4 Herons, Digital Image, January 2013 © Mary Baker

In 2012 I began to wonder if traditional two-dimensional art had gone the way of the “buggy whip” and the “typewriter.”  I wrote a blog post on the subject on The Newburyport Blog here.  And at the same time, I found myself drawn to the new things that people were doing with digital photography. People like Chris Crisman were creating photographs that had a very “painterly” quality to them. In fact, some of the photographs resembled the very detailed paintings that I had done in the 1990s.

The other art form that captivated my imagination was street art. Street Art News was, and still is, one of my go to places to find out what is happening in street art around the globe. The most famous street artist today is probably Bansky, and I also fell in love with the work of a South African street artist that goes by the name of Faith47.  My favorite series, when I first discovered Faith47, was “The Long Wait.”

I also felt that the painting that I was doing was getting stale and redundant, especially compared to what people were doing with digital photography and street art. So in December 2012, I decided to hang up my paintbrush for a while, and take a year to experiment with digital art. The process turned out to be a lot more complicated, and a lot more interesting than I ever imagined. I haven’t painted since  December 2012. I’ve been exploring this wonderful new medium, which at times seems completely magical to me, since December 17, 2012–that was a while ago.

The first images to come out of this new digital experimentation were “the birds,” the digital image, “4 Herons” above in this post,  is an example, as well as “Running Bird” below.

Running Bird, digital image, © Mary Baker