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

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

Brian Grimwood – illustrations – book & chat

I am back from the workshop and had a bit of a browse of the bookstore. The little “Coffee With… series caught my eye… because of the illustrations on the front. (Coffee with Michael Angelo, by James Hall, fun!)

book

On Amazon (click the image) you can see links to the others in the series, I particularly like the Mozart one, interesting use of colour. The artist is Brian Grimwood, I have just been exploring his website with delight. Ok, it is commercial art, but it is art. The image that follows is a good example of artistic exploration. I am in tune with that right now having been doing it solidly for three days. My hunch is that these illustrations are all digital, and he is a lovely digital sketcher!
Continue reading “Brian Grimwood – illustrations – book & chat”

In the thick of it

Photo of the view, first night on the workshop:

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The next day I learned a lot about paint. My first real go at real-media in a long time, decades!

The focus and the exercises were great.

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One small bit of real paint from my exercise sheet.

~

I finished up doing some acrylic seed heads, but they are gone, apart from a digital sketch I made on the Tablet at the end of the day: the usual digital follows.

Poppy Seed
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Paint, board and stuff…

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Acrylic paint, Gesso, and lots of MDB (Medium Density Board). I looked at a lot more than I bought, it is such a lolly shop out there. I hope this will enable me to mix all I need, at least for the weekend retreat. I then spent the rest of the day priming the boards, more to do tomorrow. The 500 ml of Gesso is almost gone, I’ll need more.

And, yes, that is my coffee.

Workshop Retreat on my mind…

I am getting ready for a painting retreat led by New Zealand artist Jane Zusters. Just as I am thinking of doing oils I think I will be doing acrylics at the retreat. Real media looming after all these digital images and work with the printer.

I am so “self taught” it is weird to go into a space where I will have a teacher. I am enjoying it so far, even though it is still four days away. What is useful is to get advice on materials, options, possibilities. I am going on another shopping spree tomorrow for media! What a blast.

Transition

I popped in a few casual doodles a few days ago. They appeal more now when I look at them after having had six days tramping. It is the time in the hills that confirmed the landscape project. Now I can see those few doodles as real transition pieces from one project to the next. Look at this one, I don’t think I posted it yet. Looks like a nice sort of bookend to me.

(Later: I had posted it but it did not show??)

 

 

Transition
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This reminds me of a story I heard that John Badcock, between series or projects does a self portrait as Christ, makes sense to me.

PS: John Badcock mentioned in Thousand Sketches here and here and here.