Image credit: Melonie Maelstrom
Please note this article is most optimally consumed while playing Arcade Fire’s Electric Blue.
Like most artists within the throes of the gloomy Great Depression, a spritely twenty-something named George Beauchamp bid farewell to his rural Texan life for the big city. As a talented & versatile vaudeville musician, Beauchamp was equally skilled at both the violin and the twangy, acoustic lap guitar. And Los Angeles offered ole’ George the strongest promise of a glitzy life under the stage lights and sunshine.
But early on in his LA adventure, the realities of a stringed musician in 1920 were frustrating. In fact, George suffered from a particularly musical malady du jour, we’ll call sound envy—with his soft strings too often drowned out by the louder brass and percussion instruments of the blaring golden age of jazz. But instead of whining like Gen Z’ers would today, industrious Beauchamp pro-actively looked for a solution.
In seeking to amplify his faint guitar’s sound, he began experimenting with steel for a more powerful presence and further—after enrolling in night school to study electronics— discovered how to convert string vibrations into electrical signals. Through testing and his learnings, Beauchamp ultimately combined electricity with his beloved acoustic guitar. And in doing so wound up pioneering the world’s very first electric guitar, known as The Frying Pan.
By fusing electricity with his music, Beauchamp monumentally unleashed decades of green pastures for iconic, wired musical expression—from the Rolling Stones' Paint It Black and guitar god Jimi’s All Along the Watchtower, to the creation of countless new instruments and the emergence of numerous defining genres like synth-pop, techno, and EDM.
As the world processes an entirely new set of tech tools at our disposal today, Swiss-based painter Conor Mccreedy has embarked on a similarly novel path with his art, one century after Beauchamp’s big breakthrough.
Image credit: Mccreedy Studio
The Liquid Blue Wave Series – Making Paintings Alive
By embedding two new technologies into his signature MccreedyBlue™ paintings, the maverick painter has awakened his canvases like never before, introducing both a bold AI element and an internationally patented proprietary lighting feature. These innovations allow his painted figures to transcend traditional boundaries and create a multisensory experience that projects well beyond the frame.
Interestingly, both traditional collectors and new art investors have quickly embraced these new artistic assets, Mccreedy explained.
“The tech-enabled living Liquid Blue Wave Series and the illuminated Monumental Mountains Collection were inspired by the wild beauty of nature and the unpredictable patterns of chaos theory. We’ve been really encouraged by the strong demand from both traditional collectors and a fast-growing segment of new art investors,” noted Mccreedy.
In fact, nearly fifty pieces from the collections have already sold since launching less than a year ago. Unlike other digital artworks, each of Mccreedy’s pieces is original and unique. Works from these new collections are featured at conormccreedy.com, @conormccreedy on Instagram, and at Zurich’s Mccreedy Studio—set along the Limmat River in a historic 12th-century building that once housed Mozart, the famed Venetian adventurer and seducer Giacomo Casanova, and even hosted electrical pioneer Albert Einstein.
For the new pieces, pricing ranges from $10k to $25K USD, based on the animation time involved for each unique piece, and the size and scale of the screen.
Each piece offers collectors both a physical painting and an interactive digital counterpart, verified through Orygin, a Swiss blockchain platform providing secure, biometric-based certification. Embedded chips add another layer of authentication, reinforcing Mccreedy’s fusion of art and technology.
The Monumental Mountains Collection – Fire on the Mountain
Beyond his living AI series, Mccreedy isn’t just painting and awakening mountains—he’s illuminating them as well. Monumental Mountains, which debuted at Art Basel 2024, features patented lighting technology that he developed and holds exclusive rights to. A decade in the making, the collection draws inspiration from the Swiss Alps, a region deeply connected to Mccreedy’s life after nearly ten years in Switzerland.
Image credit: Mccreedy Studio
Blending art with innovation, Monumental Mountains incorporates aluminum and titanium frames with embedded LED lights, allowing viewers to adjust illumination and reveal new dimensions within his abstract brushstrokes as highlighted above. This unconventional approach transforms each piece into an interactive fusion of nature and tech, redefining how landscapes are experienced on canvas.
Ooh, Girl Shock Me like An Electric Eel, Baby Girl Turn Me on With Your Electric Feel
From Beauchamp’s electric guitar to Einstein’s theories on electromagnetism to MGMT’s Electric Feel, and Mccreedy’s illuminated canvases, the thread of electricity as both a medium and a force runs deep. Each challenged tradition—wiring sound, thought, and canvas into something beyond what existed before. In Mccreedy’s work, art and technology collide in that same pursuit—where innovation doesn’t override the past but is electrified by it.
