A Little Respect for a Thirty Thousand-Year Old Tradition
As an artist who uses paint to make his objects, I take a measure of color and mix it with another measure of color. I try to get it just right, but I often overcompensate so that I have enough. I then choose the right brush for the job. It depends on the size of the area I am covering and the shape of it and the effect I am trying to get.
When I apply paint, there is a three-dimensional aspect that might not be taken into account unless you’ve done this before. The paint goes on a surface that has some form of surface characteristic. It could be a texture, or it could be something more subtle than that. As you apply more paint, you are adding onto this surface. Even with a medium like acrylic paint, which is supposed to dry flat, you get a buildup of layers that add to the surface tension. The next application of paint will be affected by what lies underneath.
The changes of surface can grant different possibilities. If I work a wash of color on a granulated surface, it would spread through the crevices and create a soft cloud of veiny transparency. If I applied pasty opaque colors on the same surface, the colors would skip over the tops of the granulation giving me broken colors. If I scrub the same paint on that surface, it would give a hazy, dirty effect. If I dabbed three different colors from my palette and let them work wet-into-wet onto that surface, it would be and yet another effect that I cannot quite predict right now because it would depend on the proportions of color and the amounts of paint and how diluted they are, among other factors. And that underlying surface would affect my efforts in one of many, many ways that I’m not sure can even be categorized.
Once the painting is done, we have something else that the surface of the painting does. These are the possibilities of the painting for the viewer and not necessarily the artist. The painting catches the light a certain way because of the surface. The viewer detects that surface with every shift of their feet or slightest turn of the head. Light shimmers and plays off the surface making it alive. This painting has a tactility on display that is in every way a part of the painting and that can not be recreated in any reproduction of it, whether in high-quality photographs or video recordings of it. In fact, it is an object that may be mostly flat, but it has a third dimension of depth that is there, even if small and subtle, and this depth creates the agency of life in this otherwise inanimate thing.
Furthermore, the direction of the paint strokes might move along the form of the figures in the painting. They might help to intimate corporeality in the depiction of humans, flowers, buildings, or mountains. In a nonrepresentational painting, globs of paint concoct their own delight. Swirls of glossy paint can look exquisitely delicious for no other reason than to celebrate the combination of colors that may only hint at something else like an old reminiscence, not just through the color palette chosen, but through its transparency and thickness.
Layers of transparent colors create optical effects that can be seen in no other way, as the old masters have shown in countless paintings. A cloth painted in purples and whites and yellows all mixed together would not be the same as the same cloth made with strokes of the same colors in translucent layers. The former is alla prima painting, and the latter is working in glazes. You have the option of one or the other, as well as many other methods. Your alla prima painting can be an impasto work that juts out of the surface in puffs of color like on a birthday cake, or it could be textureless.
I think these are valuable properties in a work of art. It has weight. It takes up space. It possesses the physical properties of an actual object. I can make things happen with these properties. I can appreciate them as a viewer when face-to-face with a painting on the wall. I can hold it and turn it around if I wanted to.
When I think about the limitless physical qualities of a painting, I wonder what about it can be said to be an analog? What does that even mean? Analog? What is the painting analogous to? Since making art is the oldest thing we humans have evidence of doing (as shown in works of art that are far older than anything else that survived antediluvian civilizations), I come to the conclusion that making a painting like this cannot be an analog to anything humankind has any memory to. So why do some people call it analog painting? Yes, there are people out there that call actual painting, analog painting. Where did this inappropriate term come from?
If you are familiar with the term, then you might have a guess about its origins. I have a theory. The software industry responsible for the imaging systems on computers had to come up with new terminology, based on clarifying the products they were releasing. They were touting the line of digital imaging, and under that broad umbrella, there was something they were developing they called “digital painting.” It was basically forming computer “tools” that attempted to emulate the experience of making a painting but solely on a device’s screen. How do you distinguish this from the other kind of painting? You couldn’t call the medium of pushing paint around on a canvas as “real” painting because it made your product sound flimsy by comparison. You couldn’t even call it “physical” painting, because even though it sounded a little more neutral, it still implied the same thing.
As an industry, you want this new term to fulfill two things at once. You want to distinguish that other product from your own product, and you want to put down the older technology because you feel your product is superior to the old-fashioned materials. You reach back in the recent eras of technology to fish around for some word that could sideways label the old stuff and at the same time deliver it a backhanded slap. Other digital industries were already using the old word “analog” to rest its case about what was so inferior about anything that was not digital. What better word?
So, why am I insulted? It is ironic, because if you are not in the business of making art, you probably never heard of analog painting. It is the working professionals themselves — the ones who should know better — that have adopted the term. I doubt most of the public is even aware of digital painting or of that ugly term for real painting.
I have nothing against digital imaging in general. It can produce some innovative images, and on occasion, I get inspired by someone coloring a comic book with a strange palette I had never seen before or by a graphic designer who juxtaposed elements from various images on a poster or website page. There are fine artists that do marvelous things with computer imaging, and my defense is not leveled against any of these areas.
Digital painting, on the other hand, is a branch of digital imaging that doesn’t always bring about the most interesting results. This is when a digital imagist strives to push around pixels in a manner that seems similar to the way that paint is moved. Through an indirect device, “digital painters” try to rehash painting techniques established by physical materials that have always had direct access to these techniques.
This new type of pixel manipulation has a plethora of brush possibilities that can create all manner of effects with whatever color you choose, and you can manipulate them afterward. You can even invent your own brushes and tools in the program. Digital watercolor has wet-into-wet. The strokes of digital pastels admit textural patterns analogous to actual pastels. And so on. But is it the same?
I have always found it a little strange that this growing new technology aspires to emulate a technology that is at least thirty thousand years old — and not doing it too well as I write this. It may one day actually fool everybody, but even if that ever happens, it cannot emulate the physical properties of a painting on a glaring screen. You can’t get those properties when you print it out either. In essence, you are making a painting that does not really exist except as a bunch of colors that come on a device when you summon it with a few clicks. As technologies make their shifts over the coming decades and inevitably supplant older ways of viewing image files, I would be a little concerned if my career were mostly based on work that takes up no space in this world.
If you are a commercial artist that wants to make a painting-like illustration for a client, then I can see the great advantages of “digital painting” over anything that came before it. It is convenient and fast. If something needs alteration, it can be done without tearing down anything from before. Everything is saved, and if you ever have to go to a previous step that might have been buried under some color, then you can. This flexibility is invaluable to someone who is working on the clock, where time is money.
I guess these thoughts are really for those that are aware of digital painting and the other term and have not really thought about why they even use the other term. You can call the work of illustrators digital painting if you want. In my view, you don’t have a painting if you are not in fact using paint, but I can understand the convenience of this term and will not roll my eyes the next time I hear it. But please, please do not call what I do analog painting. There is nothing analogous about it, the term does not mean what it describes, and you are going to risk insulting me and every painter that is practicing today, along with every painter that came before all of us.