Little known facts about digital painting that prove this genre is high art

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Digital painting is a fine line of opposites, combining a bright splash of colors with high technology. This is an amazing world of art, where each created picture is so multifaceted that it is sometimes difficult to understand and appreciate it. Someone prefers a mixed style, while someone from scratch uses exclusively a tablet for drawing and a dozen suitable programs for processing. But one way or another, this art is quite popular all over the world and can boast of an equally vivid and fascinating history of its inception.

1. History of digital painting

Since the invention of photography at the end of the 19th century, painting slowly began to fade away, and a real confrontation began between photographers and artists, because everyone tried to defend and prove their point of view. It wasn't until the 1960s, with the emergence of pop art and photorealism, that artists began to explore the concept of digital painting. One of the first to adopt digital aesthetics was pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, who introduced ink dots into his art, which he painstakingly painted by hand with special paint through a metal stencil.

In the 1965 painting Brushstrokes, Liechtenstein enlarges a comic strip called Painting by Dick Giordano. The abstract design of his composition is reminiscent of that of the 1950s New York Abstract Expressionists, but Liechtenstein deliberately parodies their supposed originality by making his abstract composition and dripping paint completely synthetic.

In the wake of American pop art, an alternative group of artists emerged in West Berlin who called themselves capitalist realists, proclaiming themselves "the first German pop artists."

One of the most prominent members of the group was Sigmar Polke, who studied the worlds of media, advertising and popular culture. But unlike American pop culture, capitalist realists took a more crude and messy approach, combining the expressionism of Germany's past with elements of media imagery to create their own digital painting style.

Like Liechtenstein, Polke loved dots. He inserted, printed and painted these dots in many of his paintings, transforming them into his own daring signature style, as shown in the 1963 painting Untitled.

German painter Gerhard Richter was closely associated with Polke and the capitalist realist movement, sharing with Polke a mutual fascination with how the printed surface could be incorporated into painting. Richter is perhaps best known for his signature blurry photorealistic paintings, which mimic the soft focus of photography so well that it often makes it wonder if they were really painted at all. His work was closely associated with American photorealists of the 1960s and 70s, who were looking for ways to painstakingly convey the sharp realism of photography in painting.

But Richter took a more experimental approach, mixing photographic and painterly effects together, expressing his admiration for the new wave of art. In the 1970s, Gerhard began photographing his own expressive, abstract paintings and creating new ones based on these photographs. As can be seen in Abstract Painting # 439, 1978, the liquid fluidity of paint merges with the glossy, untouched surface of the photograph, creating a digital painting. Both Richter and Polke have had a particularly profound influence on contemporary artists, who continue to develop their skills and experimental approaches to the creation of a particular work.

2. Collages

Many contemporary artists draw their stories from found photographic sources rather than direct observation, reflecting the penetration of print media into everyday life. Some of the most adventurous contemporary artists deliberately emphasize the digital nature of the original material, emphasizing the textures and surfaces of the original print and its cropped or torn edges.

British artist Dexter Dalwood creates paintings based on his own small collages, deliberately reproducing sharply cut lines or uneven paint gaps on canvas, thus creating strange, illusory places, as seen in one of his works in 2004. Like Dalwood, British artist Neil Gull loves to delve into the visual ephemera of everyday life, working to incorporate them as original as possible into painting.

3. Computers, printers and copiers

Time does not stand still and artists continue to experiment with the playful dichotomy between digital printing and painting. American artist Wade Guyton makes works that typify the term digital painting by printing on canvas using an Epson Stylus Pro 9600 wide-format inkjet printer. His signature geometric patterns of squares, crosses and grids are created on the computer before printing on canvas, but most of all he likes technical failures that occur to the printer beyond its control, when the canvas gets stuck and has to be pulled out, and the ink simply begins to flow out, mixing with each other.

The contemporary German artist Charlene von Hale works from the found images, which she then darkens and abstracts in the process of painting. Since 2001, she has been experimenting with photocopiers and how they can distort and transform existing images and provide her with an endless array of new materials to work with to create her own style of digital painting. Sometimes she creates new images by painting over photocopies, as seen in a 2003 painting.

4. Floated images

One of the most exciting digital painting artists today is American artist Jacqueline Humphries, whose paintings illustrate the digital languages of captcha codes, emojis and computer programs. Her intricate repeating patterns of dots, dashes, crosses, and emojis are drawn using an industrial stencil cutter, which she then weaves with expressionist stripes of paint, combining digital painting with the unpredictable strokes of her hand. She compares this layering process to multiscreen activity on a computer, where the viewer can view several pages at once, one on top of the other.

Her famous Black Light series of paintings further mimics the aesthetics of glowing computer screens painted with ultraviolet paint on huge canvases that can only be seen in a darkened room illuminated by ultraviolet lamps, giving her paintings what she calls "cinematic quality."

American abstract artist Amy Sillman is perhaps best known for her loose improvised canvases made from networks of layered lines, shapes and vibrant colors, but she also made soulful animations that bring her visual language to life. Animation work Thirteen Possible Futures: Cartoon for a Painting, 2012, was made using the iPad drawing app. Sillman then printed out each frame of the animation and turned them into a huge installation, allowing the viewer to get a peek behind the scenes of the wider decision-making process that goes into creating a single piece of art.

5. The future of digital painting

As we move into a future of burgeoning technological development, there is no doubt that the scope of digital painting will continue to expand in new and exciting directions. British artist Glenn Brown sees the future role of painting in reworking and reimagining the history of art of the past, transforming it into something new. His paintings copy and remake previous paintings, old and new, from Rembrandt van Rijn to Frank Auerbach, with the help of various kinds of filters he brings them to perfection, breathing completely new life and meaning into them.

Human fantasy knows no boundaries, especially when it comes to creativity and art. Artists, photographers and sculptors from all over the world never cease to amaze the public with their works, which, raising many questions, often remain unanswered. Dizzying art illusions were no exception., looking at which the earth literally leaves from under our feet.