The aim of this paper is to
converse and investigate the gesture and physicality associated with painting
and to what degree do they still endure within digital media? To address these
topics, we will discuss areas of naivism, child art and analogue painting
methods in comparison to post-modern approaches – specifically digital painting
- in what is deemed the ‘digital age’.
This essay will consider these elements and study their fundamentals through
historical references of primitive and naïve aspects of mark making introducing
gesture through a child art perspective before exploring contemporary digital
physicality – if it exists. To develop a
further understanding of child art and its potentials, theories advocated by
Swiss artist, teacher and amateur psychologist Roldphe Topffer will be
investigated, considering foundations of primitiveness and honesty that child
art emanates. These origins, that subsequently made a significant impact on
modernist mentality, leads us to question how and why our post-modern digitised
attitude is attempting to dissemble physical and inquisitive processes. We will
analyse what impact digital technology imprints on contemporary art, in a world
where the modern artist is involuntarily involved with ways of thinking, acting
and viewing that are ultimately conditioned by technology alongside examining
how over
time painting has been scrutinized, dispersed and hybridized due to both
internal and peripheral pressures and revolutions. This paper will provide
evidence that demonstrates that painting as medium does not have a solitary, substantial
attribute, but rather multiple and constantly adapting ones. In order to deliberate and evaluate
these topics and the evolution of the human and mechanical mark we will learn
of key theorises by John Berger, Walter Benjamin and Jasia Reichard and how
their philosophies parallel to the works of traditional artist Joan Miro as
well as contemporary artists Lisa Denyer and Chad Wys.
To quote British art critic,
poet and painter, John Berger, ‘that which withers in the age of digital
reproduction is the physicality of the work of art’ (Wolf, 2000, p.65) establishes
the theoretical and practical perspectives of this paper and what we will aim
to determine. The process, action and physicality of artist and artwork has
long since been appraised and contemplated in art theory, with direct mark
making being the initial step in the drawing process. The artists gesture – a
vigorous application of paint and/or expressive brushwork - is still typically understood
and associated with the traditional mental and physical relationship between
the painter and canvas and/or surface area, where the artist’s conscious,
subconscious or spiritual narratives are made visible through complete human
action. However, after transitioning
from the conventional and modernist notions of naturalness and autonomy into an
age of digital cultural influences - an era that is frequently perceived as a
‘time for crossing barriers, for erasing old categories’ (Brummet, 1999, p.66)
- mechanical processes continue to appropriate gestural tendencies even if they
are furthermore de-emphasised from their originality and instinctiveness. Written
within ‘After the Digital Divide’ (2009), a publication that reexamines
concepts, perspectives and examples concerning ‘new media’ – a term used to
coin the latest genre of art that encompasses works created with digital media;
interactive, computer animation, virtual and internet art - author Lutz Peter Koepnick identifies the
ever-multiplying mechanical approaches and queries how their imminent rise
impacts the role of older media. Suggesting that ‘the human gesture is
ultimately broken and destroyed by the computer’ (Koepnick, 2009, p.69),
Koepnick implies that digitally conceived art – if taken literally – refers
basically to a series of calculated algorithmic codes and not much more.
Consequently, because digital processes surpass true time and inhabits virtual
space we can dispute that the making of these simulated images abandons our fundamental
and primitive connection to our physical environment.
In a four part televised
series in 1972, Berger challenged digital’s ‘reproductive’ authority expressing
that – for the first time - ‘images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous,
insubstantial, available, valueless, free’ (Goodman, 1999, p.194). What Berger
was stating here – and in his book ‘Ways of Seeing’ – was that pictorial art
had always physically existed in time and space. Therefore, the appearance and
elevation of contemporary mechanical processes began to alter the experience by
bringing art into the daily mainstream, thus challenging paintings physical
materialisation. The proliferation over the last decade or so of electronical devices;
laptops, touch screen phones and flat screen TVs has subsequently altered the
exposition of art imageries and consequently manipulated our observation and
reception of them. In turn, these developments have reformed our perspective of
the once traditional canvas painting by initiating a whole new array of
electronical resources and modes of creation and exhibition. However, if we are
to acknowledge the residual elements of swipe marks left behind from our
fingertips on the devices touch screen, it could be suggested that they are in
part, more authentic and immediate than the final utilisations of the flat
screen as an imitation of the gestural mark. It is incited that it is the physicality of
the art image and process that enables the viewer to comprehend and embrace the
bond between person, object and experience, as they are still witnessing a
ghost of the artist’s presence and action. Berger believes the experience of
observing original art has become tarnished as we are now exposed to
reproductions on a regular basis through digital means and consequently the
true essence of art work has lessened. For reasons similar to this, Walter
Benjamin, philosopher and cultural critic, claims that due to arts now
digitised nature its ‘aura’ has subsequently been lost. Traditionally, art work
radiated what Benjamin refers to as an ‘aura’, an essence of sublimity and
transcendence occurring from their originality. This sensory impression
manifests itself through the physical experience of distance between the
observer and art object, where the objects aesthetical appearance, history,
physical condition and ownership consolidate. Although Benjamin acknowledges
the existence of replication throughout art history, for example, students and
apprentices would copy images as practice and masters would duplicate their own
works to distribute across the world, he cautions that the introduction of
mechanical reproduction that circulates images - all with the deficiency of genuine
quality - incredibly swiftly and the universal willingness of the audience to partake
diminishes the once unique and individual experience. Replicating art
therefore, removes it from its antiquity and its background, thus even the most
faultless imitation of a work of art is missing in one component, its actual
and physical presence in the here and now. In awareness of this, Benjamin theorises that the
viewer cannot approach what is ephemeral and unlike the experience of observing
a painting, where the viewers’ attention is directly concentrated on the
presence of the existing surface, when in comparison with discussing digital
media, there is a distraction, a tendency to discuss how the artwork was generated
rather than wholly absorb the encounter. As a result, Benjamin argues that digital
art work lacks the capabilities to completely detail their narrative,
materiality and possession as they are conceptual constructs that belong
outside of time.
To furthermore appreciate the aspects
of authenticity and physicality within art we will explore origins and
philosophies surrounding the child artist and their natural embodied naivety. Although
it appears from the surface that child art is flouted and with plentiful
disapproval from critics and journalists – ‘mad, infantile smearing’s’ and
‘sketches by urchins…none of whom is gifted’ (Fineberg, 1997, p.2) – the pure
and honest essence of child hood continues to overcome controversy and endure
the fruition of contemporary practice. As mentioned above, mark making
generally initiates the creative drawing process, which - in relation to the
child art angle - is habitually represented in the scribbles, lines, shapes or
paint splatters that appear within a toddler’s artwork. Rodolphe Topffer a
teacher, amateur psychologist and Swiss artist was one of the initial persons
to recognise and converse the qualities that children possess instinctively
both in their mentality and physicality. Topffer admired the imagery produced
by children and in the 1848 publication ‘Réflexions Et Menus Propos D'un
Peintre Genevois’ Rodolphe boldly stated that ‘the child’s spontaneous graphic
inventions were seen as closer to the creative expressions of great artists
than were the slick works of those whose art displayed mere conventional skill’
(Willats, 2005, p.220). It was a key
occurrence to Topffer’s understanding that child art epitomised potentials of
unaltered relationships between the body, spirit and earth, thus, representing
authentic portrayals of reality – unlike works of art that had been surpassed
by their methodological capacity or societal and cultural manipulations. Since
young children are not attentive of traditional and practical artistic
boundaries or expectations and perceive the world through unspoiled senses,
this allows the young painter to reject the illusion of everyday reality, a
process that frees the child from imitation and dishonesty. Because of this,
Topffer suggests that the drawings of children will never indicate elements of replication
but signs of unpolished primary imagination exclusively born from instinct.
Topffer’s unfamiliar revelations on this subject prompted future analysis from
artists and theorist’s alike who in turn, encouraged the materialisation of the
bond between child art and modernism.
In addition, it was the
interest and appreciation of child art by dominant artists such as Joan Miro –
whom for the standpoint of this essay will be furthermore discussed - Paul
Klee, Pablo Picasso and Vassily Kandinsky that gave child art and naivety a
significant platform and justifiability in the art world. Although Miro never
publicly merged with the Surrealists movement, like many artists of his
generation he endeavoured to express ideas void of rationale and reasoning
striving to empower and demonstrate the potential of the imagination. American art historian
and curator Barbara Rose advocated that painting has an essence and proficiency
to ‘materialise images rendered up by the boundless human imagination’ which
the surrealists and expressionists eras revolutionised. Rose had noted the
progression and development of Miro’s work from his settlement of still-life’s
and landscapes to discovering a more emotional, primitive and liberated style
in a period where artists began exploring images that emerged from process. Miro’s new found belief of
automatism as a means to indulge and experiment with techniques and materials
enabled his imageries to be shaped from intrinsic, naive and emotive states.
Similarly, to Rose, French Surrealist writer Julien Michel Leiris, sub-editor
for Documents - a Surrealist art magazine -
completed a short piece published in 1929 by concluding that ‘it is not
so easy to re-discover the freshness of infancy’ (Fineberg, 1998, p.210).
Leiries was associated with the preferment of primitive art whilst during the
same period Miro’s drawings similarly affiliated and fortified the phenomenon
of infantilism. Miro’s work looked to attain the primal elements of simplicity
and freshness that Leiries conclusion personified, the rediscovery of a child
like state and the grown adult’s effort to once again achieve this pureness. By
the 20th Century, Miro and the other forthcoming artists had started
to discard impressions of peripheral experiences and initiated an essential
revolution by painting the innermost life of deeply guarded emotions. They
perceived the foundations of child art to be the key to reach the core of
naivety and in doing so Miro’s work gained momentum and appreciation.
Relative to Pablo Picasso’s
reputed remark at 75 years of age, ‘It took me years to learn to draw
like…children’ (Weiner and Reynolds, 2003, p. 87), Miro, whom was particularly
interested in psychoanalysis and psychology - with the French child psychologist
Jean Piaget being notably profound during this period - adapted a process in
which he could reach an uncontaminated state of mind. Inclusive of Genevan
philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau theory that the child should be encouraged to
grow ‘close to nature and deserving a freedom to express’ (Archard, 1993,
p.30), Miro acknowledged his Catalan roots, childhood memories and influences
from art in Barcelona and Paris, adapting to a state of primitivism as a
stimulus. Often spending days in silence
with himself in order to amass the naïve wholesomeness of expression, Miro’s
processes emphasised the child’s ability to effortlessly achieve an instinctive
state of making whereas, for the adult, attaining this liberation and
un-learning required considerable determination and awareness.
Plate 1 - Joan Miro. Self Portrait. 1937.
Self Portrait (plate 1)
depicts two layers that illustrate opposing aspects of Miro’s physiological
state of mind and progressive journey. Firstly, the delicate concentrated
background image was painted by Miro in 1937 when he occupied a small studio
space in Paris due to the Spanish civil war. Unable to return to Barcelona to
complete large scale works in progress and restricted by limited working
conditions, Miro embarked on a series of figurative works completely opposing
in concept. Using a magnifying mirror to closely examine angles of his
appearance for exactness - a process that created enlarged yet distorted
features and a method entirely unalike in comparison to his loose and automatic
style - Self Portrait was a result of Miro’s apprehension of his at the time
situation and world events.
However, during 1960 Miro
returned to this drawing to over work a fresh version, to illustrate a new
adventure. Painting a simplified motif that followed deliberated contours of
the original figure, Miro, in the hope to attain ‘something that seemed to me more
human, more genuine’ (Gibbons, 2012), separated from everything he once
believed to be archaic and traditional in favour of untouched child-like
simplicity and imagination. The overpainted synthesised Self Portrait
characterises a critical shift in Miró’s imaginative mood and afresh creative
chapter, where visits to Tokyo and influences of young upcoming Expressionists
– whose work disdained from realism and conventional approaches - began to
stimulate and liberate Miro’s thinking, media application and colour pallet.
Using thick black paint to emphasise the motif and softened circular marks Miro
had settled into a truly Modern Abstraction direction that resulted in
juxtaposing emotive and physical artwork. During this period Miro’s work began
to significantly furthermore express rebellious, bold, calligraphic gestures,
vigorously painting with his fingers, burning and slashing his surfaces in
aspiration of reaching a universal form of genuine visual communication.
Painter Adolphe Gottlieb, a significant figure during the American
Expressionist era - a period where artists began to focus on a type of
retrogression to the juvenile with emphasis on touch and gesture, the artists
began to find stimulation from their kinaesthetic stage of puerile development -
declared ‘All
primitive expression reveals…the immediate presence of terror and fear’ (Schnier, 2014). It
becomes clear in Miro’s work that the rationale for subordinated concepts in favour
of radical emotive expression evident in ‘Self Portrait’ is a documentation of
Miró’s mind-set, an engagement between old conventional Miro and new primordial
Miro.
However, despite the
innovative concepts and physical methodologies previously taken, the continual
advancements of technology over time has resulted in a modern-day period where
digital art has brought about pioneering programmes that provide the artist
with possibilities of embracing and engaging between artistic, mathematical and
technical disciplines. Within this period, it could be suggested that the once
immediate and spontaneous mark is gradually becoming disregarded and the modern
artists attempts to ‘un-learn’ is disfavoured in contemporary efforts to master
digital methods. Parisian art critic Louis Aragon in response to painting wrote that if its
‘development and moments of greatness can be drummed into our heads, can we not
then also imagine its periods of decline and even its end, like any other
idea?’ (Dougall, 2015). This statement that Aragon suggests highlights the
challenges contemporary painting faces during a time of radical digital
takeover and therefore queries if the longevity of painting can be nearing its
end? Modern technology offers artists with new opportunities to explore
creativity in refined, complex and unmapped directions with the makings and
vast range of devices and applications that are readily available. The
immateriality and virtual qualities that co-exist with these digital processes
therefore can be perceived to threaten the significant materiality and nature
of painting itself. However, to attain this state, in a domain where the
distinctions between time and space, reality and fabrication have become
blurred, the artist has subsequently abandoned a crucial relationship - a
relationship to our physical environment. This is paintings advantage.
During a digital period,
painting as an autonomous method, continues to fabricate renewed and convincing
statements of significance as an enduring, persistent art form. In relation to
conventional painting techniques and present day mechanical processes, Lisa
Denyer is a contemporary artist whose approach to painting epitomises analogue
techniques in a method that encompasses the traditional functions of painting,
whilst acknowledging the impact or stimuli present day technology imprints on
the artist. In an approach that; embraces and energises the physical
relationship between the artist and the art work, colours that reference
artificiality partial to internet sources, television and advertisement logos,
contrastingly geometric shapes are illustrated against overly spontaneous brush
strokes and natural surfaces. Working on found plywood, hardboard or wood
instead of conventional canvas material Denyer’s visual language incorporates
elements of natural environments recognising and investigating matter,
materiality and changing states. Inspired by the emblematic transient works of
the American painter Adoplh Gottlieb - who we touched on earlier - an artist
who advocated that painting and colour could be exploited as a ‘vehicle’ to
emit personal experiences and thoughts underpins Denyer’s meditative and
reactive state of making. Embracing paintings ambiguous and scopious nature,
Denyer explores this notion through impulsive energetic mark making and
instinctive responses to surface materiality.
Plate 2 - Lisa Denyer. Manta. 2015.
Manta (plate 2) reflects the artist’s exploration and fascination of modernist painterly approaches, the transportive potential of media and substantiality. Manta portrays Denyer’s interest in materialness which is directly exemplified with the utilisation of found surfaces and the compositional details that subsequently emerge. Evolving from an awareness of escapism, a means to liberate or make sense of a suburban reality, Denyer’s practice incorporates hints of environmental forms and structures into corporeal, organic and residual outcomes. By working on these unearthed, rough and textured surface areas with a thinned application of paint furthermore enhances the fractures and inconsistencies of the material and the artist’s presence and ability to manipulate this interaction. Working in introspective states, Denyer reflects on elements of traditional landscapes and utilises painting to override sensory bombardment from technological media where the painting process is frequently open to deviation, uncontrollable surface friction and unpredictable fluidity of paint – an element of process that digital art never encounters. If we study Denyer’s process it is evident that her method symbolises and asserts key elements that support the continuation and importance of traditional painting. Firstly, Denyer’s practice radiates paintings defiance as a language and the individual mark that truly communicates humanistic principles in a progressively inhuman and technological domain, like that of the child artist and Miro who acknowledge the prominence of intuitive and introspective stimuli. Secondly, Denyer’s process illuminates a significant differentiation between painting and mechanical modes, which is that painting documents a visible record of the human hand, as the artist forms surfaces experienced as tangible in comparison to the entirely flat or non-material surfaces of digital art. Artists who continue to remain dedicated to the ideologies and practices of analogue painting in an electronical atmosphere, adhere to restore the significance of tactility that painting encompasses, to redefine immediate drawing as part of the process and to retrieve the prosperity of painting from the grasp of post-modernity were digital works produce representations that are argued to be devoid of spatial features and therefore are fundamentally flat.
However, if we are to fully discuss and
contemplate the possibility of the digital gesture we must examine contemporary
digitalism in opposition to conventional perspectives of painting. Painting
digitally in a technical era gives contemporary artists the ability to
re-combine and re-cycle ‘withered’ images often ensuing in surprising and
unusual combinations. The digitised nature of the world enables the artist to
paint without the associated, it could be said, burden of materiality and decay.
Chad Wys is a contemporary digital artist whose practice investigates the
discrepancies between the digital and analogue realms in an appropriated
manner. By ‘borrowing’ past imagery – for example, Victorian portraiture
exhibits itself within the ‘Nocturne’ series (plate 3) – Wys digitally
manipulates gestural and expressive brush strokes or drips onto the art object,
juxtaposing differing techniques resulting in an outcome that aims to
re-contextualise and appropriate the meaning of the ‘original’ image. Theoretically
speaking, the imageries Wys references are never truly original images, but are
reproductions of an original. American digital artist Grahame Wienbren - who is
recognised as a pioneer of film together with 30 years of publications and
lecturing based on the examination of new media and interactivity - indicates
that the ‘digital revolution is a revolution of random access’ (Paul, 2003, p.
15), a revolution grounded on digital developments where media is easily accessible
and can be superficially combined providing the artist with seemingly boundless
and infinite possibilities, for example, digital art can manifest itself within
installations, interactive and internet art or vast combinations of several
disciplines. Because of digitals practicality the experience viewing of art
becomes available to all, not just the trained, educated or gallery
environments. Jasia Reichardt, British art critic, writer and curator of
‘Cybernetic Serendipity’ in 1968 - an
exhibition devoted to examining the association between art and innovative
technology – analogously suggested that ‘the possibilities inherent to the
computer as a creative tool will do little to change those idioms of art which
rely primarily on the dialogue between the artist, his ideas and the canvas’
(Quaranta, 2013, p.51), contending that the capacities digital art has to
breakdown the boundaries between disciplines, will serve to furthermore advance
and broaden artistic scopes and makings. Chad Wys adopts this philosophy in a
method that continually acknowledges yet simultaneously challenges aspects of
art history and current ideologies relative to historical references of
portraiture and apparent links to modern expressionist’s painterly qualities.
Wys delves into the foundations of art history appropriating motifs from past
epochs with the aim to subvert and de-construct their previous cultural meaning
via the manipulation of present day mechanical processes.
Plate 3 - Chad Wys. Nocturne 109.
2011.
Nocturne 109 (plate 3) is a
digital C print which evidently depicts Wys’s amalgamated style that supports
the artist to explore the ‘digital gesture’ as a mark making process.
Expressing that making a mark is a ‘deeply poignant process. Whether in a
digital or analogue space, the context makes little difference in terms of the
impulses’ (Wys, 2016), Wys intentionally constructs artworks that encompass
appropriation, absence or manifestation of an ‘original’ through digital mark
making, colour and composition investigations, thus, challenging the viewer to
question what is real and what is medium - aesthetically? This loss and
alteration of traditional imagery provides the ‘new’ composition with
transformed combinations and concepts that the modern audiences can explore. It
has been insinuated that the relationship between creating a mark on a computer
screen infers less of a human connection, but, it could also be debated that
the creation of computerised concepts, compositions, writing of software and
many other digital elements can still carry the artists form of expression. This
essay has not been written to discourage the potentials and capabilities that
digital art inspires, but it is composed to make us question if these features
can be perceived as physical gestures which they appropriate. To examine this,
we must analyse the ‘drips’ and ‘scribbles’ apparent within Nocturne 109. While
these elements appear to be physical, impulsive and painterly straight from the
artist’s hand, are they not just the illusion of gesture If we are to
re-examine the process in comparison with the analogue methods taken by Miro
and Denyer. If we are to look beyond the initial mark it becomes apparent that
Wys and other digital artists, in order to create these mechanical gestures
need to understand the chosen programmes potentials and techniques in advance
to fully maximise and effectively produce the deliberated outcome. To precisely
compose a typically unpredicted and unique action prompts us to acknowledge
that through this thorough understanding and learning of applications and
software, the physical and instantaneous act is immediately cancelled.
Although it is possible for
the imagination and spontaneity of mark making to still be redevised through
digital interpretations such ‘drawing’ or ‘painting’ on computers, touch screen
iPads and other electronic devices, it is the exclusion of physical involvement
with the media – as Joan Miro discusses using his hands and fingers to
physically influence his paintings and Lisa Denyer’s inclusion of textural
media supports – inquiries that although the aesthetical appeal of gesture may
appear apparent within a digital artwork,
is it the lack of human presence
and art objects unmaterialistic properties that constricts the artist to wholly
develop a significant bond with the artwork. The theories suggested by both
Benjamin and Topffer claiming that conventional skill – as discussed
surrounding Wys, the learning and imitation of gesture within computerised
painting - depreciates the images potentials whereas naïve and instinctual
artworks by the likes of Miro and Denyer fully embrace the individual, creative
relationship. Is it the absence of
materiality and producer, product relationship the significant element that
once again makes us question if physicality can truly exist in digital media?
Throughout this
paper we have explored several perspectives and philosophies surrounding the gesture
and physicality associated with painting and questioned to what level does it
remain within digital media? The issue of the human action has been of central
importance and has been the primary and key theme throughout this essay. We
have investigated gesture through origins of child art, its revivalism through
the surrealist and expressionist eras and the continuous challenges it contends
with in a digitised era. Despite this, it has not been possible for us to
examine alternative potential art disciplines; mixed media, film, photography, installation
or the possibility were the gesture and physicality could also be present and considered
within the residual marks left behind from fingerprints on touch screen devices.
Nevertheless, the focus on analogue and digital media has presented a credible
debate were varying theories, perspectives and artists have been presented. The
beliefs of Roldolphe Topffer, supporting of the child’s innocence and pureness,
shaded from societal and conventional expectations, introduces gesture as an
early human attribute and allows us to acknowledge the initial primitive
importance between the body, spirit and earth. Paintings authentic and
immediate makings are further accredited within the significant theories
advocated by Walter Benjamin and John Berger, who illuminate digitals
reproductive, inhuman qualities and successively its impact on paintings aura
and genuineness. These concepts propose to us that digitised artwork in modern
culture has not just lost its aura, deprived of emotion and legitimacy, but it
is consequently becoming an everyday product to satisfy mass consumerism.
Benjamin and Berger’s notions in turn represent paintings continued relevance
in contemporary society as it is not a predetermined or algorithmic process but
illustrates honest and instantaneous values. Furthermore, analogue works by
Joan Miro and Lisa Denyer – in support of these and additional theories - are
comparably discussed to highlight the progression, difficulties and resurgence
of painting throughout history and in contemporary practice. The evaluation of
intrinsic, responsive mark making from historical and current standpoints provides
us with evidence that painterly, corporeal works and processes have
continuously personified the crucial relationship between artist and artwork,
thus demonstrating how it is the physical presence of the artist that
ultimately develops the final gesture. Collectively, the philosophies presented
within this paper by theorists and artists in relation to painting, point to a
significant element, the impact on the human touch in a digital age.
To discuss this
aspect from a technological perspective, we have explored some of the
potentials and concepts that inspire mechanical processes through the works of
American digital artist Chad Wys. Combining historical portraiture with digital
appropriations of painterly gestures, Wys brings traditional artworks into a
compounded style of modernism and post-modernism. This method, as supported by Jasia Reichardt theories that
digital tools serve to enhance arts further potentials, enables the artist to
appropriate the imagery and customary form of mark making from its preceding
uses and prejudiced perspectives. Nevertheless, although Wys’s technique illustrates
the capabilities that technological methods encompass, the definitive question
is that of the human mark. By discussing this through the presented artworks by
Wys, the analysis of his appropriated mechanical gestures in comparison to the
physical processes by Miro and Denyer, we have become aware that the greatest impact
from digital practices on painting has been on the eradication of the
individual and unique mark and successively the intensification of illusionist properties
displayed within digital art images. Given the range of views around the
gestural theme, the research provided within this paper suggests that gesture
comprises of the connection between artist and product, a relationship that
responds to emotion, action, materiality and physicality - a bond neglected in
digital media. The revivalism of painting withstands to challenge contemporary
digital and mechanical methods as paintings original means of being created is through
the artist’s hand and this is the critical and definitive point. Thus, concluding
that the gesture associated with painting ceases to exist in digital media and
what's more, prompting us to consider if digital methods can ever truly
represent the authenticity and presence of artist and art object? And
subsequently, can painting ever end?
Plate List:
Plate 1: Miro, J. (1937) Self Portrait. [Online image]
Available from: http://www.joan-miro.net/self-portrait.jsp. [Accessed 24th October 2016].
Plate 2: Denyer, L. (2015) Manta. [Online Image]
Available from: http://lisa-denyer.squarespace.com/nfbpmsvwrtidmiu5de4exdod2eyot3. [Accessed 30th October 2016].
Plate 3: Wys, C. (2011) Nocturne 109. [Online image]
Available from: http://chadwys.com/work_nocturne.html. [Accessed 7th December 2016].
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