Lisa Wray

Who is Lisa Wray?

Lisa Wray is a Pennsylvania-based artist, and one of the early pioneers of visual graphic media arts. Her works can be viewed as tradigital art and metaphysical art. Wray graduated from the Hussian School of Art, Philadelphia in 1979, where she studied commercial and fine art. She was a freelance artist in the late 1980s, and owned a print shop. Wray created some of the artwork in a series called the "Renaissance of Metaphysical Imagery" as early as 1978. In 1983, she started creating prototypes of the original works—from color copies, color photos or film negatives made in her graphic arts darkroom—in an attempt to produce metaphysical art, but discovered that the mechanical methods available could not achieve the accuracy of computer systems. "In 1983, when the first prototypes were made, the hardware did not exist to output high resolution in a hard copy form", she remembers.

In 1990 she visited the only two places in the country with proprietary computer systems capable of assembling her prototypes: Raphael Digital Transparencies in Houston, Texas, and Dodge Color Laboratories in Washington D.C. The first two prototypes, Brew of Life and Fantasy were assembled by Dodge Color Laboratories on a Superset machine that was first developed by the Department of Defense. The final art was archived on 1" magnetic tape, and then output as an 11x14” color film transparency. In the early 1990s, Wray discovered Judith Montcrieff and her pioneering efforts with tradigital art, after which she began using "tradigital art" as a reference to her own work as well. Wray uses the term to describe a new type of fine art that combines traditional painting, drawing and photography with digital media.