I've come into the art world in a roundabout way.

During my forty year career in the academic world, including thirty-one years as a psychology professor at the University of San Diego, I always felt 'something' was missing in my life. That something was the need for creative visual expression. During the 60's and 70's I began painting using oils and acrylics and whole new vistas opened to me. Unfortunately, life with its family and professional demands interrupted those early explorations and it was not till I retired that I returned to the art world.

In the time interval a new age, the digital, had begun and a new artistic medium had developed in this technological world. I found the flexibility and range of possibilities offered by the digital media to be excellent means for expressing my long buried creative feelings and ideas. I also discovered that the artistic process frequently lead me into unforeseen areas with some surprising and exciting results. The digital camera, Photoshop and Painter have become the artistic tools which help me not only reflect the reality of the moment but also realities as one would re-imagine them, in short, creative re-presentations of both worlds.

Ezra Pound once gave the definition of an artistic image as an "intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time". Much of my work results in emotional-thought images which are indeed time-captures of these complexes.

John Valois's art on the Web