Digital Fine Art Primer | Digital Art vs Traditional Art
DIGITAL FINE ART EXPLAINED
“Art is either alive or it isn’t. Art cannot be conveniently pinned down or demystified, precisely because it is metaphysical; if its creation is magic, then the art is magic.”
The Cosmic Toymaker | original fine art digital print by Eden Maxwell
It’s not the medium; it’s where the art comes from that matters.
Let me ask you a question that will provide a clear perspective on art media. If you’ve finished a thrilling novel, a page turner, a story that you connected with, would it matter whether the author wrote it on a computer, a typewriter, by longhand or dictated the story into a recorder? It’s the content that matters, not the method of transcription. The same principle applies to a painting and the artist.
A creator goes beyond the limits of working outside the box, realizing that there is no box. I am not the object of a modifier—that is, I am not a digital artist, nor an oil artist, or a pastel artist, and so on. When I paint that is my medium; when I write that is my medium; when I walk the doggies that is my medium. You get the picture.
Patrons: It’s not the medium; it’s where the art comes from that matters. I am an intuitive channel in the Zen sense who in a leap of faith transcends thinking to access the divine fire of the Collective Unconscious: the wellspring of all great art.
Fine art digitally made is not the product of loading a paint app onto a computer, pressing a key, and then the app creates a work of original art. It is the sapient artist who creates with whatever gift and with whatever medium. It is the artist who makes art, not the media or computer, which are merely a tools.
To further illustrate the point: Henri Matisse is often regarded as the most important French painter of the 20th century. In his late sixties, as ill health had prevented him from painting, he began cutting pre-painted sheets of paper into shapes of varying colors and sizes, arranging them into lively compositions. Matisse had invented a new medium, and scissors his chief implement.
“The True artist has no medium.
If the work speaks to you, stop analyzing and appreciate to your heart’s content.”
An artist can achieve things digitally not possible with old school traditional media. We do live in a digital world. Digital art is demanding, as there are many tools to master. One has to learn a painting app until it is transparent to the artist’s creation process. I incorporate what I had learned over the years with traditional media into my digital artwork.
With digitally made art, I can quickly select from a wide assortment of brushes and tools, mediums such as oil pastel, impasto, ink, pencil, watercolor, gauche, and so on. There is no messy or toxic cleanup.
My fine art prints are original and not copies or reproductions of other artworks.
“On his daunting quest for fulfillment, Eden had earned a remarkable distinction: for a decade, he was the one on one apprentice to a great Zen master artist.”
A lesson from a Renaissance master:
Leonardo da Vinci had worked with egg tempera that was long lasting, but the downside was that it dried too fast. When genius Leonardo learned of a rich new medium from Northern Europe called oils that would dry slowly, he immediately adopted oils into his toolkit allowing him the luxury of time to rework his paintings as needed and for weeks. Leonardo would have also embraced the digital medium.
My fine art digital paintings are the result of twenty-five years of experimentation with the premier digital art application: Corel Painter. I channel the transcendental Zen flow of universal intuition from my pen stylus into the quantum world of the computer, and then into an original fine art print using museum quality materials.