When you first meet Colin Goldberg, your first thought is, “Man, this guy is really interesting.” Colin is half Japanese on his mother’s side and Jewish on his father’s side and grew up in Southampton. He’s a true artist, and he found his medium with technology. Colin works as a web designer by trade; he was attracted to web design because of his passion for creativity and it wasn’t long before he started realizing he could build beautiful pieces of artwork using a computer.
Not knowing he was a pioneer, Colin set forth more than 20 years ago building art with his desktop computer and began selling his work and began to find success selling pieces and being hosted at local art galleries. When asked what type of artist he was, he would describe his work as “techspressionism” a word that is in common use today, and also a word that he invented. Techspressionism has been used tens of thousands of times on the internet to describe art created on a computer that expresses an emotional experience, and Colin shared it with the world. Not just people interested in buying art, but artists themselves.
It was just an idea. He built a website at techspressionism.com and started to tell people about it and from there, an entire online gallery was created where artists from all over the world are showcasing their work. You know how Facebook has the metaverse? It’s kinda like that, but with art. “Artists from all over the world have joined. We do these meet-ups on Zoom every other week which is really interesting. There is an artist from Iran, from Paris, everywhere. We all just talk on Zoom, it’s really interesting. I see it sort of as a modern day version of when artists all got together in a café and drank absinthe.”
As you cruise techspressionism.com, you get a full art gallery experience. You can get a sense of how big the pieces are because you’re in a virtual space that is all to scale. “If you are interested in buying one of the pieces of art, you can purchase it through an NFT or you can contact the artist directly online and buy the piece directly from them.”
As I’m sitting with Colin, I can see a twinkle in his eye about Techspressionism.com. It’s his baby, and he’s watching it grow. He developed it, designed it, promotes it, keeps it going. There are now artists from 40 different countries that are involved with the show, including local artist Steve Miller. Other names you might recognize are Anne Spalter, who is a digital artist and was the first person to teach it at Brown University. One of the advisors of the website is Helen A. Harrison, who is the director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs. “She’s the one who really helped define the term. When the artist group got together and became a part of the community, it was pretty crazy. Techspressionism is really an outgrowth of expressionism. Abstract expressionism is, of course, Jackson Pollock. The idea behind it really brings artists all over the world together.”
If you want to meet Colin in person, you can meet him at his upcoming show in Southampton at the Southampton Arts Center that is opening up in April which will have a mixture of artists on the East End and all over the world that is doing art with technology.
Colin’s art, by the way, is beautiful and emotionally inspiring. He creates it using a digital pen and a digital pad and prints them using a specialized printer at his house which in Vermont where he resides with his wife and daughter. “I’ll continue making art forever. It’s just who I am.”
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