Dan's Cover Artist Colin Goldberg Talks Techspressionism

This week’s Dan’s Papers cover artist Colin Goldberg, who grew up in Southampton, discusses his unique approach to painting and his efforts founding and continuing to push forward the Techspressionism art movement.

A Conversation with Colin Goldberg

Tell me about what inspired this painting. Where do your forms come from?

I enrolled at SUNY Binghamton as a studio art major after graduating from Southampton High School in 1990. As an undergraduate student, I studied painting under Angelo Ippolito, a noted New York School Abstract Expressionist painter. When asked what his work was about, Ippolito responded, “It’s about paint.” I found Ippolito’s answer both frustrating and liberating. It allowed me to fully embrace abstraction without the need for explanation. My artistic process draws upon the Surrealist practice of “automatic drawing,” which aims to produce art without thought or intervention from the conscious mind.

The piece on the cover, “Dr. No,” was created in 2020, a few months before my father died. He had begun suffering from dementia during the pandemic, and my ability to see him in the care facility where he was living was limited. My dad taught Chemistry at Southampton College (later LIU Southampton) for almost 40 years and was always full of life and vitality before falling ill. This made it all the more difficult to see him in that condition. The piece reflects the emotional state I found myself in when it was painted, although not in any conscious way. My dad and I shared a tradition of watching James Bond movies, and when the piece was complete, the title “Dr. No,” the name of the first Bond movie with Sean Connery, popped into my head. It just made sense.

What is your process for creating an image like this, combining digital and traditional techniques?

I begin by cutting a piece of linen and taping it up to the wall. I always start with paint, usually acrylics. In the case of this particular piece, the paint was applied with taping knives used in house painting. I had always liked painting with palette knives, and at a larger scale, taping knives are my favorite. After an initial layer of gestural painting, I photograph the piece and import it into my Mac, scaling it to full size in Photoshop. Then, I bring the image into Adobe Illustrator and compose a drawing layer superimposed over the image of the painting.

I do all my digital drawings using a Wacom tablet, generally in Illustrator. The digital drawing layer may contain lines, color gradients, and other forms and shapes. I then coat the painting with a specialized primer and run it through my large-format printer, printing directly onto the painted surface with archival pigment-based inks. I have a 44” Epson in the studio that I purchased 2014 with a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant.

Once the ink is dry, I tape it back up on the wall and paint another layer on top of it. I repeat this process several times. Each layer is a reaction to the previous one. The piece on the cover has six or seven layers of paint and print. The red ring was hand-painted, which was very painstaking, and the wireframe lines were printed on top. It is a nerve-wracking experience to run a painting through a printer, as the piece sometimes jams, mainly if the paint is applied in a thick impasto.

When the piece is complete, I stretch it if I feel it’s successful. Many end up in the trash bin before they make it that far.

A few years ago you founded an art movement called Techspressionism. Can you talk about that, what it means and how it takes shape with your work and that of other artists? 

I coined the term Techspressionism in 2011 as the title of a solo show I put together at a gallery called 4 North Main in Southampton. It was a rental space, and the show was a self-produced popup show. The word just popped into my head one day when I was trying to come up with a title for the exhibition.

Helen Harrison, the longtime Director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs, agreed to write a foreword for the exhibition catalog. Her words expanded the idea of Techspressionism and put it in context. A few years later, I had a solo show at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller in East Hampton curated by Scott Bluedorn. This show was also called Techspressionism. I wrote a “Techspressionist Manifesto” as part of the show, which was a way to crystallize my ideas and feelings about the relationship between art and technology.

Fast-forward to 2020: I randomly did a Google search for “Techspressionism,” and I found that another Hamptons artist named Oz Van Rosen was also using the term to describe her work. I reached out to her to see if she was interested in starting an artist group around the idea. On September 1, 2020, we met on Zoom with Sagaponack artist Steve Miller and artist and theorist Patrick Lichty, a graduate school colleague of mine. Both artists work with technology and expressed interest in the project. Helen Harrison offered to join in on the meeting in an advisory role.

We decided on the goal of organizing an exhibition and a definition of the term: “an artistic approach in which technology is utilized as a means to express emotional experience,” This was the first Techspressionist Salon.

How has Techspressionism been going? Is it difficult to try to make something like this stick and become part of the wider vernacular and discourse?

It’s gone far beyond what I could have imagined. Techspressionism is a movement accelerated by the pandemic through the widescale adoption of Zoom and the propagation of the term on social media. A core group of artists central to the community meets on the first Thursday of each month on Zoom. These salons are free and open to the public, and artists are invited to share their work and ideas relating to art and technology. They are recorded and published on our YouTube channel, and February 6 marks our 91^st Salon. Anyone can register to attend at techspressionism.com/salon.

Our first large-scale exhibition, Techspressionism: Digital and Beyond opened at the Southampton Arts Center in the summer of 2022. The exhibition included the works of more than 90 artists working with technology from more than 20 countries around the world. You can see some images from that at techspressionism.com/southampton. As part of the exhibition programming, I hosted a roundtable discussion on Techspressionism on Zoom with Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum in New York, and Helen Harrison. It was a fascinating conversation and is available to watch at techspressionsm.com/roundtable.

The hashtag #techspressionism has been used on over 80,000 Instagram posts since 2020, and last summer, we had our first museum show at the Kingsborough Art Museum in Brooklyn. Our first group show in Manhattan, “Hello Chelsea: Techspressionism 2025,” curated by Tommy Mintz, opens Wednesday, April 30, at the Hudson Guild Gallery at 441 W. 26th Street. I am also part of a large-scale video installation in Chicago called “Four Techspressionist Artists” with Renata Janiszewska, Karen LaFleur and Jan Swinburne, which also opens this April. So, things are moving along.

When I asked Harrison recently about what she thought constitutes an art movement, she said, “Movement implies momentum, and Techspressionism certainly has that.”

Where can people see your work, in person and/or online?

I am represented by Helmholz Fine Art, based in Manchester, Vermont. The gallery also has a private viewing space for collectors in Tribeca. My paintings are available in the gallery and can be viewed on their website, helmholzfineart.com. You can also see a historical selection of my work on my website, goldberg.art. and on my Instagram @colingoldberg.

I have recently completed a collection of 23 abstract Augmented Reality artworks called Metagraphs. The first work I created in this series, “Kneeling Icon,” is a 6 x 8 foot digital drawing on vinyl that was first exhibited in the show at Southampton Arts Center. In 2023, it was purchased by the Hearst Corporation and is now permanently installed in their conference room in Hearst Tower on 57^th Street.

I have recently published these works in a book called Metagraphs: Augmented Reality Art. When you view the artwork in the book with a free mobile app called Artivive, it animates directly on the book’s pages. It is the first AR art book on Amazon, and it can easily be found there simply by searching for “Augmented Reality Art.”

The collection is also available as open-edition AR fine art prints on paper, canvas, and aluminum on a new site I launched in December, metagraphs.art.

Do you have anything to add?

I would like to voice my gratitude for my family and friends who have been so supportive through all of my trials and tribulations over the years. There certainly have been many. I am especially grateful for my daughter Aya and my partner Jessica, who bring so much light into my life each day. And, of course, for my sister Malia, my mother Kikuye, and the rest of my beloved Hawaii ‘Ohana.