There's a big gap in the art world today between what's happening with computers and digital imagery and the traditional art of painting," says artist Soledad Salame. "Half the artists are still painting, and the other half are doing photographs now."

For Salame, who was born in Chile but now lives in Baltimore, being a painter these days more than ever requires a continual exploration of techniques and materials.

Over the course of her career, she has experimented with Mylar, acrylic resins, various industrial inks and washes, gold, silver and other metallic powers, quartz crystals and even the carcasses of exotic tropical insects, which she affixed to her canvases with sticky plastics. Her environmentally friendly artworks are the centerpiece of an exhibition at Gomez Gallery that runs through Dec. 21.

Still she feels as if she's just scratched the surface, so to speak.

Last year, for example, the 48-year-old artist organized a major installation exhibit at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago, Chile, where she re-created what she called "living paintings combining architectural forms with plant life, incorporating nature and its processes."

For that exhibit, Salame turned the first floor of the museum into a labyrinth that symbolically represented all the elements of the natural world. Her installation piece was a cry from the heart and a challenge to the world's governments to protect the biosphere from rapid population growth and industrial pollution -- a subject that has preoccupied the artist throughout her career.

In her current show, Salame addresses the problem of painting head on in an era in which the medium's traditional supremacy is being challenged by photography, video, installation art, even holograms.

"I just see that in this moment there is a lot of confusion," she says. "Artists are affected by what's around them; if not, we wouldn't be creating art. For me, art has a purpose. It's not only to do beautiful paintings, it's to have a message, something that's important that you have to extract from it.

"If you don't investigate the technique in painting, there's no progress. This is what I am trying to do; reinvent my own work, my own language, my own way of seeing things."

In her most recent work, Salame has focused on water as a subject and source of inspiration. To convey the unique visual properties of this primal life-sustaining fluid, she has extended her investigation of techniques and materials, even carrying on extended conversations with the chemistry departments at Dupont and other companies to learn how to create plasticized surfaces on canvas that will allow her to use their new industrial inks and washes.

"I wanted to work with the canvases from the very basic drawing to the more worked space," she says. "For years I experimented with these acrylics they use for industrial purposes to create such surfaces, and I think I finally achieved that."

In Waterfall (2002), for example, Salame builds up the painting in multiple layers that begin with a drawing on a canvas that has been sized with rabbit-skin glue. The drawing is sealed with acrylic, then covered with resin mixed with microglass bubbles.

Next, Salame applies layers of washes of various colors, then layers of wax and paint. Finally, the whole image is sealed again under a coating of varnish.

The effect is magical -- an uncanny sense of space, atmosphere and motion that captures the wild fury of the cascading waterfall and the primeval silence of its splendid isolation.

Waterfall and a companion piece, Lake Region, were conceived during the artist's visit last year to Robinson Crusoe Island, a remote fishing community 400 miles off the coast of Chile. Salame had gone there with her husband, photographer Michael Koryta, to rest after her Santiago show and to rethink her approach to painting.

The Gomez exhibit showcases the fruits of that period of introspection, including two impressive installations derived from the show in Santiago and a series of prints and paintings. The gallery has created a masterful setting for these luminous works that lend the entire space a meditative character.

For her part, Salame is already thinking about the direction she wants to take next. "I have several projects I haven't been able get to," she says. "Next, I want to do something with animation, which is very exciting to me and something I haven't done before. I also want to work on a project called 'A Wall For Peace,' which seems right for this difficult time now; I'll be working with the idea of messages on boards, it's all about silence, light, oxygen and water.

"Then I have a project about the millennium forests, which I want to do with Michael, mixing digital imagery and painting together."

Salame says she's still not ready to give up painting for photography, but she is intrigued by the novel possibilities offered by such technologies as video and holograms.

"I am very interested in holograms," she says. "I want to see things three-dimensional, I'd like to see actual movement in my landscapes. With holograms things can move, and because Michael is a photographer, we're going to try to do this together, working with digital projections, video and holograms."

Though she admits she doesn't yet know exactly how to incorporate digital and computer imagery into her paintings, it seems the next logical step in her ongoing investigation of materials and methods.

"I am still thinking how to do it, because to integrate two things is quite hard," she says. "Because you have to go from something very technical and mechanical to something very warm. It's like two very different things that have to go together. And I haven't seen too many people doing it right."