Friday Night Dialogues at the Library hosts Roz Dimon: How digital art works
Shelter Island artist Roz Dimon will discuss the creative process behind the paintings and drawings she makes with contemporary digital media at Friday Night Dialogues at the Library on January 30 at 7 p.m. “Digital Art: The Inside Scoop with Roz Dimon” will include a slide show presentation and a display of original works, currently on exhibit in the library’s Community Room.
A born artist who, she says, “could draw before I could talk,” Roz Dimon speaks of drawing she did by hand as her first love and, in pre-digital times, of her beginnings with a traditional brush, in oil on canvas. But she will tell how her early paintings clearly align with her recent digital works. “They are of one accord,” she says, “I am the same artist — using the tools of the past to honor a continuing legacy while looking to inform and imagine the future. It leads others into an understanding of where we are and how we are evolving: a traditional artist in new clothes, pushing the boundaries a bit by working in a medium that’s ‘now’ — one that’s affecting all our lives.”
Roz has been creating art on the computer exclusively over the last two decades. In the beginning, she recalls, she wondered at the “pixilation” of her compositions — highly patterned, composed of multiple visual layers and small squares that one could consider as pre-digital picture elements. Today, when most everyone knows what Photoshop is but may resist its non-traditional application, she continues drawing on a Wacom tablet, connected to her computer.
An Islander since 2001, Roz Dimon grew up in Atlanta. She is a graduate of the University of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art and the Computer Arts Division of the School of Visual Arts in New York where she moved in 1981. She cultivated her digital skills while working as an art director at The Wall Street Journal Online and for other corporations at the World Trade Center. She also taught computer art at Marymount College and Pratt Manhattan.
Well-known on the East End and to Islanders — her most recent solo exhibition opened the Historical Society’s Black & White benefit last summer — one of her pieces has recently been acquired by the 9/11 Memorial Museum for its permanent collection and is also in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her work has been acquired by various corporations, including the permanent collection of AT&T. Her Shelter Island studio has been described by a Met curator as “something of a blend between Rembrandt’s and a lab at Apple or IBM.”
Learn what it means to paint and draw with a digital brush on January 30 at 7 p.m. The talk is free with donations greatly appreciated.
