that digital tools such as the desktop computer and the internet can benefit artists working in virtually any medium.
The world of technology is changing, and the art world is changing with it. The advent of photography over a century ago spawned the development of modern art, mostly because the role of the artist as a documenter of reality was rapidly disappearing because of technology. This led first to impressionism, then to expressionism, its cousin abstract expressionism, pop art, conceptual art, and where we are today, which is digital art. I would find it irresponsible as an artist not to embrace the tools of our time, namely, the computer.
I was lucky enough to have been introduced to computers as the technology was first being offered to the public in the 1980′s, and since then, they have always been a part of my life. When I was an undergraduate at SUNY-Binghamton in the early 1990′s there was no digital arts program; only their design program had begun to utilize early desktop publishing software, and I was more interested in the painting studio. While an undergraduate student, I did an internship in the Hamptons, working as a studio assistant for fine artist Steve Miller, who introduced me to the photo-silkscreen process as well as the conceptual framework of technology art, which I embraced fully.
In 2007, I obtained a Master of Fine Arts Degree in Computer Art from Bowling Green State University. As Jackson Pollock used house paint to create his famous drip paintings, and Andy Warhol appropriated the commercial photo-silkscreen technique, I too, have incorporated the use of commercial and industrial tools and materials in my fine-art practice. It is my way of reflecting the time I am alive in my work, and leaving some artifacts behind to represent the culture of the early twenty-first century.
– Colin Goldberg
