“soul”

Now and then I make the mistake of looking at threads on DA’s forum about whether or not digital art is “really” “art”. Usually the arguments for “not” seem to center around (a) the lack of an “original copy” and (b) the perceived lack of “soul” in the work.

Now the “original copy” argument, I think is just fetishization of scarcity. I like that my art has no “original” to lose; it’s just a whole bunch of files that I back up to several places. I could run naked out of my burning apartment and lose no more than a few hours of work at best. If you want to fetishize scarcity like that, I guess that’s okay, but it’s sure not my idea of a good time.

The other thing – the lack of “soul” – is a weirder thing. I’ve never really been able to parse why digital art wholly lacks this quality; often proponents of this tend to point to the actual brushstrokes, erasures, and other maker’s marks found within the work.

And really, this one? This one is just weird. Because when I look at my pre-digital work, the look I’ve always been chasing is one that’s simplified, stripped down, and free of maker’s marks. I’ve been drawn to methods of making large fields of solid color for years, and the less there is to them, the better. Cut paper, silk screen, airbrush, stencils, they all involve huge amounts of pre-planning that suck the life and spontaneity from my work. With Illustrator, I can just stop thinking about all of that and draw.

Arguably, this is what you get when I bare my soul: inhumanly precise shapes and lines, the eerie grace of a robot’s dance.