My husband, Dominic Boreham, who has died aged 77 from acute myeloid leukaemia, was a pioneer of computer art and kinetic art. He was celebrated for his “Stos” series of computer-generated drawings, produced while he was studying at the Slade School of Art’s experimental and computing department in the late 1970s.
His art has been displayed in the UK and internationally in more than 40 exhibitions and his works are held in private and public collections.
Born in Woodford, Essex, to Kathleen Rivett, a teacher, and Walter Boreham, a bookshop manager, Dominic went to William Morris school in Walthamstow, north-east London. Following work as a commercial artist and six years as an assistant at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, he took a foundation course at Cambridge School of Art, and then studied at Wimbledon College of Art (1974-77), where he made kinetic art utilising electronically modulating light and received prizes in painting and graphics.
During this period, he visited the London Buddhist Vihara regularly and studied Buddhism, which consequently influenced his art. Two years at the Slade followed.
Dominic described the genesis and structure of the Stos series in a 1979 issue of Page, the bulletin of the Computer Arts Society. He was editor of Page from 1979 to 1982 , transforming a slim bulletin into a large quarterly journal, and interacted closely with his contemporaries in the field.
Interest in Dominic’s computer-generated art continued; he was commissioned by the historian of art and technology Frank Popper to write for the journal Leonardo in 1992 and, more recently, his work was included in the exhibition Chance and Control: Art in the Age of Computers (2018), at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and is held in their collection.
From 1980 to 1985, Dominic pursued research in human perception at Leicester Polytechnic, in the Human-Computer Interface Research Unit, and in parallel he obtained a PhD from the Royal College of Art in 1983. He and I met at Leicester, where we were colleagues in the school of mathematics, computing and statistics, and married in 1984, moving to the Bristol area two years later.
He lectured for six years in the school of fine art at Gwent College of Higher Education, Caerleon, in south Wales, and in 1991 we moved to live in Burgundy, France.
In the 1990s Dominic developed a new language and style of art, which he called “Transactional Nonobjectivism”, exploring ideas of transactional psychology, quantum physics and nonobjective art in an unpublished manuscript in 1999. His work was shown in Japan and China and he received a gold medal from the Yan Huang Art Museum in Beijing. His deep interest in ideas expounded by Carl Jung, David Bohm, Fritjof Capra and Joseph Campbell, among others, led to powerful drawings and paintings that he called “trans-psyche art”. A selection of his works can be seen at GV Art, London.
Dominic was a polymath who was a perfectionist and acutely observant; as well as an artist, he was an accomplished calligraphist, a photographer, collector, music- and nature-lover and a keen gardener.
He is survived by me and our daughter, Suraya.
