A Little About Creative Process
When people ask me if my work is "computer-generated art", I consistently respond "the tools don't create the art, the artist does!" That said, I acknowledge that the tools do, in fact, interact and collaborate with me as I work.

Even when I was a novice technology user my creative ideas were exploding with energy. The new tools seemed more directly linked to my mind and imagination than most art-making ones I had loved and worked with before. My current "tradigital" studio, which contains a mix of traditional and digital tools, has allowed me to follow new creative paths.

I believe that there are many simultaneous spiraling activities taking place when I work; images linger in my mind and inner eye and began to take up space and "bother" me and some images and ideas just hang out and demand musing time. A lot of this seems to go on as an internalized dialogue but also there is some sort of non-verbal stream of thought.

When working, I might start with a digital photograph or scan, a printed photo, monoprint, etching, drawing or real object and then begin to work with and alter the digitized information. Or I might begin painting directly in the computer using graphic art software. After I print the image I can alter the surface with paint or colored pencils or collage elements on it and then I can choose to rescan that and work on it in the computer again.

The technologies I used for one body of work enabled me to scale up extremely small bits and pieces of source photos and etchings and in that process I uncovered and expanded previously hidden components. I then fabricated new images from those fragments and found myself led in some unexpected directions (the image "At Sea" is an example).

I am surprised to see that the technology and equipment demands so much care and feeding. While formidable, these realities have not yet stopped me because the creative rewards are so great. I'm amazed that in and of itself, creeping mastery of the tools also brings me satisfaction.

Brief Biography of the Artist
The artist was born in New York City where cultural abundance filled her life. She always made art and as a young child, became interested in photography when she "helped" her father work in his darkroom. In college she was an art major who had the great fortune to study with leading artists of the abstract expressionist school.

Golden became a secondary-school teacher of art and photography, studied commercial photography and then moved to California where she operated a commercial photography business, made photo greeting cards and photo-based jewelry and continued to make fine art, mostly with a camera. Along with other pioneering artists in the early 1990s she began making art using computer technology tools and was the first curator/director of "Art at the Pond", which was a San Francisco exhibition venue for digital art.

She was a founding member of the digital art collective, Unique Editions(TM) with whose members she was, in July of 1997, an Artist-In-Residence at the National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian in Washington DC. At that time Golden had an image curated into the permanent collection of the museum. She is a Laureate of the 1998 Computerworld Smithsonian Information Technology Innovation Distinction and a recipient of the 1998 André Schellenberg Award in Fine Art.

Golden is a founding member of 911 Gallery and of The Main Gallery cooperative in Redwood City, California. She regularly exhibits in solo, juried and invited exhibitions and the work has been shown and sold to private and corporate clients both nationally and internationally. Venues include: The Triton Museum of Art, The San Jose Museum of Art, Stanford University, The Ansel Adams Museum, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Gatos Art Museum and venues in New York City, Washington D. C., San Francisco, Los Angeles, Canada, Europe and Asia. The work has been discussed on radio and television, written about in books and publications and appears on the internet most notably as the first exhibition of the new Silicon Valley Art Museum.

In order to educate the public, collectors and galleries about the new digital tools she gives talks and participates in public presentations. She works as a research consultant for companies where she has opportunities to evaluate and shape new technologies in hardware, software and media and then provide those companies with feedback from an artist's prospective.