Artist Biography
I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Mass Communications and TV Production, in 1972 from Southern Illinois University. I went on to post-graduate study at that same university and received a Master of Fine Arts degree in Video and Mixed Media, in 1975. This work brought me into contact with artists from the “National Center for Experiments in Television”, in San Francisco, California. As a group, our work won recognition from the S.F. Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in the form of an Emmy award and my own video compositions were exhibited at the Whitney Museum, in New York, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia, Saint Louis Municipal Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri and at the Flikengen Film Festival, Stockholm, Sweden. After 1975, I continued to paint and exhibit my video work, but mainly concentrated on making my living as a TV director and editor. In 1994, my wife, Myriam Lozada-Jarvis, and I decided that computer graphic software had become sophisticated enough and the price of the hardware had become reasonable enough to justify our purchase of a Macintosh system. We have been creating our artwork on the computer ever since. With the purchase of our own large format digital printer, we have become self-publishing digital printmakers and now offer our printing services to other digital artists. After many local and regional exhibitions of this digital work from 1996 on; I received international recognition, in 2000, being awarded the Grand Prize from the Toray Corporation of Tokyo, Japan during their fifth annual “Digital Creative Awards”. In addition, the winning piece entitled "Carnival" was exhibited at the National Museum of Photography in Tokyo as part of Toray Corporation's fifth anniversary celebration of the international digital art contest. I continue to make, exhibit and market my art and have had some success in writing essays and articles about digital art that have been published in related magazines and posted on many websites. Our electronic studio is located in our home in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
Artist
Statement
Artistically, my influences are quite diverse, but focused mainly in a modern vein. I admire and have learned a lot from the work of Joan Miro, Paul Klee, and Max Ernst. American abstractionists Arthur Dove, Mark Tobey and the light modulators of Moholy Nagy are also inspirational to me. The writing of the Imagist poets and the music of John Cage have had their influence on my work, but since my tools and materials have always been a bit avante garde my technical skill has always come mainly from personal research and self instruction. My understanding and love for Surrealism has led me to develop, over time, a process which allows for a symbiotic relationship between the digital computer and my own eye and hand. As with the Surrealist's poetic exercises of "automatic writing" and the "Exquisite Corpse", I trust the random, automatic, redundant and self referential qualities of computer processing to be close enough to my own human mental functions to allow one to suggest form and composition to the other. Often I do not become conscious of the work until a title is suggested or occurs to me. After the work achieves this verbal level, my conscious eye takes the lead to do what it can to bring this spontaneous and sub conscience material closer to the surface and toward a more universally held and understood arrangement, which is expressed in the word "harmony".
