While I do not, as a rule, have any great desire to acquire physical possessions, there exist in this world four objects for which, in order to own, I'd be willing to commit virtually any crime-- and they're all paintings. It can also be noted, with equal accuracy, that I'd happily give up the rest of my life if, for just one year, I could paint like VanGogh.

I love paintings. I love to paint. With any and every tool that strikes my fancy. In this gallery I've chosen to present images of digital origin, created in both Photoshop and the natural media app Corel Painter using an Intuos stylus and pressure-sensitive tablet, right alongside those painted using the traditional tools of paper, canvas, and old-fashioned sable and camel-hair brushes.

Why display them together? Because for some years now I've been bemused by the art community's reactionary attitude toward the possibilities provided by the new tools of technology-- an obsessively anal-retentive focus on method rather than result. And result is really all that should count.

Digital art is today in the position once occupied by photography-- a bastard offshoot on which the art world glares with a haughty and disapproving eye. And it has always been thus. The question of what is and is not art is a fluid and ever-evolving argument that may very well date back to the caves of Lascaux.

Consider these: Andy Warhol's can of soup and Giotto's flat, insipid, Pre-Renaissance interpretations of the Madonna and Child. Are they both art? By what reckoning? Whose "Last Supper" conveys the greater message and evokes the stronger reaction in a viewer-- DaVinci's? Or Dali's? In considering Roy Lichtenstein's comic book style and the architecturally rearranged figures of Picasso, is one more valid than the next?

Jackson Pollock's paintings were dismissed as "a housepainter's dropcloths." El Greco, in his day, was the subject of much discussion among those who looked at his drawn-out, elongated figures, and couldn't decide whether he was half-blind, mad, or demonically possessed. Edouard Manet's brilliant "Olympia" so outraged the Salon of 1865 that it had to be hung above the reach of the umbrellas and canes with which it was physically attacked. And, in his lifetime, that tortured genius VanGogh succeeded in selling just one of his paintings.

So much for the importance of external validation.

In the last 150 years the Abstract Expressionists, the Fauves, the Blue Riders, the Cubists, the Vienna Secessionists, the Impressionists, and the Post-Impressionsts (among others) have all run headlong into the rigid wall of hidebound tradition. The paradox of art is that while it is born of original thought and creative impulse, those very attributes often enrage, offend, and generally stiffen the necks of those in the established artistic community who would bar the door against anything they've not already embraced.

Yet as times, tools, and techniques continue to change, so do the perceptions of new developments and the degrees of acceptance they are ever-so-grudgingly granted. What is dismissed today may be accepted tomorrow, and hailed as a masterpiece fifty years down the road. To say "never" is to do nothing more than advertise one's ignorance.

And so, I offer something from both worlds. It is not the methodology that matters, but the result.