Artist Interview: Clayton Campbell

Clayton Campbell is an artist and cultural producer based in Philadelphia, U.S. His practice includes various visual productions and digital art, arts writing, stage design, curating, arts administrator, and artist residency programming.

He began working digitally in 1995 when he received the first Sony digital camera and has been developing work in the past years using applications that include experimenting with Photoshop Beta Generative Fill, Dalle E 2, early versions of Glitch, Glitchshop, Photoshop Camera, Lightroom Classic, Gigapixel AI, and Luminar AI.

We asked Clayton about his art, creative process, and inspirations.

Can you tell us about your background as a digital artist? How did you get started in this field?

Growing up in and around New York, I was surrounded by media and worked with cameras, xerox, and mixed media productions. My experiments with copier machines led me to making one of a kind photostatic prints that were a precursor to my digital work. In 1995 I started with digital photography. I had a Sony Mavica MVC-FD7 camera and an Apple Performa Computer. The camera recorded 17 thumbnail jpgs onto a floppy disk. I made some of my first series of digital photos with this camera, and I still love them. I was using an early version of Photoshop, called Photo Deluxe, to process the jpgs.

I also had the good fortune of relocating to Santa Monica, CA from NYC, where I became the Co-Director of the 18th Street Arts Center. It’s still a well-known multi-disciplinary arts center that supported many early performance, video art, and social practice artists. My colleagues Kit Galloway and Sherri Rabinowitz of the Electronic Café International, and Michael Masucci and Kate Johnson of EZTV hosted a a world of digital artists. Through sheer osmosis I learned so much in this collaborative environment. My digital practice is indebted to the many creatives from those times.

In 1998 I graduated to a Sony Mavica CD300 3.3 megapixel that recorded onto 3-inch diskettes. It could record up to 800 images, had a Carl Zeiss lens, and telephoto capacity. I was now on Photoshop and pretty soon after I bought a hand held Leica Deluxe 10.0 megapixel camera. It sounds quaint now but it is indicative of how quickly digital tech would change. While digital cameras were important to my digital practice, they are less so now as A.I. develops and I use more public domain sourced images combined with my own image archives. I shoot mainly with an Apple 12 Pro Max, a Panasonic Lumix, and process everything on a Mac M1 computer. My digital practice is becoming more self-contained, a reflection of how digital technology is constantly refining and altering artists practices. A far cry from Photo Deluxe, currently I am using Photoshop Beta with Generative Fill, Topaz Gigapixel, Lightroom Classic, Glitchshop, Luminar AI, and Dalle E 2, among others. Something new enters the toolbox every week. What you do with your tools is what really matters.

*Burning Down the House by Clayton Campbell*

What inspires your art? Are there any particular themes or subjects that you enjoy exploring through your artwork?

My artist statement has become direct and clear over time. I’ve stripped away the formal academic vernacular that used to be part of it, and come to a humanistic statement of purpose.

Very simply then; we live in a time of intense creative, spiritual, social, technological, and environmental change. My practice responds to these transformations by making art exploring with care the behavior of people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances.

My values have been shaped by the extraordinary situations I unexpectedly found myself in, and what I learned as a result. I believe in non-violence and this philosophy has influenced my creative work. I feel the practice of peace and reconciliation is one of the most vital and artistic of human actions. That can mean a lot of things, and I’m inspired to find ways to evoke this in my work. I try to live a life where I have done something for others and through artmaking I am inspired by the process of reciprocity, the exchange of knowledge, emotions, and experience.

There are overarching themes I continue to explore, and I develop them in series. Faith, and loss of faith; the expression of the numinous in nature; the human body, sensuality, and impermanence; a dystopian specter of nuclear technology; perfection, delusion, and mortality.

How do you balance technical skills with artistic creativity in your digital artwork? How do these two aspects complement each other in your work?

One good example is my 2008 series of digital artworks entitled After Abu Ghraib. At the time I was working extensively with corrupted jpg files. This was before Glitch. I was unaware of other artists working this way, but there must have been. To corrupt an image, I would open a jpg as a txt. file, recode the txt. file, re-save it as a jpg. When I opened it again it would corrupt. I never knew how it would end up, which is what made it fun, and reminiscent of action painting, which has always informed my digital work. The corrupted image was a starting point allowing for tremendous visual possibility, and I would use this process in many other series. The “txt. to jpg.” method only worked on much older operating systems. Nowadays I use glitch and glitchshop.

The tech skills are in service of a creative outcome. In After Abu Ghraib, my concern was directly with human rights issues and bringing to attention the torture of Iraqi prisoners the U.S. military was condoning. Printed as 48” x 66” digital prints on an early Epson printer, the final images were exhibited at Pitzer College, CA and at Aaran Gallery in Tehran, Iran. At Pitzer, the gallery described how the technical skills balanced with the artwork, creating an entirely new conversation and way of seeing the source material.

“By intentionally corrupting the digital files of these insistently barbarous Abu Ghraib pictures, Los Angeles-based artist Clayton Campbell transformed them into large-scale, geometric, painterly works. Bands of translucent reds, blues and purples migrate across the surface, shredding and obscuring as they go, allowing an indulgence in sensuous abstraction, a short-lived reprieve from the heinous acts. Resembling ancient Mesopotamian sculptural fragments—like those looted at the beginning of the U.S. “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” the bodies detach and re-combine in surprisingly exquisite arrangements. The bands, reminiscent of those used to adjust the color image on our televisions, imply our readiness to accommodate and compromise our points of view. In a post-9/11 world, are we willing to accept torture and surrender our civil liberties? What are our true colors and how much are we willing to adjust them? Campbell‘s formal filter of distortion becomes a metaphor for averting our eyes—something we are only too eager to do.”

— Pitzer College on Campbell’s art

Are there any artists or creative influences that have had a significant impact on your work? How have they shaped your artistic style or approach?

I met my teacher, Professor Ernst Fuchs, in Vienna, Austria, in 1969. Ernst was the first fully committed artist I had known and he was my mentor. He was part of the school of Viennese Fantastic Realists. I first saw his work on music posters at the old Fillmore East in New York City and knew I wanted to study with him. Through Ernst I understood how to “see” an inanimate object as a field of energy, as abstract as that may sound. It certainly has helped with digital art. His work ethic and discipline was a second influence. It helps to be patience with digital processes.

I spent many hours visiting the Vienna Kunsthistoriches Museum to look at the work of Brueghel, Durer, and the 19th century school of Jugendstil art and design. I came away with a sense of narrative representation that still informs many of my digital projects.

I’ve learned from graphic work of Samuel Palmer, William Blake, and Piranesi; the celestial cartography and engravings of Robert Fludd; and illuminated alchemical manuscripts by Solomon Trismosin. I haunted the British Museum print collection to study these works.

The Hudson River Valley and Luminist painters, in particular Martin Johnson Heade and Thomas Cole, made a significant impression on me because of their immersion in nature, allegory, and notions of an aspirational Arcadia. I had a real panic attack when seeing Jose Clemente Orozco’s murals at the Dartmouth College Library from the sheer immensity of his social vision of the Americas. I realized how uneducated I had been about United States history.

James Rosenquist’s monumental F-111 painting changed my perception of design. Leon Golub’s paintings on un-stretched canvas of oppressors and victims move me for their brutal honesty, and sets a high standard for artists to reach. I deeply admire Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party, the esoteric atmosphere of Odilon Redon’s art, and the surfaces of J.M.W. Turner’s paintings. Digital photographers Miwa Yanagi and Thomas Struth have inspired me. Numerous movies with innovative special effects have impressed me and informed my practice. My colleague Michael Fink’s special effects on the movies Blade Runner and Constantine are my two favorites. He is brilliant. I turn off the sound and study them for hours. All of these influences have made their way into my practice.

*Madonna’s of South Beach by Clayton Campbell*

Are there any specific projects or goals you're currently working towards as a digital artist? What do you hope to achieve in the future?

I am still in the midst of an online project/residency with Loop Art Critique, and it is a terrific experience. It was founded by artist Ariel Baron-Robbins. It is a two month residency of sorts in the metaverse with four other artists who all are working digitally, each quite amazing. Serendipitously, I discovered Digital Arts Blog reading the interview with Ibuki Kuramochi, one of the Loop Art Critique participants.

Visit Loop Lab 4.0 during July 2023 to see the art by Campbell alongside the 4th cohort of Loop Art Critique Metaverse Artist Residency!

An important current project has been to publish through Blurb.com a seven volume set of my entire output, from 1968 to present. The books, both in print and online, accompany a collection and archives of my artwork that is being established at Highlands University in Las Vegas, New Mexico, part of the University of New Mexico. It is important for artists, especially those who are middle aged or older, to consider legacy issues so their work can be shared and studied. Too many artists pass away and their work is lost to all of us. What we do as digital artists is our collective cultural patrimony, and much of it seems ephemeral, so we have specific issues and challenges to consider. I am working on the best way to save my digital work as jpgs, RAW files, and hard drives will all change over time.

I am in an incredibly productive period of work. The series I have been engaged with for the past two years, Trance of Thought, is evolving into new areas of research. The online site out of Paris, The Eye of Photography, has been extremely generous in showing five portfolios of my work during the pandemic. Now that I am coming out of an intense work period, I am thinking in terms of public spaces, large LED screens, and presenting images in innovative ways that create conversations that will best reflect my artist statement and values.