Why I prefer making Traditional Media over Digital
One of the unfortunate things caused by the propogation of the internet is the spread of images, reproduced and reprinted; virality, traversing fiber optic lines under oceans, through soil and through the trees, reducing art from a diverse set of mediums to being compressed into the virtual - encoded on the holographic surface of the internet like a black hole.
I experiment with multiple traditional media - currently I produce most of my works as acrylic paintings with metallic paint. These paintings dramatically change color at different perspectives, allowing them to be active and constantly changing. Few websites can convey the beauty of my paintings due to not owning the proper camera to convey it, and UI limitations on many websites, making it difficult to show the images in motion.
The motor disconnect from my brain to my stylus also impacts the quality of my work. When I interact with traditional media, like building a physical machine, I can feel the physical substances grinding against each other - I can feel the pencil press against the paper, the brush transforming the paint against the canvas. Many artists can adapt but I’ve always found this challenging, with my poor motor coordination, leaving my forms many times unsatisfying to me.
It’s not to say that I can’t draw digitally. One shouldn’t interpret this either as an excuse for lack of productivity. Nor should one see it as me claiming digital art is illegitimate. But rather, I want to encourage the reader to think how being glued to the mass-reproduced images of a website, materially alienated from a physical source, and its near requirement to be successful as an artist in the modern age, and the alienated nature of its production and physicality, limit the potential and possibilities of what art can be. The requirement to sell product favors this ever-accelerating reproductive factor, and the internet reaches nearly light speeds of this transformation.
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