Shimmering Zen Quotes

“At first, I thought I would use photography and the collage and montage possibilities of Photoshop strictly for visualization in preparation for my paintings. But after I experimented with Photoshop and digital photography, I soon discovered new possibilities and found exciting new ways of presenting ideas. I soon found that I was more interested in pure image-making than I was in actually painting the images. Digital Camera, 2017”
― James Stanford, Shimmering Zen

“While I began my career as a painter in the early 1980s, I became increasingly curious about the possibilities promised by digital tools - so I switched my traditional media for computer equipment. Digital Camera, 2017”
― James Stanford, Shimmering Zen

“The Mojave Desert is a harsh, but very spiritual, place. It’s as much a matrix as anything else in my life has been. Growing up in the desert has a different gestalt than growing up in a temperate zone, with its humidity and rainfall. As children growing up in the Mojave, we chased lizards and snakes, instead of frogs and squirrels. There is an arid openness about it, and a true feeling of being alone, that you don’t get in any other type of environment.”
― James Stanford, Shimmering Zen

“In the beginning of Photoshop and Illustrator—what became Creative Suite—and to me it looked like another tool, another set of tools. And it fit in well with my photography. The photography had been there to support my art, basically, a way of gathering information and images in order to create better paintings.”
― James Stanford, Shimmering Zen

“My work was very meticulous and very slow as a painter and so the difficulty was—the question that my graduate thesis program had—was “how are you going to make a living doing this?” After I graduated, I continued on in the same way, but I discovered that I was progressing very quickly as an artist, and that before my pieces were done, I was getting tired of them. So I knew I had to find something that moved along quicker, that followed my natural path of growth as an artist.”
― James Stanford, Shimmering Zen