Artists Describing Their Art:

Ata Alishahi - When I make art, whatever my medium, I enter an internal world of light and creativity, and I escape the external world of shadow and destruction. While I am painting, I not only live in this light-filled world, I create it. In this sense, I have always made art for myself to alleviate my own suffering and the painful memories of the war and violence I witnessed, even as a child. Yet although this work is therapeutic for me, my finished pieces also ask the viewer to join me in experiencing these beautiful worlds, and celebrating the triumph of light and color over darkness. I paint with the same precision and techniques that traditional artists use, but via the digital medium. I became fascinated with digital technologies during my work in computer industry, and I educated myself in the software that enabled me to make art using this extraordinary new method. Although I prefer this medium, I recognize that every visual image, regardless of how it was made, is primarily a message, a story to be told and interpreted. My work tells the story of a world without darknessaEUR"a world that the viewer longs to enter. My goal...

Pauline Van De Ven - I am a digital painter exploring the new medium of vector. Vector-art is a cooperation between the artist and the computer. Lines, forms and colors are made by the hand of the artist and the computer influences them in a certain way. Behind the screen, it ties all handmade lines and patches of color to mathematical formulas, known as Bezier curves. This gives them more simplicity, more contrast and a higher resolution than can be achieved by hand. Colors are pure monochromes or very fine computer-calculated gradients. While there is hardly any art in vector yet, its amazing property of fixed resolution - a vector image can be blown up to any size without becoming blurred - makes it popular in advertising. At first I rejected the bold appearance of the medium. Ceci est un Oeuf 2015 expresses the dislike. Its hard lines, monochrome colors and perfect gradients seemed to limit the emotional palette to messages of simple happiness and joy famous from Matisses cut-outs, or the brutal surrealistics of a Daly, while I am more attracted to the Bonnards, Vuillards, Sisleys or De Staels, Vermeers silent here-and-now and the introvert abstracts of artists like Schoonhoven and ...