Contemplating
When the canvas is a screen and so many pens and crayons and brushes can be collapsed into a single stylus tip, the process of creation changes—not just in in obvious tactile terms, but also those more existential.
*
Making digital art is of course less sensory than the old ways, but also considerably more liberating. No longer bound by the costs and materiality of actual, tangible things (like paint and brushes and canvas), the objects, lines, shapes and colors we desire appear almost instantaneously, perhaps more alive, emerging in a realm neither here nor there. We all of course know that place where our eyes are always looking—where we more and more are asked to (must?) dwell within. Sometimes it seems as if everything we want and need is on or behind THE SCREEN now. As actual experience becomes ever more visually determined, what do we gain and what do we lose?
*
He woke up screaming on the desert floor
The human brain is still adapting to the revolutionary changes of the digital age. Eons ago, our ancestors smeared paint on their hands and marked the walls of caves with magic beings that told us a lot about who they were. Since then, for centuries, painting meant a fully tactile experience—flavors and scents and textures and colors and the scritch-scratch of animal bristles upon a naked surface.
*
Digital art is all about illusion. Anyone working in the medium quickly learns to surrender any claims to tactile, physical realities. In terms of creation, the only thing that we hold in our fingers is the barrel of a stylus—if even that. In terms of reception, sight (once again) becomes the primary sense that viewers use to engage with our work. Nothing actually exists in space—or time, for that matter. The intangible has become the norm and somehow this is what is now familiar. We look but cannot touch.
*
Sims cutting the mohawk on a totem pole…
On the small screen, light creates frames. I breathe and soon get gone inside them. Lines and colors emerge and begin to speak and direct each successive placement of illusory daub and splash and wash. They begin to emerge—odd fellows with big heads and no necks, cowboys and Indians and women and monks and poor children and scenes from some cozmic, ongoing narrative that is all the time happening around us, and our minds knowing that it is all illusion and everything is just separated atoms quivering in space.
For years now, at least one panel a day.
It’s all about the work, right?
*