Black and White

I once had a teacher who taught me that Black and White could be more vibrant than color. Dimension, form, design, thick vs. thin, were some of the critical ingredients for producing exciting works of art in black and white. In 1985 the birth of the Macintosh computer inaugurated itself as an art tool. The first program available was MacPaint. It was icon driven and allowed a limited amount of possibility. (We say limited as to today's standards) Back then the potentials seemed challenging). In retrospect, having a limited palette of choice demanded invention on the part of the artist. While still in "discovery mode" I wanted to create works that were meaningful and that the world had not seen before. I wanted to create works that made bold statements and bring forth a totally different language.

My process was such that I printed the pictures to a dot matrix (noisy) Imagewriter printer and then photographically made large Kodalith contact prints, which resulted in 40" x 50" images. The files themselves were only 48K. (This would be the equivalent of typing an average letter in terms of file size.) Today files are in the scale of 80 megabytes, so you can understand the difference. Point being, with crude early equipment, dynamic images could be achieved.

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This is an archive of the Digital Art Museum for historical reference.
See dam.org for the current site.