Creativity with an app: but is it art?
EVERYONE is an artist,” said German performance artist, sculptor, installation artist, graphic artist and art theorist Joseph Beuys.
It was, of course, more of a call to creative thinking in every endeavour, not only in the traditional creative arts, which, as Pablo Picasso pointed out, are the realm of all children but are something for which we tend to lose our innate ability once we become adults. (“All children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.”)
“Art,” according to the Collins dictionary at hand, is “the creation of works of beauty or other special significance”, which I like to think makes me sort of an artist too, although in the field of photography, not fine art, as I can’t draw to save my life and would have great difficulty in distinguishing a Monet from a Manet.
My traditional photography skills are what they are, mostly self-taught but with a smattering of formal tuition back in the days when shooting on film was the only option available and any postprocessing you chose to do happened in a darkroom. I still fancy myself a dab hand with a single-lens reflex camera (digital now, of course), but the truly striking and breathtaking images are the ones I create on my iPhone (or, in case you didn’t read last week’s column, my wife’s iPhone, which I have on loan for a while). It’s a simple technique I developed myself using high dynamic range and a couple of contrast filters, but the results, according to many of those who view them, are works of art. So, am I an artist too (even though I am not)?
(It reminds me of the argument I have always enjoyed having with musicians I’ve played with: that they are musicians but I am just a drummer; I can play the drums but I am clueless about the theory of music and wouldn’t
Art-related tech doesn’t have the ability to turn artless hacks into artistic masters, but it does have its uses anyway
know a C flat from an F sharp. I make rhythms, not music.)
So, technology — a few iPhone apps in my case — makes artistic photography easy. How does it benefit “real” artists, such as my aforementioned wife, who has a degree in fine arts and actually stands daily in front of an easel dabbing oil paint onto a canvas using arcane-sounding techniques such as scumbling and glazing?
Just as with smartphone photography, which turned almost everyone into a photographer overnight, there are literally thousands of apps available for Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android smartphone operating systems that claim to make it easy for anyone to become a visual artist.
One of the most renowned of these is Brushes ($4.99 in Apple’s iTunes Store), and for good reason — actual artists have made quite unbelievable “paintings” on it, using just their fingers (and the adjustable brush settings in the app) to approximate brushes on canvas, including Jorge Colombo, who famously painted the cover art of an edition of New Yorker magazine using it.
From Brushes to TypeDrawing and Vellum, Sketchbook Pro to Auryn Ink, there’s an app to bring out the inner artist in you, although, as with the real thing, it helps if there actually is an inner artist in you to begin with. Without it, you’re no more likely to create a masterpiece than if you stuck to doing what you do badly on paint and canvas instead.
So, no, art-related technology doesn’t have the ability to turn artless hacks into artistic masters, but it does have its uses anyway. My wife rejoices at being able to source various reference materials for her paintings on an iPad, which she keeps alongside her as she works, instead of expensively and laboriously printing them out. As for me, using an app called iDrumTech, I can adeptly tune my 12-inch tom to A.