Kevin Messer - Digital Artist, Dayton, Ohio

Kevin Messer is an artist working in a digital medium whose art creates dramatic, powerful images that enhance habitat, produce tranquility, challenge the viewer to go deeper, and finally an immense pleasure to come home to…

His theme is “making it better” , better than the merely, and perhaps badly, reproduced photograph, by using the tools of the digital realm directly.

A quote from Kevin’s conversation with me, recorded below, “Tools are the craft of the work, the vision is in the artist’s eye ,,,”

Both as a way of exploring a new artistic medium and to avoid the rework of color-correcting my traditional artwork, I embarked on a new adventure creating my artwork using some of the same tools I used to correct my drawing — a graphics tablet and sophisticated software.

My Interview with Kevin: worth listening to especially for his insights into the burgeoning craft of digital media….

Introduction and How Started
Use of Digital Tools
Conversation on Origin of Tools
Evolving
Marketing

Explore the dramatic images on his website: https://kevinmesser.com/art/art.html

Check out Kevin’s testimony to UCS on his blog: https://kevinmesser.com/blog/blog.html

Some of his artwork:

Followed

Redd

Pool

Untitled

Some text from his website:

In 2003, I started to experiment with Digital Art. The reasons are found in the brief description of “Making it Better,” while a more general description of the process is found through the following:
What is Digital Art?

All versions of the drawing were rendered with a wide range of hard and soft pencils, including my favorite, a black pencil from Sanford Design called Ebony.
My efforts to get this drawing reproduced led me to work in the Digital Art medium.

From checking with other artists, I discovered that my experience was not unique and that color inaccuracies were a normal occurance in the digital scanning of traditional artwork.
Both as a way of exploring a new artistic medium and to avoid the rework of color-correcting my traditional artwork, I embarked on a new adventure creating my artwork using some of the same tools I used to correct this drawing — a graphics tablet and sophisticated software.

When I was an art student, I received lots of encouragement to express my visual creativity. I read lots of books on techniques and I studied other artists. I did not, however, receive any practical guidance on how to make a living as an artist — I learned the hard way what “starving artist” means. In the September 19, 2005 issue of Newsweek, art professor J.D. Jordon wrote a provocative essay for the My Turn section of the magazine, entitled, “I’m an Artist, But Not the Starving Kind.” With the subtitle, “We have as much training as other professionals. Imagine if we had their business sense, too,” the essay challenges artists to value their own work. The essay is recommended reading.
The Dayton Visual Arts Center is a group of artists and art lovers who believe that a vital visuals arts community is essential to the life of the community. From gallery talks and exhibit openings to professional development workshops, DVAC provides opportunities to meet others who share an interest in art and to learn about and support contemporary visual art. Since 1991, DVAC has been the Miami Valley’s leading proponent of contemporary art.

filed under Artist Bios - Canvassing the Artists, Featured.