Inspired by this competition, which celebrates the film release of Hockney, I’ve been playing around with the Brushes iPad app. It’s fun and easy to use, gives quick results and eliminates the need to clean any brushes! Great if paint and canvases are in short supply but as much as I’m enjoying painting with my fingers I can already see that a stylus would give greater precision and accuracy.
All this artistic playing has got me wondering just how I might use digital art as a tool or practice. Obviously digital is great for working anywhere, anytime. Also great for investigating and trying out new ideas and colour combinations. Might also be good to adapt and transform images of physical paintings. These questions seem especially interesting for the abstract artist who is engaging with texture and thingness in such a fundamental, almost sculptural way. There was a great article about the resurgence of abstract art a year ago by Francesca Gavin who believed that this resurgence was a reaction against technology – a desire to engage with real colour and real paint. This very much echoes the e versus p book debate for me in that the different formats, the different ways of imagemaking, complement and supplement each other rather than rivalling or superseding one another. O.K. I’m off now to work on my competition entry, if you’re interested the deadline is 10th November.
JudithAnnBrown 