Paint’s wicked dead man. Its reached it’s colorful limits, and it’s gone my friends. Oil’s been replaced by new tech, and acrylic’s been swapped for Adobe. Why paint when a push of a button can give you brush strokes that beat out Bacon. Someone once told me that the world needs artists.
Yeah.
Graphic artists. The ones that memorize HTML and can map out Photoshop better than their own dorms. If you don’t know how to crack a good layering system, you’re screwed.
We are entering an age where the right brain is needed for everything. With growing technology and growing consumerism, the population deals with excessive art every second. To grab your attention nifty animations and high-flyin colors must be used on every billboard, every commercial, and every flashing campaign on the web. It’s no wonder graphic artists are in demand, holding 261,000 jobs in 2006. I love graphic art and could never be as good as some of these guys. But what happened to old school? The days when you whipped out your soul in a moment and got your hands dirty. To survive these trying days a kid needs to take four computer classes, two web classes, and you still need to tweak out over the Photoshop for dummies.
I miss the days when art was about passion and emotion.
Computers are sweet, but they don’t give you expressiveness. It may rock a robot version of painting , but it can’t copy Jackson Pollock.
When the history of art is looked at closely, technology and art have always mixed. Around 1846 is when the first permanent photograph was taken. In the 1880’s Alfred Stieglitz was a photographer who took a camera and hit up the big city taking pics of skyscrapers and everyday people, thus helping photography ease into the art world. Printmaking, in the beginning, was never used as an art form either. It wasn’t until the 18th century that primitive prints were being considered art. Then in the 1960’s Andy Warhol took screen printing and exploded, creating the Pop Art movement.
Whenever there is rad new technology that becomes visual, there’s a good chance that it will soon be planted in the art world. Only, never in history have artists grabbed on to growing technology so quickly. It’s undeniable that the next HUGE movement in art will have graphic design be it's major medium. Wannabe Warhol’s fawn keyboards nowadays instead of silk screens. And mock-up Dali’s cut and paste instead of think and paint. But you can’t be Warhol without a silk screen and you can’t be Dali without paint.
Art can be anything, I’m not saying that graphic art isn’t art, it is! A lot of it is really cool and amazing, but I think there’s something missing in it. There’s so much analyses and not enough core. Not enough passion. Sometimes, freaked up proportion and radical line work is a good thing. Sometimes, you just need to throw a ton of red paint at a canvas from across the room with all your might. Art movements, I mean the really really big ones; surrealism, abstract, cubism, they all have something to prove. A different point of view to get across. I worry what these look at me generations will prove. The next full-size movement won’t be in acrylic or oil; it’ll be trying to sell you something on your computer screen.
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