Wade Guyton's Computer-Made Works at the Whitney Wade Guyton at his studio in front of a work produced by an inkjet printer on linen, which will be part of his show at the Whitney Museum. THE artist Wade Guyton works on the edge of Chinatown in a commodious light-filled space with windows looking over the Bowery. One portion is dominated by desks with little on them but Macs. Nearby is the biggest printer Epson makes - a hulking Stylus Pro 11880 inkjet. There is no smell of turpentine, no haphazard array of easels, no cans of paint or stacks of used canvases. In fact, there are none of the things one would expect in a painter's studio. Instead all the creating is executed on computer screens and printers. "I never really enjoyed drawing or art classes," said Mr. Guyton unapologetically as he described growing up in a small town in Tennessee. I would prefer to sit in front of the TV or play video games. On a steamy morning a few weeks earlier, Mr. Guyton, 40, wearing shorts, a black T-shirt and sneakers, was anxiously watching while a work of red and green stripes slowly chugged out of the printer, spilling onto the floor. The repetitive pattern was not being printed on paper, but on linen that the artist imported from France because he liked its smooth surface. Mr. Guyton had found the striped image on an end paper in a book and he tore it out and scanned it. He saw the book "sitting open on a pile of stuff and was attracted to the pattern," Mr. Guyton recalled, adding: "They are weird Christmas colors yet there's an optical buzz to it. It's interesting for me to take something so insignificant and minor and affectless on its own and let it permeate in many different ways. He elongated the image on his computer and what was now printing out before him had a kind of pattern of Benday dots, reminiscent of something Roy Lichtenstein would have made had he created abstract paintings. Less than a decade ago Mr. Guyton couldn't get a dealer to pay attention to him. Now he is represented by the Friedrich Petzel Gallery in Chelsea, and has well-known collectors avidly buying his art, examples of which are already in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, to name a few. Starting Thursday Mr. Guyton's work will be the focus of a midcareer survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art called "Wade Guyton OS," with OS standing for operating system, the software that supports a computer's basic user functions. Along with artists like Kelley Walker (a friend with whom he often collaborates), Seth Price and Tauba Auerbach, Mr. Guyton is at the forefront of a generation that has been reconsidering both appropriation and abstract art through the 21st-century lens of technology. "Wade speaks to the way images travel across our visual culture - on our computers and iPhones, televisions and books," said Scott Rothkopf, the Whitney curator who organized the show. He has figured out a way to make work that deals with technology but doesn't feel tricky or techie, rather it's intuitive. It's abstract on one hand and Pop on the other. It was Warhol, after all, who said: "Paintings are too hard. The things I want to show are mechanical. Machines have less problems. And today artists as varied as Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons and even the 80-year-old German painter Gerhard Richter are producing paintings with computers. The Los Angeles artist Mark Grotjahn recalls seeing Mr. Guyton's first show in New York six years ago. "I was blown away," he said. I must have gone back three or four times. I particularly admire the way he repeats motifs with just the slightest changes. The paintings that particularly seduced Mr. Grotjahn were what Mr. Guyton calls his flame paintings - black canvases with a menacing-looking flame shooting up from the bottom (again, something the artist ripped out of a book and scanned). Many of the flame paintings also have the letter U in them. That letter came from his computer keyboard - typing is another way Mr. Guyton makes paintings. On a wall of his studio are canvases with giant X's on them. On the floor nearby is a gleaming, stainless steel sculpture in the shape of a U - both morphed from letters he had typed and then played with. Ann Temkin, the chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, explained her early fascination with Mr. Guyton's work. "You tap a keyboard with one finger and this very large painting emerges," she said. It's gone against everything we think of as a painting. Yet, Ms. Temkin went on, "there are so many historical landmarks that precede him, so many artists who took the traditional notion of painting in a new direction."