Ann Morgan
My mother gave me crayons as soon as she was pretty sure I wouldn’t eat them, and I’ve been making images ever since. I have included some sort of technology in my process since before I knew what I was doing; I would send my dad to work with my drawings to copy on the Xerox so I could cut up and reassemble the results to be copied again and again until there was nothing recognizable. Then I’d start over.
By the time I started my undergrad degree at Michigan State University, I’d had a few computer classes and spent entire summers building canvases and painting with my first mentor, Elaine Perret. When I graduated with a Bachelor’s of Fine Art with a year off in there as an Americorps*VISTA, I had learned HTML and started referencing my digital work I did in my paintings. I used the first iterations of Adobe Photoshop and whatever other tools I could find on the computers in the graphic design lab.
After graduating and 20 years of teaching computer classes, working at a software company, and then a tech-oriented position at an association, I was burned out and wondering about painting again. After two years of struggling, I left my full time position and started doing just that, plus contract web development, digital marketing and design.
