Rick Berry

Rick Berry is a singular American artist — a pioneer whose work connects the history of figurative painting to the birth of the digital age.

Raised on comics, album covers, and whatever visual culture the street threw at him, Berry left school at seventeen and entered the world of underground comics as a self-taught artist. He never stopped innovating. Working from the Boston region, he has built a career that has fused oils, charcoal, digital painting, popular media, and classical technique into a visual language that feels both ancient and futuristic.

Rick Berry is internationally recognized as one of the earliest true new media innovators.

He is credited with creating the world’s first digitally painted book cover, for William Gibson’s landmark cyberpunk novel NEUROMANCER in 1984 — a moment that art historians now cite as a turning point in the evolution of digital art as a serious medium. He later collaborated directly with Gibson and with film and media studios, including serving as part of the three-man team that conceptualized and produced the award-winning climactic CGI sequence for Sony Pictures’ Johnny Mnemonic, bringing cyberpunk aesthetics into film at a formative moment in its history.

Over the decades, Berry’s work has appeared on book jackets, in galleries, in performance pieces and experimental installations, on album covers, and in media productions. The throughline is constant: Rick Berry insisted — from the very beginning — that the digital realm was not a gimmick, but a canvas. And he treated that canvas with the seriousness and painterly ambition of a master draftsperson.

Rick Berry’s career is a study in artistic courage. Self-made, self-taught, and decades ahead of the curve, he helped open the door to what the world now takes for granted — that digital art can be as tactile, as intimate, as narrative, and as emotionally human as the most traditional brush on linen.