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Digital Art

Art.Net: Digital Artists

A long list of images & links of digital artists. I am on the hunt for digital artists who I feel aesthetic affinity with. There is so much beautifully executed stuff that looks like it is from fantasy games, si-fi book covers or glamour magazines. What prompted this search is finding Brian Grimwood who is on my list. My recent post.

I think that finding the simple hand made work I like is hard because there are not a lot of Tablet PCs out there. Using the Wacom tablet separate from the screen perhaps does not foster the the presence of the hand. Also there are so many features & filters that simplicity is hard to find.

Digital Art Wikipedia:

Some say we are now in a postdigital era, where digital technologies are no longer a novelty in the art world, and “the medium is the message”(Marshall McLuhan). Digital tools have now become an integral part of the process of making art. As silicon-dry digital media converges with wet biological systems, Roy Ascott has pointed to the emergence of a “moistmedia” substrate for 21st century art.[1]

What is a “moistmedia” substrate? That sounds interesting. But where is this stuff?

Found this:

Ascott, Roy
Technoetic Pathways toward the Spiritual in Art: A Transdisciplinary Perspective on Connectedness, Coherence and Consciousness
Leonardo – Volume 39, Number 1, February 2006, pp. 65-69

The MIT Press

Intechnology we are witnessing the convergence of dry computational systems and wet biological processes, involving the assembly of bits, atoms, neurons and genes in conjunctions that will provide the artist with a new kind of material substrate, for which I have coined the term moistmedia [1]. Of these components, it is the bit that is the most familiar to artists: computational systems and digital media have dominated the techno-art scene for at least 30 years. Attention in this paper, however, is directed to the atom, to the nano level of interaction, and to the molecular domain—more particularly, to an organism’s information network of photons emitted by DNA molecules, paralleled technologically by the constant flows of electrons and photons across the body of the planet through telematic networks.

Hmmmm

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Paint? More from the workshop…

Close
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Here is another cross. This one is a hybrid. The back-ground is paint and the verticals are digital. There is no original either, the base image was from a shot I took of part of the canvas, resized from landscape to square, beefed up the image in post-production. I think it will make a good print.

I still have the 600×600 mm original acrylic but it got tortured out of recognition! A lot of agony & ecstasy.
This one shows a some of what I learned over the three days. Layers. Removing paint in a variety of ways. I will keep going with this. More hybrids, and perhaps the other way around too! I could print the vertical on the texture.

My goal is to make a set of physical ones.

~

Some more from the workshop soon, I still have the photos to take.

Later: Saturday, 5 July, 2008

This image is now featured in the Gallery

full size

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Landscapes

North Canterbury
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A new project. Landscapes. Unsure as ever but need to follow this. As in the Earth Crosses the starting point is Thousand Sketches. One or two are coming straight over as part of the new series, but mostly I am redoing old ones and making new ones. I want to find about a dozen I like.

Some new aspects I am noticing. The calligraphic lines, all of them in this series. while digital, will have this, I am pursuing this. The other new thing is that I will use these sketches to make oils. I will post them as I do them but on the whole I’d like to present a selected set of them, digital images and corresponding oils.

What I like is that via the blog the unity of the work is maintained. These images can “phone home”.

I wrote this to a friend who commented on my work:

“The whole cyberspace side of it is important to me, I think it will impact art more and more. The objects, even when one off and in paint etc, can have a ‘virtual life’ as well, they can forever be linked to the artists words and to other items in the project or series… books & letters did it occasionally, but it was complex, hit and miss. I think it is a significant step in this era. So I am glad you noticed that aspect of the work.”

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Pentimento, nice word

Pentimento – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A pentimento (plural pentimenti) is an alteration in a painting, evidenced by traces of previous work, showing that the artist has changed his mind as to the composition during the process of painting. The word derives from the Italian pentirsi, meaning to repent.

Mine don’t show the traces but I repent, repent, repent.

Here is one I like and just tweaked:

Metal
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What follows is the previous saved version.

Continue reading “Pentimento, nice word”

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Hand Made

I listen occasionally to Brooks Jensen’s short podcasts on photography, they often apply to all art and creativity, he is a thoughtful man. The Lenswork publication is beautiful. The website is beautiful. He has a great piece about printing images, all of which I fully concur with.

Here is the full archive: LensWork Recent Podcasts

I just listened to this one: LW0405: Considering Content, Considering Medium

It talks about the presence of the hand of the artist. So that is right on topic with the stuff I was looking at re Walter Benjamin recently. The useful point he makes is that some art is more hand-dependent than others, I am not sure if that is his word or not. Painting is at one extreme, and photography on the other.

Which makes images that are made by hand, but digital an interesting case in point. The hand is more there in the file, but when it comes to reproduction it is much like a photo.

My sketches work quite well if they are just printed on some machine in a store, but they loose a lot. The prints I make are another whole story, it has taken me a long time to perfect my technique, and there are rejects as I learn. I have found better paper, and I now have better mastery over the software, ie the colour.

So when I sign a print it means I am satisfied it is as good as I can do it.

The great masters of the darkroom probably have a strong hand in the work as well. Look at this by Sally Mann for instance.

There are a few twists to this reflection…

One is that my printing of the images influences what I make when I make digital images. In some deep way where medium is the muse, but I will tweak an image to make it work well as a print, and then the final version is posted on the net. This means it works well on my combination of screen, software, hardware paper & ink. That will be hard to replicate ever again! (I can’t always do it!)

When I do sign something that is 100% hand-dependent.

The other thought I had is that somewhere, sometime, someone and they may have already done it for all I know one of my images is presented in a way that is just wonderful. My hand, their craft.

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Earth Crosses Series Complete

I am really satisfied with my Earth Crosses series. It includes some from the Thousand Sketches and some I did since. If you have been reading my blog you will have seen most of them, but they look best together. It is this series I am working on exhibiting.

 

Here is the last one in the series.

Golden Cross

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In this moment – perverted

In this moment… Perverted
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Long Views » Blog Archive » Jon Ippolito and Joline Blais, “At the Edge of Art”

Art, like the antibodies in our immune system, creates alien forces in service of the whole. It anticipates threats and models them. It is a diversity agent.

Two forms of that process were explained and shown by Ippolito and Blais: perversion, and execution.

Here is an image of this blog, In this moment… perverted by shredder… It really is of the moment, I’ll do another some time later.

They are saying some interesting things here, diversity agent is a nice phrase, they point to what art can do, but there is more to it, of course. I want to point to the way art reveals the invisible. Their examples show that but they use a biological analogy. I prefer a psychological one, say “royal road” … which takes us beyond the social, functions of art more quickly.

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Mona Lisa

Mona Lisa . [dead] . Now http://web.archive.org/web/20010222162001/http://studiolo.org:80/Mona/MONASV12.htm

“Most probably it was Sigmund Freud’s influential essay on Leonardo’s homosexuality and Freud’s consequential analysis of the Mona Lisa which was the direct or proximate impetus for Duchamp’s image. But, whereas Duchamp seems to imply that the picture fuses artist and sitter, male and female, Freud suggests that the Mona Lisa (specifically her smile) is a manifestation of Leonardo’s submerged memory of the birth mother from whom he was estranged at age four and who Freud theorizes expressed an unnatural affection toward her young son. In fact, Freud refutes the notion that there is a physiognomic similarity between the artist and the sitter, but goes on to suggest that the device of the smile was obviously so meaningful to the artist, using it frequently in his works of the time, it must have repressed significance. The person behind the Mona Lisa, Freud suggests, may have had such a smile, a smile that evoked long ago suppressed memories of his mother. Indeed, as Freud is quick to point out, this seems to have been a persistent theme: Vasari even noted that at the earliest age Leonardo was known for having created images of smiling women:

Let us leave the physiognomic riddle of Mona Lisa unsolved, and let us note the unequivocal fact that her smile fascinated the artist no less than all spectators for these 400 years. This captivating smile had thereafter returned in all of his pictures and in those of his pupils. As Leonardo’s Mona Lisa was a portrait, we cannot assume that he has added to her face a trait of his own, so difficult to express, which she herself did not possess. It seems, we cannot help but believe, that he found this smile in his model and became so charmed by it that from now on he endowed it on all the free creations of his phantasy.

“(Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci: A study in psychosexuality. tr. A.A. Brill. New York, Vintage Books, [1955] Originally published by Freud in 1910, p. 79.)”