Jeffrey Alan Scudder (b. 1989) is a digital painter who received an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University School of Art in 2013. Since 2016 he has used the term Radical Digital Painting for a practice built on custom software, arguing that “painting is just a kind of picture message”.
Scudder's digital paintings began with multi-layered images built in Adobe Photoshop before growing into an amalgam of traditional drawing and homegrown software that, in his words, “highlight[s] abstract expressivity, play, and improvisation over production quality and technical control”.He distinguishes three levels of picture-making — the arrangement, the mark and the scan — and built software such as Dot, a tool that turns every control into a circular loop so navigation never hits an edge, and Tumpin, a recording of 128 cycling dot arrangements made with it.In 2018 alone he gave more than thirty lecture-performances across the United States and Europe, presenting live digital painting and chalk talk with store-bought video game and MIDI controllers.
His work has been shown at “ALLGOLD RENDER SERIES” at the MoMA PS1 Printshop in 2015, “New Dawn” at Neumeister Bar-Am in Berlin in 2017, and “OPEN CODES” at ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe in 2018. In 2018 he presented “Radical Digital Painting” with the artist Julia Yerger at Johannes Vogt Gallery in New York, and closed the year with the solo show “Radical Digital Painting: Los Angeles” at The Newsstand Project's House on Sunset.
In 2017 Scudder formed the digital painting team Just Another System with Julia Yerger, Artur Erman and Mark Fingerhut, touring ten events at schools including Parsons, RISD, Harvard and Yale.He has since extended his teaching practice through the Whistlegraph TikTok account, where he and collaborators share drawing tutorials set to music, and through No Paint, an iOS app that lets users mix gesture and coding to create painterly compositions.
