Digital Painting in Springfield, Vt.

Of all the art forms I’ve encountered, the one that makes me most uncomfortable involves computers. Artist Gloria King Merritt calls it “digital painting.”

Art Notes: Digital Painting in Springfield, Vt. Butterfly Effect, by Gloria King Merritt of Hartland, is one of the works in the “Changing Gears’’ exhibition at The Great Hall in Springfield, Vt. She turned to digital art while recovering from a tendon injury. By Alex Hanson Valley News Staff Writer Thursday, June 6, 2013 (Published in print: Thursday, June 6, 2013) Of all the art forms I’ve encountered, the one that makes me most uncomfortable involves computers. Artist Gloria King Merritt calls it “digital painting.” The challenge, I think, is that I can’t always tell how what I’m looking at was made. The analog technologies are simple. Drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture, even photography, involve physical processes from the first step to the last. But once a computer is involved, a question is raised about how exactly the physical object came about. So “Changing Gears: The Digital Evolution,” Merritt’s current show at The Great Hall in Springfield, Vt.’s former Fellows Gear Shaper factory, was a test. Rather than review the show, I went to look at it, then talked to Merritt, a Hartland resident, about her work. “I’ve always been interested in the blend of technology and art and I’ve had a computer since 1982,” Merritt said in a scratchy cell-phone conversation. But it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that she began making digital paintings. A broken tendon in her right hand left her unable to make art by traditional means, and when she began occupational therapy she was told that using her hand would help it recover. She got hold of a Wacom tablet and stylus and several different digital imagery software tools and started painting on the computer. “They weren’t sure I would be able to recover completely,” Merritt said. She had been painting and drawing for decades, and translating that to an electronic form wasn’t all that hard, she said. She called the software “expressive.” It ranges from applications like Photoshop, to drawing and painting programs used mostly by professional illustrators, to fractals that can modify images mathematically. The final images are sprayed onto canvas using archival pigment inks, although Merritt noted that the digital format allows for a variety of modes of display, including projection on either a monitor or a wall or printing on paper. Each of her works is signed and unique, she said. The images she creates are heavily layered. Most of the works in The Great Hall reflect on the development of a commonplace physical object and are accompanied by a deadpan description. For example, the typed sheet next to Gift Wrapped begins, “The use of wrapping paper is first documented in ancient China, where paper was invented in the second century BCE.” The title work, Changing Gears, is a triptych that shows three views of one of the gearsets manufactured at Fellows that is now part of the historical display on the company in The Great Hall. “If you turned it around in your hand it was like a jewel,” Merritt said of the baseball-sized object. As far as Merritt is concerned, digital painting is here to stay. “I think it’s probably the way I’m going to be expressing myself in the future,” she said. “Changing Gears: The Digital Evolution,” is on display in The Great Hall, in Springfield, Vt., through Aug. 23. ∎ Also in The Great Hall is a wonderfully potent exhibition of five paintings by Henry Swierczynski, a former engineer at Fellows Gear Shaper. Swierczynski was friends with the late Hannes Beckmann, who taught at Dartmouth College and was a proponent of the sharp, clear-eyed, scientific sensibility of the Bauhaus. The paintings in Springfield are taut, energetic studies of geometry and color. “Change always indicates the vitality of art, because every style has within itself a germ of its own generation,” Swierczynski wrote in one of the most intelligent artist statements I’ve ever come across. “The clarity of the work must be absolute.” Words to live by.