Going Digital: British
Artists Wrestle With
High-Tech Dilemma
Article by Helen Burggraf
LONDON - For some who studied art in college in the days before personal computers became commonplace, the incessant talk these days about digital art can be disconcerting. Terms like giclee prints, Wacom tablets, colour gamut, dpi, spi, ppi and quadtone--to many of those whose adult lives have been spent struggling to master such skills as scumbling, wet-into-wet and grisaille--are enough to make them contemplate following Gauguin to Tahiti and staying there.
But such an extreme reaction is probably uncalled for. Art industry experts here in Britain, including those at the art college level, stop short of warning artists working only in traditional mediums to "go digital" if they wish to avoid being left behind.
Just as electronic music has not put the world's symphony orchestras (or jazz bands) out of business, they say, it seems there will always be a market for the traditional oil portrait; the watercolour painted on location in Tuscany; the pastel sketch of a client's beloved Persian cat.
However, as James Faure Walker, 55, a conventionally-trained British artist who has been combining traditional mediums with (self-taught) digital techniques for the past 15 years, puts it, "If you are a painter now, you'd be pretty stupid not to use this technology, it's so fantastic."
What's more, Faure Walker thinks, if history's most respected artists were alive today, they would tend to agree with him.
Of course, Michelangelo Buonarroti and Pablo Picasso would not be alone in being confused, at least initially, by what is meant by 'digital art.' This is because the term these days encompasses a wide range of techniques and finished art forms, from digitally-composed videos to 'paintings' produced entirely on a computer screen, to multi-media installations that seem closer to films than to art. The slow-motion, film-like works of American artist Bill Viola, for example, which were featured in a show at London's National Gallery on Trafalgar Square, seem almost intentionally-designed to defy easy categorisation as either digital art or film.
Even reproductions of conventionally-produced artworks, printed out on the latest generation of ink-jet printers, and making use of archival inks on specially coated papers that are designed to mimic genuine canvas and watercolour papers, are included in the wide-ranging and rapidly-evolving definition of digital art.
Perhaps not surprisingly, it is precisely this wide-ranging definition of digital art that makes it difficult to measure the size of the market for it, or to track sales and trends -- let alone to predict the job prospects for the growing numbers of art school graduates emerging each year into the workforce with increasingly sophisticated digital art skills.
In the last three to five years, most British art colleges have added to or expanded their digital offerings, with BA, MA and even PhD courses that would have been little more than a twinkle in the paint-flecked eyes of college administrators back in the 1990s.
Meantime, instructors at some of these institutions report that even students studying traditional disciplines like drawing or illustration are turning to their computers whenever they feel a whim to do so -- as naturally, they say, as you might expect of a generation that cannot remember a time when there wasn't at least one PC in the family home.
Observes Andy Stiff, 40, subject leader of the MA Digital Arts program at Camberwell College in London: "Some of our younger students coming through the college now are just happy to pick up any piece of software, sit and play with it for a day, and teach themselves how to use it -- without any kind of formal training or even reading the manual. They just understand the computer language."
Beginning this fall, Stiff's program at Camberwell is being expanded to allow students to do the coursework online from anywhere, including outside the UK.
Four years ago, Chelsea College of Art & Design in London took the bold decision to add a new department, called Design Communication, in recognition of "an increasing blurring of boundaries between art and communication, and between traditional skills base and emerging technologies," according to Geoff Thomas-Shaw, the new department's director. The course runs from the foundation level up to PhD.
Thomas-Shaw says he sees one of his primary missions as being "to (instil in the students) a balance between the creative aesthetic and technical skills."
"If they master that balance," he adds, "they are incredibly employable -- even right out of college."
Some commercial applications of digital art, of the kind today's computer-trained art college grads might aim for, are hard to miss. These include eye-catching magazine and advertising art, creative graphic and website designs, 3D imaging, digital animation, and films, of which Walking With Dinosaurs and Lord of the Rings are among the best-known examples.
Stiff says many of his students are also finding work providing film visuals for music clubs, festivals and other events, particularly in Europe, where local governments and arts organisations often provide funding in an effort to help rejuvenate economically-depressed areas. At Chelsea College, Thomas-Shaw says his students are already working with London businesses to produce ambient music videos, a label and identity for a new record company, illustrations, graphic designs, and other projects.
The use of digital technology in fine art, however, is widely believed to have yet to register in the minds of much of the general public, beyond a vague sense in some quarters, some say, that it is a form of "cheating,"
Some digital artists even worry that many ordinary consumers, looking to fill an empty wall of their drawing room with a piece of 'original' art, may instinctively avoid buying a digital work for this reason. (Recent news reports that the Andy Warhol Authentication Board is claiming many so-called original Warhol prints are in fact not genuine Warhols, and thus are not as valuable as their owners presumed them to be, can hardly have boosted consumer confidence in the market for fine art prints of any kind.)
It's also an open secret in the digital art world that, as a result of such perceived concerns, some digital artists are less than forthcoming about their use of digital processes in their work if it is not immediately obvious--a practice that, even if not widespread, cannot ultimately be good for the category's long-term reputation.
But despite such concerns, digital artists say there are also some encouraging signs. For one thing, a small but growing number of consumers are becoming educated about digital fine art, and are actively open to buying it. Major shows by artists like Viola, in prestigious venues like the National Gallery, it's felt, will help enormously. Meanwhile, a trend towards more contemporary home furnishings may also help to move digital artwork that is modern in feeling and looks good with sofas and chairs, some observers say.
Then too, as the first generation of art lovers to have grown up with computers comes of age and begins to buy homes, resistance to digitally-created art will naturally drop, believes Keith Watson, 43, who owns the Deluxe Gallery in trendy Hoxton Square, East London. The Deluxe, which is located a few doors down from the White Cube Gallery (where a recent show by British bad boy of art Damien Hirst was held), is one of Britain's only galleries to specialise in digital art.
"The market for digital art is younger than that for oils and watercolours," Watson explains, "and many of these younger people, who would buy digital art (now) if they could, don't yet have the money. They're not at the kind of level where they can just afford to go and spend £500, let alone £5,000, on a digital artpiece.
"But when they are older, and have the house, and want to furnish it, then, I think, you may begin to see much higher sales, especially of the [more expensive] video and screen-based digital art."
According to a number of British digital artists and others in the field, Britain lags behind such countries as Germany and the US in embracing digital fine art. So much so that some digital artists here, including Faure Walker -- who is among Britain's most successful digital artists -- go abroad at least some of the time to sell their works.
"I think one reason the market for digital art in England is not as established as that in America or Europe may be because we have more of a reputation for conceptual art, and people don't see digital art as being so conceptual," observes Watson.
"But for the artists themselves, it is the ideas behind the art that matter, not how they are creating it.
"A lot of digital artists I know came from painting, sculpture, and photography backgrounds, but they use the computer in their art simply because it allows them to best express their ideas."
Watson cautions against reading too much into digital fine art's relatively modest current sales profile, or the fact that virtually all Britain's best-known digital artists supplement their earnings from sales of their art by working as graphic designers, web designers, or by teaching at local art colleges. Contemporary art is always a niche market, he notes, and artists have always taught and taken on commercial jobs in between doing their serious work in order to help pay their bills.
Denise Laurent, a London-based artist, agrees. She took up digital painting after she developed an allergy to white spirit and had to give up her oils. Having subsequently discovered she wasn't allergic to turpentine ("thank god"), she now goes back and forth between conventional oil paints on canvas and digital oils, and specialises in commissioned portraits of cats.
In addition to selling her paintings, she also sells limited edition prints, does graphic design, web design, and even writes.
"All sorts of people are buying digital art now, because there are museums and websites devoted to it, and also because there are lots of people who frankly don't care how an image was created," Laurent says. "They like an image and they just want to buy it and put it on their wall.
"If you tell people you're a digital artist, they sometimes say, 'oh, well you're just using a computer', as though you're somehow cheating", she admits. "But you never, ever hear anybody say, 'well, so what, you're a painter, anybody can pick up a brush and paint'. But of course, anybody can. It's only ever when technology is involved that people begin to think that somehow, you must be cheating.
"The fact is, it might take me just as long to paint a painting digitally as it takes me to do it on canvas," Laurent continues. "Because it's not so much the act of putting a brush on canvas that is the problem, but the thinking process that goes into it, which the computer doesn't help with at all. I know artists who paint in acrylics on canvas who can turn out three paintings a day. Me, I'm lucky if I can get one out a week, even using my computer.
"I think the problem for digital artists is that we have to somehow show people that we work just as hard as any other kinds of artists, because in the end, we're just as much artists as they are."
Helen Burggraf is a London-based American writer who studied fine art as well as journalism while at college in the US, before working for many years as a business journalist in New York. Most recently she has been writing for British publications, including Artists & Illustrators magazine, a London-based monthly for practicing artists published by Quarto Magazines Ltd.
A version of this article first appeared in Artists & Illustrators magazine, London ( www.aimag.co.uk )
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