Digital art and technology realizes the dream of the Impressionists, to paint with light, and allows us to create works with more vivid colours than was possible before digital art. The colour space of “natural” media was always dulled by the binders and admixtures necessary to hold the paint or chalk together. My digital art paintbrush is a pressure sensitive Wacom stylus and my digital paints are made of light in all the visible colours of the spectrum. I also use traditional photography tools like my medium format Rolleiflex, and large format Ebony camera. These are my building blocks in combination with my digital skills.
I was trained by my mother, Marjorie McKee, who was part of the abstract expressionist movement in New York and had one of the last shows at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery. I was just old enough to meet and have discussions about art with many of her now famous friends, Jackson Pollock, Bill and Elaine de Kooning, Harold Rosenberg, Harry Jackson etc., and her teacher, Hans Hofmann. Most of these people rarely called themselves "artists," usually they referred to themselves as "painters." So, because of the way I work and my background, I decided that "digital painter" was the most appropriate term for the digital art I make. I got seriously involved with digital art early on, in the mid 80s, though tools like Photoshop only became available in 1990. The early days were a struggle.
I hope the resulting 'new vision', a term I borrow from Moholy Nagy, will engage the viewer to re-look at nature at this critical time of earth changes. I believe the fragility of nature can only be captured fully in this new altered medium. The viewer is caught off guard as he/she is viewing nature but from a new perspective in terms of the macrocosm.