Art and the Technical
I’ve been taking an art class at the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria. It’s a lot of fun, and I’m learning a lot, but I think there’s something many traditional artists could learn from me. Computers are hard to use.
We were discussing perspective in class and my teacher was talking about drawing boxes. “In the rennasaince,” she was saying, “perspective was like computers: a technology that changed the world.” This comparison seemed a little off to me, but it was what she said next that irked me — “your friends might not be able to draw a box by hand, but they can probably draw one on the computer in, like, thirty seconds.”
Then again, maybe not.
A friend of mine, an art student, gets this kind of dismissive attitude on a daily basis. She likes digital media, but she’s more than capable with traditional media like pastels. Some of her pieces are incredibly vivid. Nevertheless, some of her fellow students — and even professors — think so little of the digital media they tend to assume she can’t draw at all. They assume the computer does all the work for her, and they’re surprised when they finally see her more traditional work.
That’s one of the strange things about computers. Many people have difficulty using computers, but they thing anyone else can do anything at all with the beasts with little more than a snap of the fingers. In reality, computers — especially the art programs — can be mighty difficult to use. Just because the computer can do something doesn’t mean you can make it do it, any more than all the expressive techniques inherent in charcoal make its users instant masters.
Besides, art generally isn’t about media anyway. Art is about seeing something and communicating that vision to other people. The computer might be able to render a human figure, for example, but an understanding of composition, color, and perspective are all still needed. In fact, more often than not a digital artist has to understand spatial relationships, qualities of light, and human anatomy on a technical level, whereas a traditional artist can rely more on perception and intuition.
Since I’ve already alluded to it, let’s take as an example a program by Curious Labs called “Poser.” Poser lets digital artists create three-dimensional human figures for their art relatively simply, and is the subject of some sneering by traditional artists.
The fact that Poser can create the human figure, however, does not save that much work for the artist. The artist must still find a natural-looking pose for the figure (a problem not generally encountered when drawing from a model). Furthermore, the artist must be able to arrange lights properly to light the model, find a suitable point of view, and even decide which camera “focal length” to simulate. Someone drawing from a model need only draw what they see — a difficult proposition, to be sure, but not one that requires a great deal of technical knowledge. The Poser artist has to shape the figure, pose the figure, and light the figure, drawing on what he or she knows of anatomy, studio lighting, and photographic conventions. Furthermore, the artist must have the technical ability to compensate for the failings of the program — its tendency to create doll-like figures and its tendency to create images with an infinite depth-of-field. (Three-D art programs tend to render distant objects with the same visual clarity as nearby objects, which significantly adds to the artificial hyper-realistic appearance of much digital art.)
Digital media, like all media, has its limitations and strengths. A good artist knows what media is needed to communicate his or her message — whether it’s charcoal, crayons, or pixels. The focus on the media itself instead of the individual aesthetic qualities of a piece is misplaced, as is any judgement of art based on how difficult or simple the viewer perceives the creation of the piece to have been. The focus should be on how well the piece communicates its message, instead.