Artwork - digital vs traditional

Welcome to 2008!

In reviewing my 2007 blogs I noticed a trend in my topics -- a lot of duality. Compare and contrast. Yin and yang.

Apparently, 2008 will be no different from me.

High Concept deals with a lot of architects and we get a lot of feedback about renderings -- the 2 schools, the traditional "Mike Brady" way and the high tech 3d visualization route.

We position ourselves as a 3D modelling company and there is a level of speed and accuracy that comes with that approach, no question about it.

However, a hand rendered piece presented on a nice watercolour paper has a sense of magic to it -- the soft lines and vague shapes invite the potential tenant to bring his or her imagination and dreams to the table to fill out the image.

As a company we are playing with ways to bring both to the table. I have mentioned in a previous blog, that Corel Painter has become my software of choice.

I miss the feel of paper under my fingers, the ink building up on my caloused hand and all those old smells that go with my well-used tools.

...but, I don't miss throwing away ruined art pages! I love how easy it is to experiment and simply "undo" or throw a layer away if it didn't take me closer to my destination.

So, I guess I am going with the best of both worlds -- I put a sheet of paper down on my Intuos tablet to create some friction/resistance for my stylus and choose a product which simulates traditional media perfectly. It also Allows me to incorporate images, patterns, vector shapes, and text while painting with oils/inks/watercolours/chalk on a textured surface.

I don't use masking tape to get a smooth line anymore - click, click, click - draw a mask and paint around that detail easily!

If you like to draw or paint I suggest you check out the free 30-day trial (there is one for both PC and Mac) -- you'll love it (and understand why I rave about it)!

Then when you are asked, digital or traditional -- you can choose both.

Get the trial: http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/ca/en/Product/1166553886612

Awaiting the muse!

Well, here it is -- Friday, my blog day.

I have been so busy this week and as usual I have been looking out the corner of my eye waiting for inspiration to strike.

Alas, no muse...

Inspiration, is a weird thing. A doctor doesn't wait for the right mood before he performs an emergency surgery, the race car mechanic doesn't stop the car from leaving the pit until he "feels" that his work is done, hell, I don't think the guy making your Big Mac is going to hold off throwing it in the bun until he finds the PERFECT onion.

For some reason, creative work -- writing, painting, performing -- has always been presented as some magical process. I guess, I just don't buy it. I quit waiting for those pixies to show up as soon as I had my first deadline. Dreaming doesn't fill a page; knowledge, skill and hard work fill a page. Great ideas fill a page.

My buddy Mitch always used to say (and I paraphrase here): "If I practiced operating on the human brain as many hours as I have drawn I would be a hell of a brain surgeon."

In other words, in the daydreams we grasp at ideas and find our voices, but it is in the act of our design, our craft that we produce results. The more we do it the better we get.

An architect, for instance, is likely to wake in the night with a great idea, or be inspired by some great building she saw on vacation -- but it is unlikely that it is the specific design that suits the purpose of a building she is currently designing. Like most professional creators, she is likely to make some sketches, take some notes, do some research, rework it and then put it away in a drawer somewhere always waiting for the perfect fit to come along. And when that chance comes to make the idea into reality -- she will do it for a purpose and likely for a fee.

So when the blank page is too white, the piano is too loud or none of the colours are mixing right, you need to shut off that whimsical right side of your brain for a few minutes and let your reason and experience show you the way.

Of course, I could be wrong -- perhaps writing without a muse you will end up putting out something like this blog. If so, remember the advice was free -- and we usually get what we pay for!

Modern art sucks, and I'll tell you why.

I can remember the first painting I ever saw that stopped me dead in my tracks. It grabbed me by the curly short hairs of my visual cortex, gave them a powerful shake, and said Pay attention! There is more here than meets the eye. A small, painfully slim figure lies in at the edge of a great tan field, a country house in the distance, beneath a lowering sky. I was seven, and the painting was Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth.
That painting awoke in me a realization that you could tell an entire life story in one image, a story of courage and pain, hope and loss, determination and struggle. One image, immediately accessible, instantly understood.
I grew up in rural New Brunswick, and I knew fields like that (actually, the farm is a real place, and was only a couple hundred miles away in Maine). The sense of place in the painting was astounding to me. I could smell the dry grass around her, I could feel the roughness of the soil under her hands, I could hear the distant slap of the barn door closing - all from an image created by rubbing colored mud onto a flat surface with small hairy sticks. It was magical. I needed to know how the artist had done it.
Over the next few years, I devoured every art book that was in our local small town library (along with all their dinosaur books and every episode of Danny Dunn). I discovered much more Wyeth, both Andrew and his father, as well as Titian, da Vinci, Michelangelo, Velázquez and many of the Old Masters. Frazetta was still a few years away for me, but I was also drawn to the works of Maxfield Parrish, whose heightened reality and technical perfection still amaze me.
I could see that Wyeth and Parrish were the modern descendants of a great artistic tradition. They had learned all the skills of the Old Masters, combined them with a greater appreciation for the natural world and, (freed from a need to incorporate religious iconography into every image), they set out to depict and exalt the human experience. Painting, which once only depicted flying saints and glowing Christs, could now be used to show the courage and dignity of a simple woman, crippled by polio.

This is what Art should be, I decided. This is how I will learn to paint. There could be no finer goal than to master the ability to create a new reality, to use this media to exalt courage and human dignity, to show the way forward, to lift up the human spirit.

Boy, was I in for a surprise.
It turns out, that Wyeth, Parrish, Rockwell, Erte, Mucha, et al were not considered real artists - they're only illustrators. The real Artists (with a capital A) are above such petty concerns as being technically proficient and easily understandable. The new Modern art world, (which was sadly well established before I was born), would be inherited by the dribblers, those artists who created works whose (alleged) artistic merits were A) - inversely proportionate to the amount of skill needed to create them, and B) - directly proportionate to the amount of explanation they needed in order to be understood. Great technical virtuosity, and an incredible ability to communicate complex ideas to every person with eyes, has given way to the spastic spatterings of paint and the abstruse interpretations of Pollock and his imitators.

A bit harsh, you say? Consider the next image - 1 panel was painted by a man (a recognized Genius of Modern Art), 1 panel was painted by a chimpanzee and 1 was painted by an elephant. See if you can tell the difference. Here's a hint: the elephant's painting is upside down.


Let's see a monkey paint the Mona Lisa, and I'll give Modern Art another chance.