Art and the Artist

I have been an artist for as long as I can remember and I have written articles for magazines about art, but this is the first time I have put forth my personal musings about art and the creative process as I experience it.

I have expressed my creative urges in many different mediums, but for the past couple of years, I have focused on learning to use computer software to create images that can be used in many different ways. I never thought I would enjoy working on a computer to create art, but as I finally developed a broad enough skill set in Photoshop, I found that it was so much fun and empowering. I use to do graphic art in the early 70's and at that point in time, it was really hard because none of the software programs that we take for granted these days even existed and it was all done by cut and paste - really time consuming stuff!

Today I am posting one of my latest attempts of a self portrait called "The Density of Smoke - A self portrait in Sepia", where the pattern in the background is a recreation of an algorithm for the density of smoke. I feel that the algorithm is so neat looking that I had to use it somewhere in my portrait because I sometimes feel like I have the physical density of smoke.

I am fascinated at how the algorithm for the density of smoke insinuated itself into my self portrait. I read constantly and I see thousands of words and images, but this one algorithm jumped out at me and caused me to want to inhabit the same space as it, in what ever manner I could.