When the artist Anthony Cudahy, 34, was growing up in Fort Myers, Fla., he received plenty of encouragement from his mother, a painter herself.
But he still yearned for creative peers, whom he found on the blogging site LiveJournal, on which he’d spend hours messaging with other artists.
Even as his world expanded offline — he moved to Brooklyn in 2007 to study graphic design and illustration at Pratt Institute and later earned an M.F.A.
in painting from Hunter College — the internet continued to inform his practice. “When I first started painting, I was thinking about the role of a painter as this collector of images, almost like you’re a Tumblr,” he says.