Artist Jon Legere has pulled on the strings of his past to produce the pieces in his current exhibition.

He has produced digital canvas prints and they are showing at the Rock Island Caf? until October 9. Mr. Legere said he had attended Purchase College, in New York, which is a state university.

?There have been quite a few names that have come out of there in the acting field,? he said.

?But it is one of the top dance schools in the country and it was a great learning experience and the great thing is that you get to work with other artists in other fields.

?So I started off doing sculpture, printmaking and design. I didn?t like design, but went back to sculpture and into video. It is not a new thing, they have been doing it since the 50s and 60s, but it has never really found a home in an art school.

?So they kind of slapped it on the back of the sculpture division. I just started getting into it and began playing with sound and art.

?I was really inspired by the technology.?

He said in his years of studying with design ?it began to mix well. ?I learned some of the skills to use the computer and if you can?t use a camera and edit it, if it is kind of a hurdle to get past with the medium,? he said, ?But once you master that the sky is the limit. So it was really fun and very experimental.?

The work that is in the Rock Island Show is a culmination of work in sketchbooks that he kept for the past five years. ?They are visual diaries and sometimes pieces of paper get shoved in there, like a chewing gum on the floor, whatever ? a complete vernacular,? said Mr. Legere.

?And so I just had these things sitting around and I decided I wanted to do something with them and I did little elements, little drawings, little doodles. Just little fragments of the book and I high-resolution scanned them in and then started making collages with them.

?There are 13 pieces there and it is kind of like an archive of the last five years of my sketches and doodles. Then using the digital medium to put them together and now putting them onto canvas, which is kind of a new thing too.

?John at Bermuda Blueprinting has a large format printer, which takes canvas. He prints it and then I stretch the canvas and put it onto a frame.

?It is kind of fun, it?s exciting and it is still experimental and I think it is where art should be. It should be a course of exploration.

?As a creative person ? you will continuously reinvent yourself otherwise you get washed out and dried out.?

One of Mr. Legere?s heroes is Andy Warhol whose concept of art was about mass production.

?That was the concept,? he said, ?Although he produced these images of pop culture, he was quoted so many times as saying he wanted to be a machine. The Factory was the name of his studio and he employed hundreds of people to just reproduce his work and so it was about reproducing and pumping it out. He was commenting on the society and what it had become.?

Mr. Legere said that his show definitely has a pop element to it. ?I think Andy Warhol is in the same way as Jesus and Jimmy Dean ? he is a very easy artist to accept in this culture, because he has been marketed so well.

?And so that is not just the reason why I like him, I like him because I believe he was making fun of consumerism or maybe he was just going along with it.

?But his art was all about the mass production of it and I thought that was quite ingenious. That is why I like him. I mean his imagery is great too, but it is the idea behind the imagery that I am fascinated with. I say my ?ultimate? or the artist I respect most is Marcell du Champ, who really changed the notion of what art really was and he was around in the early 20th Century and he passed away in the early 1960s.

?He was noted as the founder of Dadaism, realism and conceptualism ? he would hang a urinal on the wall and people didn?t know how to react.

?He made them question what art really was for the first time. You couldn?t do that today because the question has already been asked and answered. But back then when people were doing impressionistic and Picasso had just begun making a break out ? seeing a urinal ? people were pretty bamboozled.

?So I think any kind of art that really makes you question what you are looking at and what you are thinking about is brilliant.?

Mr. Legere said he loves people who speak their minds truthfully about the art they are viewing.

?You should question,? he said, ?You shouldn?t just accept things for the way they are.?

Next on the agenda is work with religious undertones said Mr. Legere.

?I would say more than religion, belief systems,? he said, ?This show has a little Jimmy Dean, religious Adam and Eve and I will probably continue to question religious beliefs.

?For a lot of Western people I think Jesus is the symbol of good, and Jimmy Dean is a symbol of cool. Definitely for North America, white males it has been, Bob Marley would be more conscious cool, which are great and I think that all three of these people were probably just doing their thing.

?But it is society that kind of markets them and made them into icons. I also like the idea of people or things being made into icons and blown out of proportion and then all of a sudden they take on a greater meaning.

?That is an element that I like to deal with.?

Mr. Legere and Antoine Hunt are working on a film at the moment for the Bermuda International Film Festival.

?I am always working on new things,? he said, ?I am working on this new business and it is going great and it is going lovely.

?What LAVA is and what the art work does is really about making things happen and it is dealing with the visual communication of the Island.

?In the commercial and the fine art sense and I am really into getting stuff out there and getting people to question, to take a risk. So I think things need a little bit of a shake here ? not in a bad way.

?It is something very, kind of like George Orwell?s ?1984? ? everyone going down the nice safe path ? it is really scary.

?If you are doing something that you don?t love then your output is negative energy. If you are doing something with an ulterior motive, if you are not happy with yourself and what you are doing then how can you emanate happiness.

?It is also very dangerous for children when their parents don?t love what they do ? they are their mentors and what does that teach the kids.?

Mr. Legere said he thought that Bermuda is a very intelligent Island.

?The culture needs that push as well,? he said, ?I really think that as we become more business savvy and the economy rises and all of that, the culture should rise and if it is forgotten it can be very detrimental to our environment.

?And you know it is not that we can?t understand it ? we are very well travelled and we know what is out there and it is no reason why we can?t have it here and show and example to the rest of the world.

?Why not? And in the last few years I have seen a huge change on both sides the cultural and the business.

?I think things will keep moving and LAVA wants to be at the forefront of that. More artists are going away and getting an overseas education and coming back and it is about them staying here.

?This is to the artists out there ?it seems a little hard at first, but it is all about you making it happen. If everyone uproots and goes to the cool cities Bermuda will never be at that level. It is about digging your heels in and I think whether it is art, culture, business, sports ? everyone needs to come back and teach and pass on. I love Bermuda. It?s a wonderful place.?

The show runs until October 9 at the Rock Island Coffee Shop.