Jeff Elrod is an American abstract painter who employs both digital and analog processes to create his work. Using Photoshop he draws and reworks imagery that he then renders on canvas often by hand, using acrylic paints, tape, and airbrush. His computer generated images are also sometimes printed directly onto the canvases.

Elrod began painting abstractions inspired by super graphics and video game imagery in the early 1990s. In 1997, as a means to distance himself from his conscious mind, he began to use the computer to facilitate paintings through a technique he calls “frictionless drawing.” The software program allows for the production of lines and color fields without the direct intervention of the artist’s hand, thus allowing him the freedom to experiment and engage his subconscious mind, as “a digital breed of automatic writing.” In one body of work, inspired by artist and poet Brion Gysin’s “dream machine” project, Elrod evokes the hallucinatory effects of Gysin’s machine by processing his original drawings into blurred images that create overall fields of colored soft cloud-like forms that resist focus.