Digital Paintings

Sylvia don't let personal animosity colour your comments it has made them too extreme. I'm well aware that the Mona Lisa has been caricatured in many ways including drawings by professional cartunists. On this occasion it was the use of a digitally defaced photographic image of the Leonado painting that I objected to. If you don't give a damn about that well I do. I wish the Specsavers advertisement had not been placed on the Forum. My objection to making similar changes extends to other great European paintings by Leonado, Carravagio, Velasquez, Rembrandt, Goya to name just a sample. I think great paintings should be treated with respect and not defaced for amusement. That's big of you Syd to offer your forgiveness for my ungentlemanly insults - I wasn't aware of any insults in this thread. You may regard the thread as closed but some of us have more to say. I can sympathise with any members still following all this - it has gone on far too long. But I would like to thank Alan and John for their comments. Alan. if you are skilled in using Graphics Software your input would be invaluable whenever you want to post any comments on digital imaging. John. You will be an asset to the Forum. Kevin Hulsey's work is stunning and a fine example of what can be achieved by digital methods. The only artistic element it lacks, in my opinion is texture. Everything is bright and shiny there are few textured surfaces though the pattterned surface of the carpeted areas in the dining room are painstakingly drawn. According to reviews the same shortcoming appears in Hockney's iPad paintings. Thanks also for the link to Hockney's Joiners they are hard constructions to understand and most of us would need helpful commentary to get to grips with them. His researches described in 'A History of Pictures' about the frequent use of lenses and mirrors to make wall projections to capture detail - Vermeer is the most well-known. These were widely used by artists to record detail and to record bright colours. Hockneys inquisitive delving into how painters have interpreted what they see is fascinating.

For myself I don’t care how long this goes on for; my only criterion would be that it’s interesting and stimulates further thought/discussion. I acknowledge that it is getting difficult now when there is a reference to a previous post—I can’t remember them all and scrolling back to find the relevant post takes a while with five pages to go through. Which brings me to— Alan—I’m slightly puzzled by your remark. Who is telling you you have no right to voice your opinion on digital art? The thing I always find most difficult with these on-line forum discussions is that without the tone-of-voice etc. it is oh so easy to miscommunicate both as a reader and a writer. So maybe you were just expressing an opinion and not challenging a previous post(?) I too come from a graphics background and when I first ‘went digital’ I was astonished at what the software could do, and all from a thing little bigger than a pizza box. Also like you, I now prefer to devote my efforts to drawing and painting the traditional way, although I do occasionally get what I call withdrawal symptoms and feel the need to play around with the software a little; just for old-time’s sake. RobK2—the thing about the Hulsey work, as I’m sure you recognise, is that it’s a case of the function determining the form. By which I mean that the artwork is a commercial work and is produced by a method that allows it—in whole or in part—to be reproduced in many forms and on many surfaces. I don’t mean to offend anyone’s intelligence but I know nothing of your own experience of digital artworking techniques but that type of work is produced by software and in a manner that is termed resolution independent, meaning that it can be scaled up or down without loss of quality. Also sections of it—to show this aspect or that—can quite easily be lifted out of the work. With conventional, olden-days techniques this would require separate illustrations. And so the purpose and usage determines the outcome. But yes, what it loses is that it’s not wet enough, there are no brush marks and it masks the human hand with it's gloss. Re the joiners, I used to be more interested in and involved with photography than I am now and I made a number of attempts at joiners. After the first two or three failures, I realised that I had completely misunderstood the basic concepts. It’s not as easy as some might think. And I recognise that talking of the joiners is off-topic but another thing that has fascinated me about them since I first saw them, is that they have a computer/digital feel about them but (I think all of them but I might be wrong) they were produced by very basic conventional means—machine-produced enprints and glue. As I said earlier, I used to live in the Leeds/Bradford area and once attended a lecture by Hockney when he was visiting Bradford to see his old Mum. He talked of his interest in European v. Chinese perspective in art and how the joiners were an attempt to explore ways of using photography to present multiple viewpoints. I’d be interested to know how others experience the joiners as they have always fascinated me. I’d be happy to be the originator of another thread on that if anyone else is interested.

I strongly resent the last post because it is biased and is an exageration. Members who were clearly not interested in Digital painting - and that probably includes Syd - were making ill informed comments which were wrong. In fact I would welcome useful comment from members have some experience of digital software and who could make a constructive input to the discussion. While I think I have something useful to contribute to digital painting or anything else. I will keep my membership.

I was away painting with my friends yesterday but if it makes you feel better I'll apologise to you now. So forget it.

I do occasionally buy The Artist, but not often. A friend loaned me a copy once and they were advertising some sort of a competition which I decided to enter just for the hell of it. It was online submissions and that required registering with PoL. I remember being disappointed that the vast majority of the judges selections in the competition were works of a highly realistic nature, and many of them direct copies of photographs. Except for the competition registration I didn’t use the website at all until I came across it again a couple of years ago through a search for something or other. Although the magazine is a useful source of information about exhibitions and the like and it can be interesting and informative to see how other peoples’ work develops, I think the why is usually more interesting than the how and the why for the artists they use in the features tends to be determined by sales. I don’t mean that to sound as scathing as it probably does; they have to make a living, but for me it doesn’t make for very interesting reading. My introduction to digital graphics was before the interweb, when the print industry started to go digital. At that time digital meant Apple-Mac and I’ve seen no reason to change since then so I have no direct experience of Corel Draw and Painter because the Adobe software was the industry standard but I’m aware that they were the alternatives to Illustrator and Photoshop and all vector imaging works in similar ways, likewise the bitmapped software. My ‘specialism’ was Illustrator and almost everyone—and I include myself—gets immensely frustrated with the Pen Tool and wants to avoid tangling with it. But it’s essential to doing anything more involved in vector imaging and you just have to keep going until you get the AHAA experience. I did try a Wacom graphics tablet for a while but I found it awkward, I think just because I was by then so adapted to the mouse (I found the mouse awkward at first and used to shout “I can’t draw with this **?!!!** thing”). Apart from my occasional withdrawal symptoms relapses mentioned earlier, I use Photoshop for photo-editing and this is almost entirely correcting/prepping my pictures of my own artwork (I like to make a progressive record as a painting/drawing develops and changes). I have an iPad but I’ve not yet used it for any form of painting, not because of any ‘objection’ but just because it hasn’t grabbed me yet and I have other things that keep me interested. I did consider using it as a sketch pad but the screen is almost invisible in bright sunlight so it isn’t practical. Re the joiners again, there is a very large—it must be almost life-size—joiner of a nude which is quite impressive but it’s not included on that site. What is there are the earlier experiments in which he used the regular chess-board type grid; not so effective I feel. But yes, the ‘portraits’ especially the close-ups can be a little disturbing. As a viewer the trick is probably not to look at them with real-world expectations. I did try making a joiner-type image on-screen, but the software gets in the way; it demands that you work in a particular way that tends to crush any spontaneity; it’s much, much easier to shuffle bits of paper around. Re your Cezanne comment, pretty much all of what I do now is landscape work and I’ve said it before, to the point of tedium probably, but for me it’s all about being in the landscape. Also my best work is of the locations I have visited on many, many occasions, and therefore know well. I’d dare to bet that it was the same for Cezanne and Mt San Victoire.