Today, things are moving faster than they were when photography was trying to be accepted in the art world. Digital art is facing the same gauntlet, but the course will be far shorter. At this moment, digital is taught in Universities in America and throughout the world. The first masters of the medium are alive, some are working today. Some feel digital’s success is a matter of faith. We feel digital’s success is inevitable. For now, digital practitioners are ‘voices crying in the wilderness’. Do have a look, for the wilderness is already shrinking.
In 2009, the co-owners of Recent Developments, Cheryl Hrudka and Stan Johnson, took a different path from their traditional photography. Both began to explore the virtually unlimited non-representational possibilities offered by digital software. Negatives and transparencies were put aside for the moment. “Out there” became “in here”. There are few negative scans, few RAW files. Their major starting points are blank 185mb fields in which the possibilities are endless. This is the same formal compositional problem that confronts any artist in the more widely accepted fields of drawing and painting.