Starting with a Doctorate in Fine Arts from Yale, Jonathan Reeve Price worked in conceptual art and concrete poetry, showing in galleries and museums in New York. But he quit the art world to join Apple, where the introduction of MacPaint was, for him, a life-changing event. He spent many years coaching content creators and their managers in high tech companies in Silicon Valley and Japan. Along the way, he published more than 30 books on computers, digital art, and technical communication. He now returns to art with pixels on his brain. He explores NASA pictures of the sun, LandSat Orbiter images of rivers on Earth, and U.S. Geological Survey topographical studies of our liquid border, the Rio Grande.

Jonathan Reeve Price: Artist Statement

I work on an iMac, using a wide range of software to explore the data reflected in images such as NASA pictures of the sun, LandSat Orbiter images of rivers on Earth, and U.S. Geological Survey topographical studies of our liquid border, the Rio Grande.

I love the data. All those stacks of zeroes and ones add up to individual pixels, like dots of paint on a canvas, ready to be manipulated, distorted, shifted, and transformed. As I explore these artificial representations of the physical world, I get to view the scene up close, then far away; I soar to 30,000 feet, and then I wade through the reeds.

As I zoom in and out through so many levels, I carve paths through the imaginary space, to lead attention on. My goal is to bring out the patterns in the natural landscape, and the odd unnatural beauty of its digital representations. I want to give our eyes the pleasure of repeated visual tours, and, along the way, to lighten our spirits with tiny beautiful sparks.

These days I am exploring the liquid border—the imaginary line drawn down the middle of the Rio Grande as it passes between Texas and Mexico. Real, but invisible, the border floats away. But what pain comes across that unmarked frontier, what desperation, what determination! Exploring the photos and satellite data of this mighty river may help us imagine the people struggling across the river, and the trackers from the Border Patrol waiting on the American side.

Living next to the Rio Grande, I feel an affinity with other rivers, such as the Connecticut, the Ebro, the Ganges, even the Nile as it escapes the Aswan Dam. I remix the satellite data. I look back at what real painters have done.

I distort the original, useful, scientific image, taking it apart and rebuilding it with half a dozen applications, just to see what I can make out of the bitmaps, vectors, color palettes, and the spray of code. I struggle with the counterpoint of paint and pixel, the contrast between the prose label and the visual detail, the interaction between what we know and what we see. My prints are markers on the trail, not final destinations.

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