Digital painting and the question of value...

"Wow, this painting is great! ...oh, it's only digital." 

Kelley McMorris

Outer Harbor - South Entrance
http://fineartamerica.com/featured/buffalo-south-entrance-light-lianne-schneider.html

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a wonderful illustration posted on Facebook that had been reposted from artist/illustrator Kelley McMorris' blog. At the top was a sketch of a digital artist thinking and planning his/her next digital art creation - paying attention to light, form, composition, color, message. This kind of thinking goes into the creation of a digital work BEFORE one ever puts pen to tablet just as it goes into creating a traditional artwork before putting brush to canvas. At the bottom of the illustration, however, was another sketch of the same artist sitting back in his/her chair and saying, "Computer draw me a horse." The two sketches demonstrate the difference between what actually happens in the process of creating a digital artwork and what the public perception of such art might be.

Until I took up digital painting, I probably suffered from the same misconceptions. Now, I know better and, like many other digital artists - illustrators, cartoonists, 3D fantasy creators, fractal artists as well as digital painters - I'm anxious for the day that digitally created art is perceived by both the public and gallery owners and art critics as valid and valuable art. That day has not yet arrived. Few critics can even agree on what constitutes "digital art" let alone consider it for the rarefied atmosphere of upscale galleries. Isn't most photography digital now? Photography as art seems to make the cut for what constitutes "fine art" though photo composites and significantly altered and textured works are not viewed the same way. Besides, I don't recall any photograph ever bringing $44 million at auction. (I'm speaking of the recent auction price for the Barnett Newman "Onement VI" painting that looks like a blue ping pong table top).

I hope you'll pardon my outrage about this but just because some ritzy art critic decided to tout Newman's series of paintings in New York art circles doesn't make it art, let alone art worth $44 million. Perhaps it's the "little green monster" at work in me, but I can assure you that a great deal more thought, time, effort, reflection about mood and message went into my digital painting pictured above than went into this work. Give me a roll of blue painters' tape and a gallon of oil based house paint and I could create the match for this in red or yellow or whatever color the critic might like. Then there is the $75 million for a 1950 Rothko, or the $148 million for Jackson Pollack's No. 5...but I'll stop there.

There is debate even within the digital painters' circle though about whether what we do is merely a duplication of traditional painting techniques or an expansion of them, and further whether a work created specifically for reproduction and print, even in limited editions, could ever have the value of a singular "original" traditional painting. So let's dissect the process and the question of reproducibility versus value.

Writer/artist Stephen Danzig contends, "Within the digital creative matrix is a human consciousness that must utilize the traditional processes of understanding line, color theory and subject matter - its linear function is the same by definition as traditional processes and must be judged and valued accordingly." There is some agreement about the similarities in the creative processes. According to the Wikipedia article on digital painting, "As a method of creating an art object, it adapts traditional painting medium such as acrylic paint, oils, ink, etc. and applies the pigment to traditional carriers, such as woven canvas cloth, paper, polyester etc. by means of computer software driving industrial robotic or office machinery (printers)....'Traditional digital painting' creates an image in a stroke-by-stroke, brush-in-hand fashion but the canvas and the painting tools are digital." 

I consider myself a traditional digital painter because even though I work from a sketch or a reference photograph, I apply each stroke and color in my painting individually just as if I were working with acrylics (my previous traditional medium) on wood or canvas. I work doubly hard to create the effect of tooth, texture, brushstrokes - aspects of a finished painting that would be automatic using traditional materials. I am not talking about programs - and there are many excellent ones on the market - like Corel Painter that will "clone" a photograph and convert it into any kind of painting with just a few keystrokes and the push of a few buttons. (Not that that is as easy as it looks either!) I am talking about starting with a blank "canvas" or a simple black and white sketch and actually painting each brushstroke, being responsible for color mixing, type and size of brush, desired output style, proper lighting and so forth. Even using a reference photo - as a painter would use a model or paint in plein air - does not negate the incredibly detailed work the true digital painter has to do.

This is where the disagreement often begins about the merits of digital painting. It is both harder and easier than traditional painting, I think. It is harder because as J. D. Jarvis, the Museum of Computer Art's contributing editor says, "Digital artists work hard to mimic the effects of gravity, absorption or resistance and interaction with grain and texture that happen naturally (or by chance) with physical materials. And, since these "accidents" shape the nature of such material-based work, digital tools force us into devising new virtual techniques." I have to use digitally rendered effects like "noise" or "grunge" or canvas texture to give my work the same kind of dimension and texture a physical painting would have. But it's easier and more freeing too for several reasons. Contrary to Stephen Danzig's assertion that digital art has the same linear function as traditional art, creating a digital painting or illustration is NOT a linear process. It is a layered process. Some of my digital paintings or digital composites have more than 30 layers. One folk art painting I did had 84 separate layers before I was even remotely satisfied with the final project. This is a major difference but one that should bring added value to the finished output. "Digital tools offer production techniques ...such as multiple undos and the ability to save and combine previous renditions of a single project and, thereby, allows us to risk pushing a composition in a direction that while it may have destroyed a physical work on traditional materials, only brings a digital composition greater depth and more polish. If nothing else, we are allowed to know that flash of inspiration wasn't really a good way to go after all and can return to the previous undamaged state. For this reason alone, digital compositions should be the strongest, most polished and thoroughly explored compositions in art and, at the same time, the most spontaneous." 

To be continued in Friday's post....

Moral Outrage...how can that be heroic - or artistic?

“I think people should be angry at things that are worthy of anger. 

Injustice is outrageous and deserves outrage.” 

Chris Hayes

Navajo Triptych

 http://fineartamerica.com/featured/navajo-triptych-lianne-schneider.html

I can see immediately how one might not be able to identify “moral outrage” as a virtue, let alone see how it can possibly relate to art. But I think if we look a little closer, it will become very apparent. Sam Keen, in his book “Fire in the Belly” says that possessing the virtue of moral outrage requires us to plumb the depths of whatever intellectual courage we have “to think clearly about the nature of evil, and the moral courage to confront death (or injustice, I’d add) in a heroic manner.” [parentheses mine] Keen speaks of one of his own heroes – Ernest Becker – and said it was Becker who raised the question of  what constitutes authentic heroism by “identifying the false heroism of political claims of absolute righteousness” where “any crime is justified so long as it is for the fatherland, the motherland, the revolution, democracy, or the people of God.” 

The author goes on to say that the absence of moral outrage is one of the most troubling symptoms of our time. We have bought into the slogans, the excuses, the justifications for inequity and hardship with almost no expression of outrage at all – or with a sense of resignation rather than a determination to action which moral outrage requires. But to be a hero, to complete that heroic journey as a human being and as an artist, Keen says, “A man (or woman) who has not been morally anesthetized cannot have his eyes opened to unnecessary suffering, disease, and injustice without feeling outrage and hearing a call to arms.” We must in some way – through our art – become “warriors in defense of the sacred.”

Though he probably would not identify himself as such a warrior, artist/poet Carl Unruh exemplifies this heroic virtue in my mind although certainly his art and poetry reflect a sensitivity to beauty and joy, too.  Carl is able to express outrage while maintaining an attitude of compassion and respect for the dignity of those against whom injustice may have been focused. But more than that, he can capture in his poetry, in much the same way as Robert Lowell and T.S. Eliot in his “Hollow Men” and “The Wasteland,” his dismay and sadness, but not resignation, in the face of injustice. In “Now I Understand,” Carl expresses exactly that kind of moral outrage Keen is talking about as a virtue. 

Once again, this is a virtue perhaps best expressed in one art form or another – certainly in protest song and poetry, but also in photography and art that depicts the plight of the suffering, the poor, the struggling, the outcast, or the horrors of war, or even the devastation visited upon the earth by man’s arrogance and greed and neglect. Surely we have room in our portfolios – and in our characters – for a little moral outrage to identify ourselves (if only to ourselves) as everyday heroes as we continue our sacred quest. Perhaps that’s the vital quality that will, as Sam Keen says, light the flames in our hearts.

Background texture: Gates of Hell by Valerianstock