Helen Anne Lemke is a digital artist from Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. We live in an amazing world which she wants to explore through the camera lens and through her imagination. Using Photoshop she creates pieces responding to quotes, and other inspirations to create the world of her imagination which she invites the viewer to come and explore.

A love of quilting influences her use of colour, an awareness of the importance of values, and a love for small pieces and textures. She began taking photos in grade school with an Instamatic camera, eventually progressing to a digital SLR. With the purchase of the digital camera, she wanted to learn how to process her photos and that lead to wanting to know more about Photoshop. A series of classes designed to improve her photography led to the purchase of Sebastian Michael’s Living the Photo Artistic Life course.

The first COVID lockdown in 2020 provided a chance to explore that course as well as several subsequent courses. Digital art has provided hours of joy during a lockdown and an opportunity to connect with other digital artists around the world as they worked together through the courses connecting via Zoom once a week to encourage and support each other.

A daily practice of three quick pieces leads to each of the pieces in this collection which is part of her State of Being series. While the originals were meant to be 10- or 15-minute exercises, each of these pieces wanted something more so each of these pieces evolved from the original exercise into a more complete piece. A State of Being explores emotions we feel and attempts to depict them in a visual way. In each case, the emotion to be portrayed has been a surprise to the artist and forms part of her enjoyment of the series because she is never certain what is going to pop out to surprise and delight her.