Another Pear - A Test for my SquareMess custom brushes

[DarkOwnt]

D Akey

Recently, I've been thinking a lot about digital art, and what makes art, and what is not art.

Strangely enough, having ultimate control of a layer or an undo button, or the ability to sample colors is not what makes something art or not. Neither is the level of difficulty... painting a masterpiece with a blade of grass or only three colors or in a rainstorm does not make the painting more legit.

First, I think photography, mixed media, or 3d art is one thing, any time you are the author of every stroke though... then I think you can refer to it as a painting.

Now what does one strive for in a painting? I think it must be something more than mere exact copying... that is what photography is for. The aim of the artist is not to turn herself into the equivalent of a perfect set of lenses and CCDs, nor a perfect robot who can reproduce things photographically. An Artist brings something of herself to the work. Perhaps a slight variation in the composition of reality: moving a tree here, or shifting a house there. Perhaps varying the color, or textures of certain things to elicit a feeling of what the artist feels about the things, blurring certain edges, emphasizing others, making other areas blurry or unsaturated... there is something in the way of the unreality in the work's actual shapes, colors and values (in comparison to the subject as it really looks) which makes it more true to the artist and more real to her vision of the subject.

So what IS wrong then with color sampling or tracing or using digital tools is not that it is easy, but that it can encourage a person to create (in a very inefficient way) nothing more than photography... placing the exact same color at point x,y in the reference on the same relative place X,Y in the painting would be a pointless exercise. The tragedy is the absence of the artist's view, the subjective element in the act of seeing, of perceiving, of valuing, or of contemplating the subject. To the extent a digital tool can be used in a way that encourages creativity, exploration of possibility, quite frankly to the creation of happy mistakes, I think the artist is served better. Those happy mistakes although not in line with reality might be closer to the artist's vision, and happily can be kept after the fact.

In the end the digital tools are not the problem and they never have been, it's been the temptation to use them simply to copy something, which replaces the artist's eye with the perfection, inhumanity, and pointlessness of a Xerox machine.

Using layers then is no problem if you use it for your vision of the subject, since THAT creation, whether through happy mistakes, or messy strokes, or careful attention, is all that matters.