Digital Line Versus Drawn Line

Digital art is hard. I've been experimenting with it on an outstanding comic project that I'm working on and it isn't easy to approach. Maybe my tablet is too small, or I simply haven't committed to making it work, but there is something about creating a digital file that just doesn't excite me for this project in particular.

But I wonder exactly what I need to do to make it work. And wonder exactly what it is that I have issue with. And I've decided that when I try to start an image that is purely digital, I get lost in the abstractedness of the method of input. When I have a 11x17 piece of paper with a 10x15 working space, and I set pencil to paper, overlap it with ink and then scan it into a digital file--I still have a physical understanding of the images I've created. I think I take for granted the mark I leave on what I create.

Drawings are nothing but the evidence of action--my pencil touches paper in a specific pattern and all facilities accounted for, I am left with a physical memory of of where my hand was and how it moved at a specific time in a specific place. This isn't all there is to drawing, but it is a base element.

When I touch a stylus to a drawing tablet that is connected to my computer, the process is altered. The lines I make on the screen, though analogue to the movements I've made, are only digital interpretations of a movement that once existed. They are physically different to a line on a piece of paper, and indeed, exist as without physical form. Sure, when I draw a line on a tablet, a line shows up on my screen, but that line is only suggestive of physicality--it exists as data to give the illusion that a physical action once occurred and when all is said, is hollow in content.

A digital line, no matter how suggestive, fluid, or varied, can still be broken down into a series of ones and zeros. Ons and offs. yeses and nos. But a drawn line isn't so easily analyzed. Yes, the line still may exist in a similar fashion to it's digital counterpart, but no matter how far it is analyzed, it can never be defined by a simple binary. The weight of the line, the hand of the artist, the rapid dulling of the tool, the slight powdering of the graphite, the slight burr of the paper and the pencil cuts into it; all these elements cannot be replicated by current programming prowess. And maybe it is these imperfections that I crave when I compose images purely digitally. It isn't as though digital art has no place--quite the opposite--but no matter how far we come, the gap only continues to widen between a line on a computer screen and a line on a piece of paper.

Reading to Write

Typically, I don't read. Call me ignorant or uneducated, but anything that I can't stumble across while browsing the Internet isn't worth my time. Unfortunately, I'm an intellectual at heart, and hold a University degree in the Visual Arts from a school that was heavily theory-based (it was heavily practice-based too, but I'm talking theory right now, and that shit was heavy). When you're not the kind of person who enjoys picking up a book and reading it and your degree depends on it, you spend a lot of time searching through piles of books for snippets of information. My peers all know dates and artists and movements and events, but I am terrible to talk to about anything outside of my field of interest, because I never bothered to commit these things to memory. I was satisfied knowing that if it ever came up, I could probably Google it or--if worse came to worse--go to the library and do the fact-mining that got me through my degree. Yes, I was quite the prospector in my day.

But, much to my dismay, that's not enough. I say this as a bibliophobe that I am: I need to read more than just what I'm directly interested in. I've always known that the broad reading that is required of students is important for expanding one's interests, but it is only now, on the other side of the scholastic journey, that I realize it is absolutely essential.

As an artist I think I know what my work is about and no one can really tell me otherwise, because I made it and so I have a personal knowledge of my intentions. Yes, I'm sure that my art has elements that I'm not actively aware of, but my awareness of this unawareness is still a form of awareness; but as an intellectually-driven artist, this drives me crazy. Practices that are based in sound theoretical boundaries conform to more than just my own biases. And I need to be aware that not only are there elements in my work that I didn't intend to include, but that their inclusion is, in fact, the intention of the work itself.

Taking into account the holy-trinity of art: the artist, the art, and the viewer; I, as the artist, engage in an open dialogue with the art and the artist. But of these three members of the artistic trinity, only the art has a chance of living on indefinitely. My intentions and the interpretations of the viewer are subjective, transient, and insistent upon the art. The art however, exists only as itself. It doesn't take into consideration how it is being read or interpreted, and those readings and interpretations that it inspires do not change the physical dimension of a work of art.

For the sake of myself, and my ability to read and interpret my own actions, I need to read and interpret the actions of others like me, and others unlike me. I could sit around on Wikipedia reading all day about comics, and folklore, and popular culture, and link in back to my work easily. But art isn't about what something is, necessarily. It's about what it isn't. And for that, it's not good enough to read about the narrative structure of comics. I need to read about things that I don't consider when making art, and figure out why my work isn't that. In doing so, I might be able to figure out exactly what my art is and why it is that. Maybe, also, I will discover that my art is something entirely different than I would have ever thought.

Why?