Art in the Digital Age

Nowadays art is not just about putting a brush on canvas, or a pen on paper, or even your traditional type of printing methods. Art can be, and usually is, anything and everything. While I was growing up, I always had this notion of art being so much more traditional. Contemporary art did not appeal to me AT ALL!!! I liked traditional painting and drawing, and that's what I practiced. No doubt helped along by my Dad, who was always saying to me "you've got be your own worst critic". He would look at something and judge it on it's merit of being accurate, lifelike, and representative of what you saw.
Now don't get me wrong, Dad has a very open view of most art - he's quite happy to like a lot of modern art, abstract pieces as well as the more traditional. But he was always one to push, (and rightly so), the idea that knowledge and skill were of utmost importance, and I think this is where I gained my views on art.
But as I've gotten older, and studied different areas of art, I have discovered that it's not just 'traditional' art that appeals to me. There is a lot of contemporary art that I really like, and as I mentioned in my last post, I have recently discovered some very appealing digital art.
Which brings me to my subject for this post. How art these days seems to be so much more accessible. I can sit here and draw a picture on a piece of paper and upload it onto various electronic sources, and people all over the world can see it. And I can get instant feedback and gratification. For an artist that can be satisfying, or it can be terrifying.
Another part of art in the digital age is the editing that can be done to change any picture. Photos can be changed to look like anything we can imagine up. (That opens up a whole separate rant on editing, in particular beauty editing, that I have VERY strong opinions about but won't discuss here in this post!) Paintings and drawings that I might wish just had a little tweak here, or a whole other colour palette, can be changed in an instant. I can then save the files and have them printed out.
Giclee printing is another benefit of the digital age. It has become very acceptable within the artistic community to have an edition of Giclee prints, just as it is to have an edition of etchings, lithographs or linocuts! And screen printing nowadays is also a digital wonder. You can design beautiful and intricate pictures either freehand or in Illustrator or other art programs, and send them straight through online to screen printing companies that will essentially mass produce them for you, for a relatively small cost. The resulting print will still have the look and feel of any other print, and no-one need ever know if you did do it entirely digitally. Of course, maybe you want people to know that you have done it digitally. It is after all, just another medium we have at our disposal these days, for creating beautiful and unique works of art.

Tonight I have been playing around (and I say playing around because I am SUCH an amateur with it!), editing one of my drawings. I love this pen drawing - done with a Faber Castell Pitt Indian Ink pen. But I love the effects I was able to come up with by digitally playing around with them. So much that I am going to have one of them printed as a Giclee edition.

Phoenix rises (along with Stickman!) C. 2010

I think that as our world evolves, the art community, and therefore what is considered art, has to evolve with it. People don't want blase. They want amazing. They want to be moved by what they see. That emotion is different in everybody, and that is one part of art that will never change. The creative process that leads an artist to make something that someone, somewhere will find amazing hasn't changed. That will always remain, no matter how digital we get.