PAINTLESS PAINTINGS
Steve Klarer
PAINTLESS PAINTINGS
A collection of paintings made without paint. Everything here is digital, some of it starting with my own work but much of it based on previously existing images. Sources range from the Paleolithic cave paintings of Europe through East Asian art of recent centuries, to studio photography and snapshots taken while walking around my small town.
Images are grouped into several categories. One set, based on several years of investigating the culture and thought of the Aztecs, whose culture was part of the Western Mexico complex where I live, includes notes on the Aztec deities. Most of the others stand, I hope, on their own. In the poetry section, any translations from Chinese are mine. I apologize for the lack of line breaks. There's no way to insert them.
About
I've been retired in a small town in Mexico since 2016. Before retiring I worked in a Medication Assisted Treatment program in Boston where I provided counseling and addiction-specific acupuncture. I had a private general acupuncture practice for a few years before that. In an earlier existence, I spent about five years in a graduate program in Religious Studies (Buddhist Religious History.) Before that, I was a monk in the Chinese Buddhist tradition for over a decade. Even earlier, I was a hippy, a student, and, very early on, a Military Brat.
When my teachers told me that I didn't have the talent for making art I believed them and didn't even think of trying. Sometime around 2005, I discovered the virtual world of Second Life and, while playing there, started building virtual objects. The virtual nature of Second Life meant that I could build the kind of things I'd imagined but that couldn't be made in real life. Things like sculptures that floated in the air, that you could "walk" through and experience from the inside out, surface textures and colors that changed as you looked at them. I became hooked on digital media.
It's now been close to fifteen years that I've been playing with digital art. The objects I made in Second Life could only be seen inside that world so I couldn't show them to friends and family. A friend pointed me to the wonderful, and now vanished, suite called Aviary where I realized that I could, in fact, paint. I just didn't use paints: I used pixels. I could share my work both in its original digital format as well as in prints. It's been a nonstop adventure since then.
Contact
- Ajijic, Jalisco, Mexico