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Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Visual Art Art That Really Looks Like This

Posted by Jen Graves on Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 11:43 AM

I'm not really in love with these iPhone paintings by David Hockney, but I'm in love with the idea that they were made to be seen pretty much exactly the way you're looking at them now. Or almost exactly.

Lawrence Weschler writes:

Over the past six months, Hockney has fashioned literally hundreds, probably over a thousand, such images, often sending out four or five a day to a group of about a dozen friends, and not really caring what happens to them after that. (He assumes the friends pass them along through the digital ether.) These are, mind you, not second-generation digital copies of images that exist in some other medium: their digital expression constitutes the sole (albeit multiple) original of the image.

The flood of images has more or less resolved itself into three streams. To begin with, portraits, and mainly self-portraits at that—perhaps playing on the way that an iPhone's blackened screen, when off, already functions as a sort of Claude Lorrain—style darkened glass, reflecting back a ghostly image of the user's face. (Intriguingly, the reflected face in the blackened screen is approximately twice the size of the same face if one turns the iPhone around to snap a photographic self-portrait. "But that's how it always is with photography," Hockney points out. "It inevitably pushes the world away. That's just one of its many problems." Hockney's drawings, as it were, bring the face back to full scale.)

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I'm in love with Jorge Colombo's New Yorker covers that he drew on his iPhone.

Posted by care bear on October 7, 2009 at 12:00 PM

#1: Oh yes! I first noticed these a few months back and they are pretty sweet. Here are a few links:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/tn…

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/tn…

Posted by Marie on October 7, 2009 at 12:25 PM

And the first time I saw examples from that iPhone app was last winter by Goro Fujita. He is an animator and did a few wonderful iPhone drawings.

http://chapter-56.blogspot.com/search/la…

Posted by Marie on October 7, 2009 at 12:33 PM

google "colors ds",some great stuff on there from the Nintendo homebrew program Colors.

Posted by jns on October 7, 2009 at 2:36 PM

"But that's how it always is with photography," Hockney points out. "It inevitably pushes the world away. That's just one of its many problems."

So says Mr. iPhone Finger Paint. Fuck you, dick.

Posted by Greg on October 7, 2009 at 9:27 PM