ARTY FACTS

Dick Pountain /Idealog 363/ 05 Oct 2024 03:05

When I’m not writing this column, which let’s face it is most of the time, I perform a variety of activities to keep me amused. Apart from walking, cooking, reading, listening to music (live and recorded), playing and fettling guitars, I have a couple of computer-based ‘hobbies’, namely making computer-generated music and computer-generated pictures (non-moving). I recently restarted work on my Python-based computer composition system Algorhythmics – which I described here back in issue 306 – after a four-year rest. What prompted me was viewing a YouTube video about the Indian mathematician D. R. Kaprekar and some interesting numbers he discovered, so I set-up Algorythmics to compose a short piano sonata around two of his numbers, and it sounds like a fairly pleasing mashup of Ravel, Janáček and Satie.

I’ve been documenting my efforts at visual art in this column for over 20 years as I marched through successive generations of paint software from Paintshop Pro to Photoshop Elements to Sumo Paint to Artflow. I loved art at school and can use both paint and pencil reasonably well, but I’ve never been tempted to use either seriously since I discovered the computer (any more than I’m tempted to write articles with a quill pen since I discovered the word-processor). The crux is editability: once you discover the infinite flexibility of digital imagery it’s hard to give up this ability to experiment, redo and correct without wasting paper, canvas and paint. Images on a screen certainly lack the texture of proper paintings, but then I’m strictly an amateur with no realistic ambition to make a living selling my work.

I’ve also been into photography ever since the 1960s and my computer explorations began by processing snaps to make them look like paintings, which taught me how to use layers and blend-modes to take total control of both the colour and tonal content. Later I began using this knowledge to create purely abstract images.

It won’t have escaped anyone in the habit of watching Instagram, Facebook or YouTube reels that there’s a remarkable revival of abstract painting going on right now among the social-media savvy younger generations. Unlike me they’re not working in the digital domain but rather in the messy and expensive domain of wet paint. Under various labels like fluidart, spinart and poured art they’re making dynamic action paintings – Jackson Pollock style – by pouring multicoloured acrylic paints onto a canvas, manipulating it using palette knives and then spinning and tipping it to produce a finished image. Often they incorporate silicone-based additives that introduce cell-like patterns of bubbles, and the results have a very particular biological look. Some of them are very attractive indeed and nearly all are highly decorative. I doubt that many of these folk consider their products to be high art but they are highly saleable, and that’s on top of any revenues that derive from successful social media hits, which is just as well as the costs in canvas and acrylic paint must be considerable.       

I'm very keen myself on early 20th-century modernist abstract art, especially Vassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Sonia Delaunay. I don’t set out to imitate their works but merely play around using digital processing on a starting image, which could be a photograph, a clip from a website or a digital image that I draw by hand. Mostly I just use a mouse nowadays (I’ve had several Wacom tablets in the past) since my starters are so simple. Another way I sometimes start is by using Zen Brush 3 on my Samsung Galaxy Tab, a delightful finger-painting program with extraordinarily realistic watercolour bleeding effects, and then send the result to my Chromebook via Android’s Nearby Share. Then I spend some time layering, blending, smudging and slicing until I see something I like, which does indeed tend to mean something that reminds me of one of my modernist mentors. 

I’m not at all tempted to go in for fluidart myself to make money, even though those attractive canvases are more readily marketable than digital prints. That’s not only because I don’t have a garage in which I can splatter paint up the walls, but also because whenever I watch these artists at work on Facebook, more often than not I find the earliest part of a new work the most pleasing but then they keep adding too many colours and over-do it. So, while watching one particularly spectacular piece I hit ‘Watch Again’, then hit || to stop it at an early stage I liked better, took a screenshot and used that as a starter for my own piece! This potentially raises a novel legal issue about copyright and plagiarism: I froze a moment in time that didn’t make it into the final painting, so was I really stealing…. 

[You can see six of Dick Pountain’s abstracts at https://www.facebook.com/dick.pountain/posts/pfbid02UBtGRbAU7aTLSPYjeyTebxJUjMJ6EME6cKd5iqYBsYcdbaPCPrUNxZNqJhE48rSKl and hear his Kaprekar tune at https://soundcloud.com/dick-pountain/kaprekar-sonatina]