The Submerget Artist, using Flaming Pear Filter in Photoshop, Rod Mackay
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"The very
god damn thing you think is so important today, you'll be stomping on
all over tomorrow." But that's the way life is!
The boy next door (right)
Digital art is
as new as the first full-colour Macintosh computer system, which
emerged back in the early 1990s. It is the first way of
making an image that ensures that the artist will emerge with clean
hands. It also seems unfairly quick and easy of execution in the eyes
of traditional painters and sculptors. Those of us who are old
school artisanss have a limited shelf-life; we are "submergent,'
soon to become fossilized. After that, our artifacts will be
collected in museums, where curiosities are always appreciated.
Artists on the ground always feel threatened by a new technological
airship. Cave-wall artists must have hated to see the advent of
encaustic, and it is on record that they very much disliked the coming
of oil paints. And then there was photography and watercolours and now
the old question is rephrased as "Is digital art real art?"
Digital artists themselves show the characteristic defensiveness of an
emerging group opposed by academia, and the various recognized
"fine arts" are, for the moment centred there. A few of them
insist that their "prints" are "originals" and others would like
to be called "post modern artists" thus switching attention away from
their preferred medium. |
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Nathan Oliveira, self-portrait
Oliveira's paint surface bears the scars of his fury...
Kim Levin
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