Long ago, a painting was something that resulted from the application of paint, paint defined as dry pigments suspended in a vehicle like oil or water. I think these days a painting is that which results from the act of painting.

My definition of painting emphasizes the action over the result and what it feels like over the tools and materials. Painting is the activation of the body, primarily the hands and eyes, to assimilate the world. Saying that painting is the mere spreading of pigments does not encompass all that painting is.

Asserting my own private definition is not all that radical, there are plenty of arbitrary and self serving ideas about what a painting is, established mostly by folks who don't even make paintings. If paintings are defined by whether they've been in the inventory of Sothebys or the halls of the Louvre, then my work would not currently qualify. In the interim I would have to refer to what I do in some other way - obsession, worship or madness. Better to hack the language slightly than to stupefy my potential patrons with a completely new vocabulary.

My definition makes drawing a subclass of painting, a kind of painting which is typified by the application of dry materials on a textured ground. How about mosaic or collage? A kind of painting involving the arrangement of objects or fragments of objects. If a work is executed with physical materials like stained glass, shards of pottery, bits of string or gobs of pigment in a liquid vehicle, thinking about painting as an activation of the body does not present any major paradigm shifts. Things get more interesting when we consider painting with untouchable stuff like information.

I manipulate light by smearing information into a digital file. The process is a lot like traditional painting with the following exceptions - instead of a brush, canvas and paints, I use an electronic stylus, a flat screen, and raw data. While I am painting, I look at a subject and move my hands much like someone working with physical materials. I hold a stylus with sensors that respond to delicate changes in my hand's position, just as the hairs of a paint brush might bend with pressure. The image appears on the flat screen as if it were a canvas. Afterwards, I have a chunk of visual information that can be zapped across the globe, printed for exhibition or totally transformed in some unprecedented way.

A digital file is much more flexible than dried paint, and has the potential of persisting indefinitely. Printing a digital file for exhibition means putting pigments on paper using the sprayed ink process. Since these paintings start out as digital files, each print can be considered an original.