Painting the Digital River: How an Artist Learned to Love the Computer

This is the first book to explore, in depth, the connections between painting and computer graphics. It celebrates the new vistas available to artists, but also highlights attendant problems.

It is written in an accessible style, and illustrated with the author's work alongside works by Roman Verostko, Neo Rauch, Ellsworth Kelly, Mark Wilson, Ken Huff, Anna Ursyn, Lane Hall, Lisa Moline, Hans Dehlinger and Shelagh Wakely. It recounts the excitement of discovering paint software in the 1980s, the emergence of an alternative ‘digital’ art world and the dialogue art and technology.

James Faure-Walker

James Faure Walker (born 1948, London) studied painting and aesthetics at St Martins (1966-70) and the Royal College of Art (1970-72). He began writing criticism in the mid 1970s, and in 1976 he co-founded Artscribe - a journal for contemporary arts which he edited until 1983. His writings have been published in Studio International, Modern Painters, Mute, Computer Generated Imaging, Wired, Art Review, and he has contributed to a number of exhibition catalogues. A long-standing contributor to Siggraph, the annual conference on computer graphics, he has participated in numerous international computer arts festivals and exhibited widely in Austria, Germany, Holland, Japan, Russia, Spain and the USA. In 1998, he won the Golden Plotter first prize at Computerkunst, Gladbeck, Germany. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at DAM Gallery, Berlin, Digital Salon, New York and Bloomberg Space, London. He was awarded a three year AHRB Fellowship for research into painting and the digital studio in 2002, and is the author of 'Painting the Digital River: How an Artist Learned to Love the Computer', published by Prentice Hall (USA) in 2006.

Current Research

Having recently completed 'Painting the Digital River' I want to continue searching for ways of mixing and blending paint software with painting. I remain fascinated, too, by the shifting attitudes towards the use of technology in drawing and painting. In the latter stages of researching some illustrations for this book I became fascinated with the depiction of water. I have been photographing rock pools and water patterns left in sand. I also have developed a renewed interest in medieval and early renaissance painting.

In broader terms, and thinking forward to a further publication, or conference, I have been exploring the way the 'other worlds' in science - such as the immense spaces of astrophysics, the nano worlds of micro biology - could find some reflection in visual art. It is the question of how artists can make connections in their work beyond what is immediately visible, beyond the conventional subjects. In one sense our knowledge has reached out further than ever before, yet at the same time we speak of art having its own 'art world', its own local habitat, its comfort zone.

I am interested in raising the 'art' awareness in the development of software; also in the shape of new fine art courses incorporating digital expertise; in the future of digital painting; in redefining drawing; in producing a 'project manual' for visual thinking using computer graphics concepts. I am particularly interested in Walter Crane and Lewis Day's publications of the early 1900s, and how they anticipate these thoughts. Though I am suspicious of any instant remedies for the problem of integrating digital tools with traditional methods, I wonder whether a future generation will look back and wonder why painting, drawing, photography and digital media were studied separately.