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James Faure Walker has been incorporating computer graphics into painting since 1988. He works with both physical and digital paint, playing on the contrast between the two. Alongside his visual work he has written on this theme, making the case for understanding digital art as an extension of the art of painting.

Part of my job as a painter is to take in what I see around me, to observe and understand, even aimlessly. So I take photos, and I also draw quite a lot – storing images for future use. Much of the time my drawings are abstract. Some are made with digital paint, some with watercolour or oil paint. Switching between these different modes keeps me on my toes when making paintings. Twenty years ago I began using computers, and the story of how I came to integrate the digital and the painterly went into my book, ‘Painting the Digital River: How an Artist Learned to Love the Computer’.

Another part of the job is what I would call visual engineering: making an image that projects itself as efficiently as possible. We may be surrounded by electronic images, flickering screens, video on iPods and so on, and you might think concentrating on the non-electronic still image, i.e. painting, is a mistake. Perhaps it is. But using digital technology in painting but making it invisible and seamlessly part of ‘painting and observing’, can catch the viewer off guard. I had a large painting on show in Trafalgar Square, London, in October 2007, and no one mentioned it was ‘digital’.

[James Faure Walker]