Berkeley-based Roy Tomlinson paints on Iris prints to produce "stains of life"

As he stands in his darkened studio, Roy Tomlinson guides a paintbrush around the lines and shapes of a computer-generated pattern projected onto an Iris print. With an overhead projector as his only source of light, he instinctively coats the print in lush brush strokes of oil paint. With each stroke, he shapes and twists the painting to his liking, creating a hybrid work that defies the narrow categories of digital and traditional fine art.

Tomlinson's marriage of digital and traditional media is the result of the 43-year-old Berkeley artists ongoing struggle to express his vision. And although he has been a professional painter for more than 20 years and holds an MFA from UC Berkeley and a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, he is still finding new ways to create his work.

Essentially, Tomlinson's latest technique is an unconventional take on the process of digital fine-art printing. By using an Iris print as a step in a creative process, rather than an end result, he reverses the process favored by most digital artists. Instead of taking an oil painting, scanning it to create a digital file, and then outputting the data through an Iris printer, Tomlinson paints on Iris prints.

That's the essence of how Tomlinson created some of the works in his recent untitled series of paintings, but the process was actually much more involved.

Before the Iris prints are even output, Tomlinson has an initial step to complete. Replacing paintbrushes with Photoshop for the initial planning, Tomlinson began most of the paintings in his recent untitled series with a preliminary pattern. These preliminary patterns included, among others, a Viking tombstone, a 13th-century priest's robe, a leopard print, and a piece of fabric scanned from a fashion magazine.

Once Tomlinson chose a pattern, he scanned it. Then he opened the scan files in Photoshop and manipulated them with the clone tool. For example, to create one piece he copied and flipped mirror images of a pattern and skewed them slightly to provide a look of unhinged continuity. Once he liked what he saw, Tomlinson then took his digital files to Potrero Hill-based digital fine-art printer Urban Digital Color for Iris prints.

For most digital artists, the Iris prints would be the end of the process, but for Tomlinson, they were only the beginning. He took the finished Iris prints to his studio and pasted them onto a board. These prints served as the backgrounds in some of his paintings. Next, he took either a photocopy of another pattern or a Photoshop file and cast its image onto the digital Iris print with an overhead projector.

At this stage, Tomlinson began the layering process. He ultimately spent months layering paint on top of the Iris prints, sanding the paint down, and rebuilding layers-some of which were as much as 1/16th of an inch thick. With each additional layer, Tomlinson says he created space and depth. But he believes that the meaning of his paintings is far deeper than thick layers of paint or swirling patterns.

"A pattern is one simple image. It becomes a vehicle," Tomlinson says. "The painting is not about a leopard print. My paintings are a process of investigation and how I interact with the world and how I create my notion of what's real and not real. I use a flat pattern, and it doesn't mean anything. My challenge is to give meaning to something that has no meaning."

Coaxing meaning from patterns is all the more challenging for Tomlinson because his digital-nondigital technique can lead to unpredictable results.

"I want to question the boundaries of a solid thing," says Tomlinson. "With the computer work, I generate a new kind of mark. Using Photoshop I can alter an image before a project, and I set up a chance operation that way."

A lot of planning and foundation work goes into creating Tomlinson's "chance operations." For example, one of his paintings started with a magazine image of a model in a field of roses. Tomlinson scanned in the image and brought it into Photoshop. He then cloned out the model and sharpened and dissolved the roses. With some tweaking, he changed the colors and cropped the image. He also removed some of the dot pattern. Finally, be faded most of the color, leaving the image looking like a grainy photo.

After Urban Digital Color made an Iris print of the digital file, Tomlinson started experimenting. And the element of chance in his work began to affect the image.

"These weird colors started happening where the Iris prints started separating because the prints are impregnated with dyes," Tomlinson says. 'In the process of sealing the print off, the dyes were lifted out of the print and were remixed. They ended up creating a bunch of colors I had no control over. They added blues, and I stained the print with sepia tones and put stripes of black on it, and then I scrubbed the black off. I don't know what I was trying to achieve with that. It sort of arrived."

After years of working as a traditional painter, Tomlinson's decision to incorporate digital imaging in his art arose, in part, to add spontaneity. He knew he needed a change when he says he got to know and was able to predict exactly what his finished pieces would look like. Although he still creates some of his art without a computer and Iris prints, Tomlinson is happy with the results of the new process, and he believes the hybrid digital-nondigital technique brings a much-needed level of stress and tension to his paintings. Tomlinson says the tension in his latest work was achieved by using and abusing his equipment to the point of crisis. He compares the tension in his recent paintings to a glass of water filled to the brim and balanced on the edge of a table. If the glass is moved to the middle of the table, the tension is gone and the painting is no longer interesting. But move the glass back to the edge, and it's the same glass, but with an added pressure. That point on the edge where the glass could either stay balanced or tumble to the ground with a crash is the same kind of tension Tomlinson says he wants in his work.

"It's a crisis point highlighted," Tomlinson explains. "Crisis is important to me. I like to create crisis in the studio. I look for a way to deal with it. You want a painting to be suspended, not stable but ready to change. I find that edge and sometimes it spills over. If I have a mess, then I clean it up. I don't like to make my paintings too right, there's no energy, if you've overworked it, you have to mess it up. It needs energy and activity. It's not a picture of something, it's a phenomenon, a breathing thing."

Much of the energy in Tomlinson's newest works radiates from change, from disrupting the methods with which he has painted for many years. Until recently, computers had no meaning and no place in Tomlinson's arsenal of equipment. But now he sees Photoshop as an invaluable tool.

Tomlinson runs Photoshop on his 266MHz G3 Power Macintosh, with 192MB of RAM, and a 9GB external drive. That may seem like too much machine for simple Photoshop work, and even Tomlinson admits that he could be doing much more with his system.

But he's not really sure he wants to do much more with his G3. Tomlinson says he considers his computer to be a useful tool, but he is still a painter, not a digital artist, and he is not anxious to learn any digital techniques that will divorce him from his brushes.

"I'm ignorant of the full potential of my computer," Tomlinson says. "I just learned enough of the technology to use it in a certain way and then abuse it in a way it's not meant to be used. I don't do stuff that's fancy with Photoshop. I don't see myself as a digital artist at all. I'm a hack when it comes to Photoshop, and I'm not interested in putting out art that is a digital file [as a finished product]."

Whether he considers his work digital art or not, Tomlinson's latest series of paintings attracted the attention of one of the Bay Area's leading proponents of digital art, Griff Williams, director of Urban Digital Color's Gallery 16. The gallery, which is across the hall from Urban Digital Color, provides artists with space to show their work. Williams decided that Tomlinson's images merited inclusion in a just concluded Gallery 16 show. Tomlinson seems both shocked and pleased with the success of the show, which ran from April 8 to May 28. At presstime, he had sold six pieces.

Despite his apparent success from last month's Gallery 16 show, Tomlinson is unsure whether he will be working on Iris prints again. But he does know he will continue exploiting the capabilities of his G3.

"I'm not sure if I'm going to keep spending $500 on an Iris print and hit it with oil paints," Tomlinson says. My next body of work will be generated from photos that I will take and manipulate into something abstract. Like taking a Xerox of a Xerox, it generates its own pattern after a while. I know I could use a digital camera, but it's too direct. I like the layering of technology. I like my art to take on the stains of life, like dragging something behind my car or showering with it for a week. Life is like that, it's not perfect."