"You see I was still being stubborn, or stupid,
whichever way you look at it".

To my surprise, although computers had advanced a phenomenal amount since my early
IT days, all the tedious programming had been eradicated and these grey boxes with a telly on top were able to store within their hard drives, software packages, which allowed you to create layouts and text without the boring task of having to design everything by hand. Perhaps computers weren't so bad after all. Now I was able, after a lot of fiddling, to eventually produce a few lines of text which I was able to send to the laser printer, take down to Graphics and cut and paste into my design sheets. Doing away with the unprofessional appearance of hand-written text. I could handle this. My computer experience at college was reasonably basic. I used a software package, Pagemaker, which I became reasonably knowledgeable about much to my tutor's annoyance. You see I was still being stubborn, or stupid, whichever way you look at it. The industry standard for graphics was Quark Xpress so of course I used Pagemaker. The result, an unemployed Graphic Designer. To my shame it is only now, four years after I left college I have created my first piece of design within Quark Xpress. Is it just me that acts in this strange way I ask myself

I purchased my first 286 computer just before I left college, thanks to a student loan. It had an EGA colour screen which was state of the art for me as the computers which I had used at college were all in black and white, I'd never managed to progress to the Quadra which was constantly booked out to other members of my group and the whole art and design block. I was so proud of my new machine, which kept me mentally sane through my reintroduction back to 'real-life' after three years away at college. I spent day after day at home, designing everything from newspaper layouts to greetings cards, sending my designs off to countless design groups and agencies, hoping and praying someone would take me on. The trouble was that all the design groups wanted people with experience, something which I was sadly lacking in. All in all I must have written over 150 letters. I managed to get a job at Kall Kwik printing as the chief graphic designer. This should have been my ideal job, something that I had always wanted since foundation. But I was badly missing my other half, since leaving college. So the job went the same day I started, which I feel was the best decision of my life, and has not been regretted at all.

Since then my computer skills have developed in leaps and bounds, through the guidance of my better half, I have used the computer to create a wealth of imagery. I am still excited by the use of pixelization and although the computer monitor has moved on in leaps and bounds since the early days of the tv screen, and software packages have allowed you to 'morph' and create almost visually perfect worlds upon a SVGA 0.? something dot pitch monitor. I still yearn to go back to the heavily pixilated world where the images held a magic for me. I feel that were are trying to create too perfect a world on our monitors. People never seem to be satisfied with what they see, each new game that hits the retail shelf claims to be better than the last, a bit like the washing powder war which rages every day on our television sets.

I think that the pixel has been overlooked in our stampede for perfection and photo-real images. What I try to do in my work is to explore the way that our computer imagery is created, magnifying the screen to show how an image is structured. Pointillism has been explored, what about pixelism.

The new series of images I have created, tries to look at objects in a different light. I like the way, when magnified, the image breaks up and loses its past form, new shapes start to appear and the once familiar shape of, lets say a face, becomes a series on squared tones of colour. I have always loved to find shapes and faces in the flames of an open fire or in the folds of a patterned curtain. I think it is something that everyone does to a certain extent. I want people to start seeing their own shapes and forms in my work and retrieve whatever they want from the pictures created. It might be that each day they take a different picture away with them depending on the mood of the viewer, just like each day you see a new pattern in the curtains depending on the circumstances, such as lighting and distance.