Following up on last week's discussion of artists who are challenged to make the best use of our era in illustration:
Horrible New Yorker cover drawn on an iPad by famous artist David Hockney
In the following years, technology continued its inexorable incursions into art. Photography improved and became more accessible, then morphed into moving images, then moving images with sound. When photography went digital, it became possible for even the most untalented to manipulate images, simulate the act of drawing, and cut and paste moving images to create visual collages. In recent years generative AI has made that process interactive.
These technological changes put new creative freedom in the hands of the lumpenproletariat and introduced undeniable economy and efficiency into the production of images. What are we to make of all this? It does no good to avert our eyes. These are the forces that pushed illustration out of most magazines and then pushed most magazines out of business. Today they have breached the barricades of the most distinguished art museums.
For a while, we could take comfort from the fact that most digital art, even digital art by accomplished artists such as David Hockney (above) was so laughable that it didn't warrant serious consideration. But today talented artists are creating first class images digitally, and first class images are always self-legitimizing. If the image is excellent, I reject objections to its pedigree.
Exhibit A for discussion is the work of the brilliant Nathan Fowkes. Born and bred on traditional art media, he nurtured his talents honestly, spending years doing lovely, honest plein air paintings. In recent years he has also become a virtuoso with digital media:
I think these paintings are admirable. When I first saw them I couldn't distinguish them from traditional media, so it would be dishonest to think less of them just because they were produced digitally.
Instead, I salute the open mind with which Fowkes embraced the new tools and the honesty with which he explores their potential. I'm happy to say that both are hallmarks of Fowkes' work.
Fowkes is awesome. I learned about him here.
ReplyDeleteYes, IMO he does truly excellent work.
DeleteSin duda son muy buenas y se aprecia que tiene una gran formación y experiencia con el arte tradicional ( o medios tradicionales )
ReplyDeletePor lo que opino que esa experiencia le dió una base muy importante para crear con medios digitales...lo que hizo fue cambiar de herramientas, creo yo.
Estoy de acuerdo en que su experiencia con herramientas tradicionales marcó una gran diferencia. He escuchado lo mismo de otros pintores digitales destacados como Craig Mullins. Hasta que no dominaran las herramientas tradicionales, no les iría bien con las herramientas digitales.
DeleteFowkes is high on every artist's list of living artists.
ReplyDeleteBut still, fundamentally, essentially, inescapably.... these digital tools were developed by autistic non-artist nerds to replicate photo retouching and manipulation techniques... with a high resolution Lite-Brite as the ersatz photo-paper.
These tools in use carry within them, with every mark, the philosophy of those founding fathers' founding precepts, predicates and of their eye-destroying radiating screens. The affordances and limitations alike are invariant. The base ideas are ever felt in the productions; a constant vacuity or insipidity at the ineffable core; the lubricity is the stupidity. A minute blur where the subtlest feel of a hand dragging against paper or canvas should be.
Which is to say, the digital realm will always be mired in Anaesthetics™.
There are all kinds of reasons to have qualms about digital tools, but I propose in this series of posts to put aside all concerns except one: the aesthetic quality of the images we're seeing.
DeleteFor now, I don't want to talk about John Henry's race with the steam drill. I don't want to talk about the lack of justice in digital art or whether these tools were invented by "autistic non-artist nerds to replicate photo retouching and manipulation techniques," or whether their screens are indeed "eye-destroying." To purify the question, I want to put aside, for now, what we may sacrifice in exchange for their economy and efficiency, or how much we love the people and traditions they might replace, or how much we loathe the office workers and art editors they empower. We can discuss the teleology or epistemology or ontology or eschatology of digital art some other day.
For me the only question of the day is: when you look at these digital paintings by Nathan Fowkes, what do you think of their artistic value? Personally I think they are quite beautiful. I think they are strong, observant, well composed, sensitively done and (as with all of Fowkes' work) beautifully colored. If you think that viewing them on "a radiating screen" is any different from viewing a Leyendecker or a Maxfield Parrish or a Frazetta on a radiating screen, please explain why.
"is any different from viewing a Leyendecker or a Maxfield Parrish or a Frazetta on a radiating screen,..."
ReplyDeleteThat's a good point. We all use them (and are looking at them here) for looking at the work of great artists, but it's a really crummy medium (there is absolutely no doubt that they're damaging eye-sight en masse, it's been noted among kids with phones; and impairing mental sensibility to subtleties in the natural world).
I do wonder why this artist has chosen to use this medium. Might make sense if the end goal (a distributed product) is the determining factor, whether screens or prints on paper. In which case it's just an adaptation from the transformation of work into a mass-product in earlier illustration to fit the hellscape technology of today (which he somewhat brightens). But paper is a medium meet to the hand, the mind-eye, and a setting within the world. Screens are not.
Not sure it's really possible to entirely talk about the aesthetic quality of the images and ignore these contexts and those referred to by others. Especially as the work will either go down the route of mimicing pigment on paper like these (which are pretty successful), photography, or speak through the disordered and ugly manner of production, the anti-qualities, inherent to the digital medium and how it works.
Bill
As has been noted by me and others, reproduction and distribution have always been the life's blood of illustration. Modern illustration began when technology first enabled accurate reproduction and mass distribution of images. Before that, illustrators had to rely on primitive woodcuts and limited etchings. But the new technology meant you could hire the best talent, such as Leyendecker, by charging 6 million subscribers of the Saturday Evening Post 5 cents apiece, and selling advertising for the rest. That was the economic engine which drove the entire enterprise.
DeleteIf you look at The Post from 1910 or 1920 or 1930, the reproduction was poor. It may have seemed like a miracle to subscribers at the time, but to our eyes today it looks chalky and fuzzy. It wasn't until the late 1950s that the quality of mass reproduction could capture the sensitivity of the delicate pencil lines of Bernie Fuchs and Austin Briggs, or the intensity of the color of Bob Peak.
The moving finger writes, and today digital reproduction and distribution are the state of the art. Circulation is global, far less expensive, and much faster, so at least the economics are irrefutable. In high rez, properly calibrated, the reproductions are far more accurate than the Saturday Evening Post covers of Leyendecker and Rockwell. Whether the radiating glow is an asset or a liability is a subject for debate.
Are you sure the concerns you're expressing aren't due more to nostalgia rather than the inherent qualities of the image? I love the smell and feel of printed paper from the 1930s. I love the yellowed, crumbling newsprint hosting comic books and comic prints. The liquid crystal display on my monitor has none of those magical qualities, but isn't that distinct from the image?
When the first steam engine trains were invented, they were an ugly assault on the senses-- noisy, smelly, polluting beasts. But after a century they became humanized as a result of their interactions with our lives and today people are very nostalgic about them. People write songs and poems and books about them. Their train whistle has taken on human qualities and haunts us. Their folklore is romantic. Perhaps with time, your "radiating screens" will become humanized too.
"Are you sure the concerns you're expressing [...]
ReplyDeleteI don't think so, because, as you say, the display on the monitor "has none of those magical qualities"; and, yes, while it's "distinct from the image" I think the image needs ultimately to return to a 'hard copy' form (screens are... crap), and when it does so has to justifty itself in that form.
So, it's success or otherwise will be in its either successfully replicating a painted/drawn medium, or (while not to my liking) feigned photorealism.
The things that are unique to digital processes are, I think, ugly and not conducive to figurative representation of either imagined or seen things.
But you're right about the technology for colour reproduction being superior today compared to what was had in the past - except for the cases of 'block' colours through various lithographic processes.
These are far superior to digital reproduction of the same kind of images, beacuse the technology works in a way that is analogous to the placing of paint on a surface by hand. Even a kind of art in themselves, an automated version of japanese woodblock printing in some ways.
I think we can say that digital work has advantages over these when (i) it is dealing with fully chromatic and modelled forms (ii) and we're looking at a printed (eg, giclee) artefact at the end of the process. But then, why digital rather than a reproduction of, say, a coloured pastel or oil of one of the subjects Mr. Fowkes has turned to here using the scanning technology at disposal ? (He of course must have particular reasons for prefering the medium he uses, but that's probably involving considerations seperate to the question)
Trains were ugly measured against the beauty they erupted onto - the natural worldand the heights of crafted things that preceded them. They were mitigated by the beauty that was added to them in their crafting, and which today elevates them above the ugliness of the subsequent mechanised expediency of manufacture, and the loss of soul in much human endeavour, which followed.
Bill
Fix: 'I think we can say that digital [work]< reproduction has advantages over these...' /Bill
DeleteThe new art technologies are changing so fast, I doubt we'll have time to become nostalgic about any computer program before it is replaced by the next.
ReplyDelete'Perhaps with time, your "radiating screens" will become humanized too' - only by lowering the bar even further.
ReplyDeleteBill
(The 'anon' of 'radiating screens' you were first responding to, David, was someone else, btw)
DeleteNo deep analysis on my part but as I see it, if the image speaks to me I really don’t care how it was created as long as it is not AI.
ReplyDeleteThe point of the (my) lubricity remark is that there is an inherent slickness to digital work that is profoundly vacuous and can’t be dismissed. A deeper problem than even the smooth gradation of the virtual airbrush or bland-perfect vector edge or the utterly dead flat colorvalues, or the stamped-out sameness of photoshop brush use. Their wellspring actually; the deep aesthetic problem is there is no authentic artistic resistance to use of the medium.
ReplyDeleteThere’s no pushback from reality that creates any friction; there’s no beautiful dance of effort and achievement. No evidence of derring-do and deeds done, no virtuosity in the virtual. These are art pieces without performances. They might as well be transmitted from one mind to another without any intervening medium at all. That is the problem of their perfect lubricity in a nutshell.
It is in that sympathetically felt feedback friction – in looking at original man-made artwork – that gives even the atoms of real art a centering aesthetic gravity that connects it to the world. Or better to say, such evidence grounds the work in reality, personality, and physicality. Thus humanity.
Here we are unmoored. Not from Fowkes’ greatness. We have a great artist’s mind at work, but we don’t have his body. His hand is gone. There’s no paper or canvas. No board underneath. No floor and no feet. It is solipsistic at baseline, solipsism as method and aesthetic. Because he is working with the disembodied tools of non-artists, built by coders and technologists and circumscribed ultimately by their blinkered dreams and limited sensibilities.
A good photo of a real work of art interpolates the real physicality evidence via lens or photopaper grain and pixels. Discrete pixels, as bad as they are, can still – when coalesced in the eyes - suggest whatever physicality was captured photographically. They can’t however suggest what physicality was never there in the first place.
To Kev Ferrara-- Isn't the "performance" that led to the art the same thing as the "back story" behind the art? We have often discussed the view here that a work of art must stand on its own, without being propped up by an accompanying manifesto, or an explanation from the artist, or a knowledge of the artist's family life.
ReplyDeleteBy the same token, why should our assumptions about the historical tactile sensation of a brush dragged across canvas or the spatter of ink on paper be relevant if the digital result is indistinguishable?
If you are suggesting that these pictures visibly suffer from a lack of physicality in their creation, I'd urge you to point out specifically where. When I first saw these pictures online, I couldn't tell whether they were done digitally or by hand. My guess was "by hand," in part because of the traces of what looked like light red pencil line sketching out the basic shapes in pictures 3 and 5. Fowkes told me that they were all digital, painted in part with digital brushes that he had designed.
I think your point is exactly right when applied to that Hockney picture which is (kindly speaking) a piece of crap-- a miasmic combination of the novelty of the iPad medium, the celebrity of the artist and the hubris of the publication. It has no heft, and is guilty of all the sins you describe. But I feel the opposite way about the pictures by Fowkes.
When oil paint was invented, it added an "inherit slickness" as artists stopped chipping away with gouache or tempera and began slipping and sliding around with the newly oleaginous medium. The "resistance" of the paint was like spreading soft butter on warm bread, and called for a different wrist motion. It's difficult to think we should fault digital painting on that basis.
Great comment Kev.
ReplyDeleteThe ancient Egyptians, without hardened metals, had to shape their granite sculptures by abrasion, and this, by way of effortful physical participation with the stone contributed deeply to the aesthetic of their statue's massive, slow forms. The discovery of case hardening steel gave rise to the lithe articulation of limestone exemplified by Renaissance sculpture. Then the invention of the pneumatic hammer. And so with each technological step comes an extension of our bodily capacity at the expense of widening the gap between participatory relation to its means of expression.
With the advent of the resistance-less, fluid, infinitely scalable mailability of digital computation we are now at the stage where our body is irrelevant to the shaping of what this technology affords: the digital simulacra of physicality at the behest of the unembodied intellect.
One could say that meaning is to be found in the resistance to our imagining.
The "resistance" of the paint was like spreading soft butter on warm bread, and called for a different wrist motion. It's difficult to think we should fault digital painting on that basis.
ReplyDeleteYou are missing the point David. The embodied mind engaged with the behaviour of oil paint, or any other physical medium, is a sensory feedback loop out of which participatorily meaning finds its root. It is not a question of slippery or stogy, smooth or rough, slow or quick, but of how these qualities feel under the hand while it is making manifest the dream which guides it and yet reciprocally informed by it. The intention and the means are mutually dependent.
And if 'the means' is an electronic machine whose output is pixels on a screen, what does that say about the intention?
ReplyDeletechris bennett-- That's a pretty romantic notion of the role of the artist, chris. It reminds me of Antoine de Saint Exupéry's Little Prince, who said, "it's the time you give to something that makes it precious." Your theory appeals to me because I'm a romantic kind of guy, but around here we also take pride in being tough minded. The true test is always in the pictures themselves, not in the rhetoric surrounding them.
ReplyDeleteSo I urge you and Kev: show me. Let's focus on that first painting by Fowkes. How would it be improved if Fowkes chiseled it out of stone like the ancient Egyptians, or painted it with a traditional medium? Point me to where it is lacking because it is only "digital simulacra of physicality at the behest of the unembodied intellect."
For me, the painting is a fast, confident sketch in a medium that can keep up with the artist's quicksilver hand. I think the high contrast / high risk palette, which is shored up by nuances in the colors of the trees in order to convey the tangled, interlocking vines and trunks, was handled beautifully. That's a very difficult task for any artist at any speed in any medium. I think the strategic highlights were expertly placed, and I don't see how they could've been improved if they were painted in a traditional medium. I like how it was staged, with the dark, interesting shape in the foreground to give it depth and the deft handling of that light source at the top. If you asked me to identify 1,000 worse paintings of forests using conventional media, I could easily do it before lunch. So please: point out to me how the "resistance-less, fluid, infinitely scalable" digital tools made specific aspects of this painting inferior.
Eh, they’re alright. I find them a little too "shapey."
ReplyDeleteLots of artists these days are absorbing the stylized iconic qualities of Hollywood concept artists, children’s book illustrations, 70s sci-fi art, etc., and it has made everything feel over-designed.
At first, I really liked this style of painting. It jumps out at you, and I appreciated the strong cartooning skills it requires, but lately, it all feels a bit one-note to me. A bit gimmicky.
Not every tree branch has to look like a swamp vine from a Frazetta painting. Not every rock needs to be covered in blue and gold crags like a mountain face in an Edgar Payne landscape. Not every wave sliding onto the beach has to be covered in little white circles of surf like a Calvin and Hobbs cartoon.
In the final picture from the post (the best, I’d say), he loosens up a bit and tries to really paint instead of cartooning with noisy digital brushes, but here is where the limitations and inherent laziness of the digital medium become most apparent. I spent the last few hours before coming here looking at 19th-century German impressionist landscapes, and the difference is jarring. The digital Fowkes just looks so sickly by comparison. It feels like biting into a rubber steak after sitting down at a fancy restaurant.
I also have issues with some of the color effects he uses. The "chroma slider" effect he uses, for example. That's what I'm calling this technique (popular in digital painting because it's easy to do and has a loud effect I think) where you paint a gradient from one high-saturation hue to another without changing the value at all, creating a vibrating but flat gradient effect. That feels gimmicky to me as well. It’s fun to do—I was really into it for a while with digital painting because it makes it SO much easier to create the illusion of detail without putting in the time—but once you've seen it, you’ve seen it a hundred times. A related, overused effect Fowkes loves is the "chroma jitter," where you add chroma noise to an area without changing value, wildly shifting hues in an area without modulating value. This lets you create very clean shapes without the picture looking cartoonish, by simply jumping around hues in an area. For an artist with a deadline, it's great because it's never "wrong", you can paint with whatever hues you want and the eye will accept it, whereas with value you actually have to get it right or it will destroy the illusion. These techniques are straight out of the Disney/Pixar school of painting; all the cool kids in San Diego are doing it, and Fowkes is really into it. I'm tired of it, and I think it's used to hide limitations of the painter.
why should our assumptions about the historical tactile sensation of a brush dragged across canvas or the spatter of ink on paper be relevant if the digital result is indistinguishable?
ReplyDeleteCorrect, *if* it were indistinguishable, it wouldn't matter.