Artist Bio - Adrian Keats

I have been creating digital art for about 15 years. It has evolved as I have changed in my thinking. I try to create images that look like they have been painted, not because I think they should, but because it looks more natural. I also blend my photography into images to help tell a story.

My digital canvas starts blank, as with any artist, but can progress in a myriad of directions depending on the chosen starting point. And then more directions, more choices, always looking for that inspiring and alluring shape, colour, feeling, that makes me want to look again. And again.

Only then does it start to get close to a finished canvas. That could take 20 hours or more of layering, colouring, shaping with many different "seeds" until the finished work arises.

It is a voyage of discovery, finding what exists within and knowing when I have found it. That is the key – like an orchestra with a conductor – the music is there, it just needs to be brought out!

A good camera does not make a good photographer. Fine paint brushes do not make a great painter. A good computer does not make a great work of art. It is still fundamentally the artist who makes the picture, with or without good, fine or better tools.

Not knowing where I will end up is exciting and challenging. Finding the right picture, getting the right feeling, is inspiring – to "discover" such beauty and present it to the world.

Traditionally the artist knows what the end result will be, or at least is hoped to be. It is a bounded canvas, physically and metaphorically. The digital canvas is infinite and the skill is in finding the beauty within.

There have been, and will continue to be, many dead ends, when there is no point in digging deeper, in following a path. Change it, start again, go a different way. But the rewards are great when a path leads to something stunning. A new universe.

It is a new way of creating art; a new way of "painting"; a new tool; a new medium. That is all. It still needs the artist to make it work.