For many years both artists have been strongly invested in sharing their understanding of digital and analog processes in relation to painting. In their first show together, they seek to abstract painting away materiality in order to embrace a poetic visual pedagogical form. Their approach stands out as a unique concept that expands beyond the confines of traditional terminology. Below is a statement written by the artists.

Radical Digital Painting focuses on the technical and spiritual systems we use to produce, present, and parse our pictures. For us, digitization is a process of translating things into discrete units, like counting on fingers. Making a painting, on the other hand, involves the synthesis of analogous elements to form a whole. A meditation on digital painting, then, is a ride on the digital–analog divide. This route defines a new approach to picture making, disparate from both traditional visual abstraction in painting, and the common conception of “digital painting” as in, say, Photoshop tutorials on YouTube.

To quote Jeffrey’s software piece Ten Minute Painting:

All digital media objects exist as a collection of reproducible bits. And so... their materiality yields little meaning. Because of this, painting today aspires to be understood through a set of abstract terms, similar to those which have been developed for mathematics and poetry. A painting is just a kind of picture message.

To group our ideas together and make them searchable, we have been using the label Radical Digital Painting in relation to the Danish computer musician/composer Parl Kristian Bjørn Vester’s substantial work on the idea of Radical Computer Music.

To date we have been distributing this work in a discursive lecture format that includes painting slideshows, software demonstrations, games, and media theory. We present along with our collaborators Artur Erman and Goodiepal & Pals, and sometimes with guests, including Mark Fingerhut, Lee Tusman, and Kate Hollenbach. There have been over twenty Radical Digital Painting lectures since 2016.

Julia Yerger is based in Los Angeles, CA. She received her BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 2015. Since 2017 she has given lectures with the RDP team at Temple University, Harvard, RISD, Parsons, UMASS, Coaxial Arts in LA, UC Santa Barbara and Kimberly-Klark in New York. She has recently shown her digital paintings at February Gallery in Austin, TX and ThatThat Gallery in Los Angeles, CA.

Jeffrey Alan Scudder (Jeffrey Heart / JAS) travels and spends his time programming and making pictures. He has taught at UCLA and Parsons The New School for Design and worked previously at the design studio Linked by Air. Jeffrey received an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University School of Art in 2013. In 2018 he has given two public lectures in conversation with artist Casey REAS on Drawing, animation, and coding systems.