Fingerpainting 2.0
My dad was an artist who used oils, and later pastels, to create some beautiful landscapes and designs. I was thinking about him this week when I read about a British artist who has exchanged canvas for the medium of iPad and iPod screens to produce some innovative art.
Not sure Dad would have understood, but he would have appreciated the risk-taking nonetheless.
People chat in front of British artist David Hockney's artwork at the Pierre Berge Foundation in Paris Monday. "Canvas is just so 20th Century." That's the lesson of Hockney's new exhibit using the Brushes application for iPhones and iPads. (AP photo/Thibault Camus)
Replacing canvas
The British artist is David Hockney, and he unveiled his work in Paris recently in a show still underway. As the Associated Press reports on Hockney’s creations: “Canvas is just so 20th century. That’s the message of David Hockney’s new Paris exhibition, where glowing iPads and iphones – their screens a changing medley of still lives and landscapes created … on the ‘Brushes’ application – replace traditional canvases.”
Lessons from kindergarten
You might call it Fingerpainting 2.0
So, instead of perusing framed portraits, abstracts, and landscapes, visitors to Hockney’s exhibition stare at dozens of plastic and steel contraptions made up of the hi-tech screens and wall adaptors. Each of them feature a cascade of color objects highly defined by the magic of digital technology.
A famed pop artist, Hockney has named the show, “Fleurs fraiches” or “Fresh Flowers.” The name is pegged to the still lives he paints with the iPhone Brushes application that lets you use your finger as a paintbrush. The name also connotes the immediacy of the show, which is updated regularly with new images.
A Where’s Waldo element
And, by the way, those images are e-mailed to the Paris exhibit by Hockney from wherever he is in the world at the moment.
A new kind of flowers by wire delivery system.
Brushes began as a communication medium but it has evolved into more of an artistic endeavor by Hockney. Over the past 18 months the artist has created more than 1,000 drawings, first on his iPhone and then on the larger iPad, curator Charles Schelps told the AP.
“He would lie in bed and draw what he was seeing – the scenes out his window, his desk, or more often than not, the bouquet on his bedside table,” Schelps said. “And then he would e-mail the latest drawings to his friends. Besides the 20 or 30 people who get his e-mails, this work has never been seen before.”
For artists on the go
The Brushes painting application was designed by Steve Sprang for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. It is the winner of the Apple Design Award for 2010 and it was even used by artist Jorge Colombo to create the cover of the June 1, 2009 issue of The New Yorker.
The iPad. less than a year old, already is becoming a new creative medium for artists like David Hockney and Jorge Colombo. Will this high-tech fingerpainting catch on? (AP Photo/Angelo Carconi).
Brushes uses an advanced “color picker,” together with several kinds of electronic brushes that are moved by the touch of a finger. The application features multiple layers, extreme zooming, and a simple and deep interface.
It allows the user to choose any color using the hue/saturation color wheel, and you can undo your mistakes easily and move on from there.
The application also features a Brushes Viewer that makes a video capturing each step of how you compose your painting.
Removing the oops factor
Jorge Colombo says he depends a lot on the “undo” feature of Brushes saying, “It looks like I draw everything with supernatural assurance and very fast – it gets rid of all the hesitations.”
Further evidence of the suggestion found in the virtual unknown as elsehwere, “If you build it, they will come.”
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Comments
another cool feature by apple to revolutionize technology. i think this a very cool app of combining technology and art onto one canvas. also how detailed it is and professional it looks makes it something somone can take serious enough to make it a actual skill.i think it opens eyes up to the detail of art and technology, a person like me that as no art taste at all really shows me the beauty of art that i never notices before because im into computers. if computers can now take the work of art and turn it into a program on a computer it makes me think where else can computers take us and will people of this generation take for granted what are considers skills and just look at them as another software application?
I am an amateur artist and I do enjoy to draw, paint. etc. This is amazing! I actually have never heard of it before. I am really liking the mentioned “undo” feature…that is incredible…if only there was such a feature on real painting. However, there is only one concern that pops into my head–The medium is the message. We first shape the medium and then the medium shapes us…our way of doing the message. Can relying solely on technology to mediate our artistic talents take away from our physical intellect of art and the touch-feel phenomenon?
This is crazy! to think that technology has evolved into creating art by just the touch of a finger instead of a stroke of a paintbrush or other tools. I guess it is important to recognize that technology really is creative in itself because having these recourses and advanced tools is something that we are privileged to have, but I don’t like how technology takes away tradition of how things were done and should be done. Art is know to be done in an old fashioned way, with a canvas and a paint brush, the same goes with many other things that technology is trying to advance and replace. I think that if everything is being categorized into touching based off technology then what is unique and creative about it really?
I think this is incredible! Personally, I am not very technology savvy or to be honest supportive. It drives me crazy when my boyfriend will be on his iphone playing games, checking sports score, on facebook, or doodling with apps like the Brushes app. Yes, new technology like the brushes app and emailing works of art is new and fresh and amazing. But to say that it is the new canvas is kind of sad. It is disheartening the technology and the internet and media has not only taken over journalism, newspapers, and traditionally print but now it is starting to overcome art as well. We know that music is computerized and altered and “touched up” just as photographs in magazines are doctored and airbrushed. But art? This show and these pictures are wonderful expressions and the fact that the artist can email them to people in the morning from his bed is amazing. But does that make them art? Make them worthy of showcase? I don’t know.
I am not by any means an artist myself but I think we need to be careful how far we let the internet and technology overtake our lives.