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Extract from Guardian article by Sean Dodson
Artists who paint by digits
The mouse and keyboard are taking their place alongside the brush and chisel for a new generation of artists, reports Sean Dodson
Thursday November 30, 2000
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Although digital technology allows digital works to be produced in vast quantities, not all digital artists are using computers to produce unlimited editions of their work. Penelope Wakeham (http://www.penelope.wakeham.btinternet.co.uk/), a Winchester-based painter, has been using computer technology for years. However, her prints are unique and cannot be reproduced exactly.
Wakeham paints not with a brush and canvas but with a mouse and a computer screen - usually using a package such as PhotoShop. She prints out her paintings in the usual way, but that is where any similarity with David Austen ceases. Because next she fixes the ink with a transparent medium (eg varnish), allows the medium to dry, and peels off the paper leaving a thin, brittle sheet of ink and medium. Wakeham then pastes the sheet on to a canvas or board. Each painting usually takes three or four layers of ink. This she says gives her paintings the kind of depth we see on a computer screen but never on a printed copy.
"Using digital technology to produce images that look like photographs, drawings or paintings is just reinventing the wheel," says Wakeham. "The computer must have its own means of expression. In my work, I endeavour to take something of the screen - be that computer monitor, cinema screen or television and paint with it. I want to take the image, saturated with light and give it physicality and texture. My work is digital and unique. Each piece is a one off unrepeatable work created using a computer as the tool by which pigment is distributed."
Other artists are embracing digital technology in novel ways. Former Turner Prize nominee Mark Wallinger has used digital technology to produce a 3-D text-based work. Credo is currently on show at Tate Liverpool. It includes two passages from the New Testament and requires the use of special glasses. After the show it will then be reproduced in a limited edition set and distributed on CD. While Tomoko Takahashi, more recently shortlisted for the Turner, has already produced Word Perfect , a web-based work that examines the effect that word processors have on language.
But although a number of professional artists are taking to the computer, it is in the colleges where it they are most common. Trudy Stephenson is a promoter of artists still at college. She represents artists like Anthony Gross, who is currently studying for an MA at Goldsmiths and who makes wall sized computer generated prints that evoke games technology. "Artist are always interested in new technology," says Stephenson. "And you don't have to be a whizz at computers. I think that you can sometimes produce better work if you don't have any experience in that field because you see thing in a totally new light."
In March, Tate Britain will host its first exhibition of internet art. The exhibition will follow high-profile shows in the US at the Whitney Museum in New York and Walker Centre in Minneapolis. Each work will celebrate the use of new technology. But the work of Austen, Wakeham and Gross proves that digital works are not that easy to tell from the non-digital. Next time you see a work of contemporary painting or sculpture or photography, ask yourself this question: Just what role has a computer played in producing that particular work of art?
For complete article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4098317,00.html
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