AJAX -- Long-time Ajax resident Mike Butler can quite literally be called a digital art pioneer.

In the early 1980s, in the infancy of the personal computer, he saw the potential for art-making with pixels and bytes that began a fascination that continues to this day.

After graduating from the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto in 1980, where he had studied fine art, Mike got himself one of the first, rudimentary Radio Shack colour computers and immediately began experimenting with the creation of abstract designs. As this was prior to computer printers, he had to be content with his art being viewable only on his monitor - although he recalls that some artists from that era would take photographs of their screens and print them for display. In this pre-virtual reality world, however, Mike imagined himself as the creator of digital art for people in the Cyberspace envisaged by one his favourite science fiction writers. And, in a fascinating case of imagination realized, with the advent of the Internet, his work has now become available to a world-wide audience.

Butler drew constantly from the time he was a child, inspired by his mother, who dabbled in oils and pastels. But the 63-year-old, Montreal-born artist spent most of the first half of his life -- after an early stint, in the late 1960s in the Royal Canadian Air Force -- working at conventional jobs in sales throughout Canada. However, his love of math and science drew him to computers and computer programming and he eventually landed work as a programmer for the City of Oshawa. At age 55, he took early retirement and, since then, has devoted himself strictly to art-making.

Using various computer applications and tools, Butler typically begins his pieces by cropping and blowing up a photograph - many of which he shoots with a digital camera in his neighbourhood - then distorting and filtering the image and adding other previously cropped pictorial elements he stores on his computer to end up with a final result.

His art credo is simple: rather than making grand statements, he sees art - and especially non-conceptual abstract art - as "visual music" that he wishes to have touch the heart of the viewer, take them to a transcendental place and add aesthetic value to their lives. This dovetails very nicely with the tenets of his spiritual path, Tibetan Buddhism. Butler sums his philosophy up poetically and with Buddhist clarity: "Our perceptions tell us that the phenomena of everyday life are solid and permanent. Just like the clouds in the sky, though, they are fluid with only arbitrary boundaries and are constantly being blown apart by the wind of time. When we purify our perception of the habit of solidifying patterns, all the myriad things shine as luminous, pure appearance. Abstract art can help to break through the illusion of the solidity of everyday life. When the illusion of solidity melts, the frozen world of objects dissolves into a fluid dance of perceptions."

He socializes and keeps his drawing skills sharp as a member of Ajax Creative Arts. He most recently showed several of his digital abstracts in a juried show at The Framing Dames art gallery in West Hill. His art is available through several international publishers.

See the work of this dedicated and accomplished artist on his web site at www.mikyo.com.