iPad and Computer Art

OK I have to try sketching with this new technology. It is very different from pen and paper sketching and so you need to think in a different mode. I found using your finger to draw is difficult and using the iStroke stylus offers just a slight improvement; it does not offer a delicate pen thickness; that could perhaps be dealt with by increasing the scale of the pallet, I think, I need to experiment.

Great advantage of the iPad is that you have access to all computer drawing enhancements, which I am not keen on since it takes away the personal artistic touch one does when one sketches nonstop without erasing. The colour pallet ‘creation’ is interesting; you take the range of colours from an existing Photograph! Walla! No fiddling around with trying to invent a colour theme! I love it but it so artificial.

But is ‘artwork’ produced by computer drawing programs, such as this Apps or Corel Painter, considered Art in the real sense?

Linton Windman: I think so; art is only limited by creativity!

Catrina Chen: yes

Errol Hugh: Yeah, but it seems to me the artist’s ‘touch’ is enhanced by the technology and not by virtue of the skills of the artists’ emotions or talents. Think about ‘oil painting’ created by an artist using Corel painter! It looks like oil painting, but really it is not.

Linton Windman: Skills are still required to “paint” on computers, as it is to use paint and brushes. I think it just gives artists more options and we don’t need to wait for the paint to dry:

Errol Hugh: Right: computer skills, very different from the skills required to use brushes with paint, not to mention colour mixing! But I guess the term ‘art’ has always been an evasive descriptive topic for critics. Is technology creating new ‘fields’ or removing complacent borders?

Linton Windman: I agree that computer skills are different, and maybe less “personal” but surely you have to be creative or “artistic” to transfer what is in your mind to reality, paper canvas or the computer screen, unless you are talking about reproducing

I think the problem is there are too many wanna-be artists using technology to take short cuts. Everyone who owns a digital camera these days call themselves a photographer, and every one who owns a MacBook Pro is a designer! With technology and software easily available now a days it is easier for people to explore or express their artistic side without the limitations of the need for artistic skills.

Daikatse Thuy: Computer skill is a new technology which we need to learn and accept. It is only a tool to express Artistic sense. I must admit Coral painter can do a lot more than brushes and paints. I love my Wacom board which works faster and less messy.

Errol Hugh:I can’t forget while visiting the Art Institute of Chicago with my son, Harlan, who was just about 12, when we came upon the huge Georges-Pierre Seurat: ‘Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte’, Harlan was amazed and exclaimed “Low resolution painting!”. At that age Harlan was occupied with programing his Atari computers. Thinking back, in 1884 Seurat did what computers are now just being able to accomplish! The art work, 10 X 7 feet, took more than 2 years to complete. Today computer software simulates ‘pointillism’ in a ‘snap’. Question is: “Is the simulation art?”

Harlan Hugh: Full circle… I can remember standing in front of the Seurat (http://raymondpronk.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/seurat_1884_85_a_sunday_afternoon_7201.jpg) and thinking it was amazing. I had seen it before in pictures of course, but it really doesn’t look like much until you see it life size. As I remember it, every dot was more than 1 cm across. I think the simulation of pointillism is no more art than is copying another work, only it takes less skill for the user (the programmer of course had to do a lot to make that possible… is that art? maybe). Once it can be done at the press of a button, it becomes nothing but a tool. Tools can be used to make art, but their use alone is not art… However, each tool that makes something easier lowers the barrier to entry and increases the threshold at which something becomes interesting. People need that much more to impress them as everything gets easier to do…

Emmanuel A. Beryllia: likes this discussion.