How We Got Here

We should talk about how my art journey is going. No, I’ll not start at the beginning. That would take too much time and all the twists and turns getting here would merely serve only to confuse us both. I recall a 64 count box of Crayolas with the built in sharpener. That was an early pivotal moment. The sheer abundance of colors and that wax smell. Perhaps some other time. 

This is all about my commitment to digital art. Why, when I was perfectly happy working in acrylic, pastel and sometimes clay, did I decide to grab a stylus and commit to this most ephemeral genre?

One thing that has always bothered me about traditional forms is that, for the most part, doing any of them always feels like being one step from disaster. A feeling that is totally inconsequential when relaxing at a sketch pad but downright debilitating when standing before a three foot panel alongside a client expecting results. In quite a few circumstances going off on a tangent is frowned upon. 

I craved a space where, if in the middle of a project I took off in a different direction just to see where it could take me, I wouldn’t be penalized with a canvas covered in mud and dead ends when eventually I got back to work. Digital does that. With a modest amount of preplanning I can recover from any error in judgement I might commit in the virtual space. 

That, to me, is liberating. It is as if I have permission to both draw inside and outside the lines at the same time without consequence. The space for experimentation is laid out before me. Nothing is real unless I say it is. Before that its all nothing but ones and zeroes. 

It doesn’t mean I don’t make mistakes, I do. If I decide to live with those mistakes, however, its my decision alone to make and not the result of some physical property of linseed oil and solvent. 

The downside of this devil’s bargain are the ones and zeroes themselves. They copy themselves so efficiently. Weeks of intensive work can find itself blasted across the globe almost faster than the time it takes to realize it’s escaped. But thats a totally different kind of anxiety that has a number of solutions.