Studio Time

I did digital art exclusively for many years. Quite a few years back (2010 or so), I got fed up with it, tossed the computers and went back to doing art with traditional media. A couple of years ago, I decided that the decision to erase computers from my life entirely might have been overly hasty and started to integrate them back into my artistic workflow.

Inkscape is a vector editing program. It’s open source, very capable and “free“.

I sort of wonder if the idea of automatism and that of digital drawing are all that compatible. I suppose that’s an artistic, philosophical quandary that I’ll deal with at some point but, for the time being, the program does offer a way of creating “scribbles” that are infinitely editable and that print cleanly and precisely. It’s an experiment that I’m having some good results with.

Doing things digitally gives me results that are strangely modernist. I get the feeling that some of the work would fit into the mid 1950s very well. It doesn’t provide the same sort of release that working with traditional media does. It’s cerebral with nothing really physical involved. There is no “random” to speak of. I’m sort of tempering that by using the drawings as sketches and adding “random”, paint effects and so on with actual paint.