My latest digital painting on offer here for your viewing, was inspired by a media tragic human story. A story, which sadly is showing us all how little heart and compassion we have on this little blue planet of ours. What follows is how this tragedy and my technological curiosity became my recent inspirational creative muse . . .

I love being an artist + designer! Choosing and wearing both hats has given me a place for my endless curiosity to explore and to learn outside of the normal channels offered in formal education. Most formal education asks of us to blindly accept that which is offered as instruction, along with the usual delivery of certitude, using facts that we are expected to trust as being definitive facts that are beyond question. What I love about being an artist + designer is that every creative act is predicated on beginning with ‘questioning everything’. I also love that creative innovation requires an ongoing commitment to endlessly innovate. Each successive innovation, as in; change, alteration, revolution, upheaval, transformation, metamorphosis, breakthroughs; new measures, new methods, modernization, novelty, newness, creativity, originality, ingenuity, inspiration, inventiveness; all are intended to shake up our perceptions to see and experience our world anew.

Perhaps this is why one of my favorite artists is David Hockney. Hockney’s creative spirit has always embraced new technology. His creative means of exploration, and his end results are contemporary innovative art works. His art works are treasures anchored in the historic, but told a new. Each image introduces opportunities for making art historic themes a newly reinvigorated into the contemporary world of art, via engaging technology such as cameras, photocopiers; fax machines, video, collage, and any other emerging technology.

Also, I love that Hockney is an art + art making historian, who links historic technology’s beginnings to the historic journey of art. A good example is his research into image making, in and through the development of the optic lens, and its empowering impact on the artist intent on re-presenting, or mirroring our world back to us.

For example lets consider Hockney’s use of an iPad, and his use of a inexpensive but seemingly simple apps. I wondered for years what was the secret software that David Hockney was being once more celebrated for innovation, and thereby introducing hardware and software into the fine art world.

It took me about a year of reading before I came across an article, in which the author mentioned that Hockney used an app called ‘Brushes’. So, I having just purchased an iPad, decided to find and acquire the app, with my intent of giving it a try. What I found was the original and an upgrade version called ‘Brushes XP. If my memory serves me correctly, I paid about $3.00 for it. And then my idea of fun times began. If there is one aspect of life that chimes my bell, it is a new challenge.

So here we are one year later, a time span during which I invested much time exploring what might be accomplished with Brushes XP. One of my results is learning that the single most important reason I love being an artist is using my ability to image a topic that I feel I must do, while also learning and employing something new such as intuitively learning and using Brushes XP. The result is a finished artwork that I have titled: The Refugees’ Wheel of Tears and Blood. Refugees as a topic has for months dominated the news media, but so has this painful reoccurring aspect of war’s destruction throughout humankind’s history. I believe, without a doubt, that our current fleeing refugee migration is a very timely relevant human story, one that is showing us how little heart and compassion we have on this little blue planet of ours. It is a given that those in power in the pursuit of greed can persist in making anyone’s world one of uncertainty. Tragically this is especially so for the Syrian refugees who have had to step out into a world of lord knows what? I purposely chose to use the word humankind to remind myself and everyone else that our lives are best served with kindness to all humans.

I hope you are moved by this current offering of my artwork and that you will share your thoughtful insights and comments on my websites’ contact page. If you would like for me to share my inspirations for any of my website’s posted artworks, please peck out a message requesting I do so using the contact page. Simply state the date of the art piece and the file in which it is located. Here is a ‘how too’ example: 2015-09 / Most Recent Art. Click the send button at the bottom of the page, and I will happily find your noted image and I’ll begin pecking out what was my source inspiration.