FRACT V FRICTION

Dick Pountain /Idealog 322/ 07 May 2021 01:10

There’s never been a better time to be a digital artist. Last night Channel 4 News had David Hockney talking about his new show of Spring landscapes painted on his iPad, at the Royal Academy. And back in March Michael Winkelman, aka ‘Beeple’, sold an NFT (non-fungible token) to his work , a collage of 5000 digital images, for a record $69,400,000. It was purchased by Vignesh Sundaresan, aka ‘MetaKovan’ who paid for it using 42,329 Ether digital currency.

I’m not quite in that class but I do consider myself a digital artist, and it must be true because I’ve put it on my business cards. It’s not just that I take digital photographs, which I discussed in last month’s column. I’ve also written here, a few years ago, about the way I took such photographs and turned them into ‘paintings’ by repeated transformation in Photoshop, using layers, filters and other effects. This kept me amused for quite a while, but eventually it palled: such processed photos have become a bit of a cliche in adverts and music vids, so I gave up for a while. 

Then in a major life change I deserted Windows for a Chromebook. I tried Photoshop Express online, but that didn’t cut it so I sought alternatives: there are capable photo editors like Pixlr, but none had all the filters I needed until I came across Sumo Paint, a sort of minor Photoshop clone for Chrome but with several whacky features of its own. One of those features was a ‘fractal morph’ filter, which takes any image created in the draw and paint section and applies a fractal transformation to it, with several adjustable parameters that create very striking, naturalistic looking images with fractal levels of detail. I soon became hooked, stopped working from photographs and started drawing simple, colourful, textured shapes, fractalising them, cropping and further processing them to create a new (to me) medium.

The results were pleasing, looking like very complex paintings that might have taken months to do with brush and pigment. And that after all is what digital art – from painting to synthesisers and drum machines – is all about, creative cheating, skipping the hard slog. You can see some of the results for yourself at my web site.

Greatly excited I naturally wanted to try and sell these images, to become a real artist who gets mashed in the Groucho Club every night. There were several obstacles though, the first and worst being resolution. Fractal morphing is very compute intensive, so runtime explodes with increasing image size and eventually crashes. The biggest initial drawings I could process were between 600x600 and 1000x1000 pixels (dependent on content), and though the results look great on screen, they’re too grainy when printed large. A partial solution is to resample them at 4000x4000 with interpolation, which looks smoother but fuzzes out fine details. A second obstacle is that no-one buys abstract prints like these off screen, and the substantial cost of printing and framing a lot of them on spec was an investment I was reluctant to make. 

A third obstacle is that Sumo Paint was Flash based, and Google terminated Flash support in Chrome in February 2021. Sumo’s authors brought out a new, non-Flash version – and it doesn’t have the fractal morph filter...  When I contacted them they told me they’d permit the older Flash-based app to run on Windows, so I now keep a digital museum piece: a Windows 8.1 installation running discontinued Flash and Sumo Paint. It feels rather precarious, a bit like painting in digital egg tempera.

Things have perked up a bit on the printing front though. A friend of mine who paints the old way in acrylics started putting her work on the Saatchiart website and selling plenty of it, and recommended I give it a try. Saatchi offers two different deals: they’ll print, frame, sell and deliver for you, deducting their commission, or they’ll pass buyers on to you and you deliver (which obviously she has to do with paintings). I’ve put some of my work up there under the first deal, but I’m getting nowhere near her level of sales because I’m selling only prints rather than ‘original artwork’, and most people who spend serious money on art want to own the original. Which makes me very curious indeed about Beeple and his NFTs. It seems crazy that people are prepared to spend millions to not own the original artwork, but it’s not that much crazier than Bitcoin or Ethereum, and when everyone is going crazy then it feels a bit crazy not to go crazy too.      

[Dick Pountain invites you to "get in on the ground floor" at https://www.saatchiart.com/account/artworks/1239765 ]