PETER LEIGHTON BIO

The digital art of Peter Leighton is an art of contradictions
...his PhotoShop manipulated photographs and collages,
conveying a timeless spirituality, speak to serious
issues about the past and present while simultaneously
laughing at how much one can visually fabricate
with computer technology these days.

Leighton's small, mysterious pictures look like Polaroid
emulsion transfer photographs: rough, unpolished. You
might be tempted to say that they are all about keeping
it real, except that Leighton is more interested
in keeping it surreal...

"Digital Art: Austin Artists Pursue the Possibilities"
Cinque Hicks, Downtown Arts Magazine, 2002

In my 20's, I my first tentative encounters with adulthood were filled with thoughts of becoming a writer like my father. However, it was as a janitor and caretaker at the Southwest Craft Center in San Antonio, Texas, in the early 70's, that I first met and apprenticed with Tom Wright, the school's photographer-in-residence, a period of training lasting for the next two and a half years. It was there that I traded in my pen for a camera.

These first years of the Craft Center's existence were vibrant ones. The creative energy and sense of community and purpose were palpable. Tom and Stephen Humphrey, a potter who lived at the Craft Center too, were both National Endowment grant recipients. There were also weavers, metal smiths, wood workers, video artists, painters, sculptors and writers, who were either teaching there or who had intuitively gravitated to the place. Many of these talented folks are still working in the arts in and around San Antonio today.

By the mid 1980's, I had discovered desktop computing, guided by a growing sense that I had personally exhausted photography's possibilities. This led me to experiment with the earliest digital graphic applications and dot matrix printers just coming onto the market. I immediately saw where the technology was heading. I purchased my first scanner a couple of years later and discovered Photoshop shortly thereafter. By 1995, I no longer thought of myself as a photographer. I was a digital printmaker. It was around this time that I bought my first woefully inadequate ink jet printer and also began experimenting with outputs from higher resolution Iris printers. By then, I had reached two conclusions: First, until ink jet ink sets became more stable, digital prints would only rate as a marginal art form, and, second, as a digital printmaker I wasn't going to trust my output to anyone else. I had to be in control of the process from beginning to end.

These conclusions would govern the next ten years of my creative output. It would take this long for technologists to develop digital inks that equaled archival inks used in traditional printmaking. Ten years, as well, for the price of large format, high resolution printers to drop to an affordable level for an average guy like me. The images in my various portfolios, then, plot the course of my development, along with the technology, over time. Many of the images from "An Idyll Mind", for example, were started in 1994-95 and were first printed from a dot matrix printer onto letter-sized paper.

My journey has been about a search for voice, for a personal visual vocabulary, mined from an almost overwhelming, digital landscape. I've tended not to play by the rules of the digital imaging game, blurring the differences between the digital process, the photograph and the traditional print, for example. This being said, my methods are fairly straight forward. I combine in various ways found imagery, my own photographs and hand work in the computer, using Photoshop's digital imaging tools, a scanner, trackball, digital stylus and tablet to cast familiar visual styles in a digital light. While most digital imaging solutions offered today are based on the idea of automating and making the process of image creation faster and more efficient, my own approach tends to the opposite. Less precise, more experimental, time consuming and often accidental. While this is a counterintuitive approach to computing, it leads to, I think, a powerful means of personal expression.

Initially I was drawn to the paradox inherent in the use of a tool to create art that on the surface appeared to be so antithetical to the creative act. Today, ironically, the paradox is that, like the Brownie camera in the early 1900's, digital imaging has become so democratic that few serious artists consider it to be a medium worthy of exploration. And yet culturally we define ourselves and, in turn, are defined by the tools we use. The very ubiquity of the digital image today then becomes an all the more compelling reason for artists to explore and push its boundaries. In the end I do hope that Penny Prints and I will have contributed to this exploration while, at the same time, staking a claim as well to one of its more interesting points of departure.

peter
December, 2008