{"id":3768,"date":"2020-07-17T19:49:10","date_gmt":"2020-07-17T19:49:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/instantloveland.com\/wp\/?p=3768"},"modified":"2020-07-17T19:51:16","modified_gmt":"2020-07-17T19:51:16","slug":"james-faure-walker-speed-and-limits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/instantloveland.com\/wp\/2020\/07\/17\/james-faure-walker-speed-and-limits\/","title":{"rendered":"James Faure Walker: ‘Speed Limits: Digital Paint and Abstract Painting’"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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James Faure Walker, \u2018Proposition VII, Green\u2019 (1991), composite inkjet print, 76 x 102cm <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

In his third piece as a writer-in-residence at Instantloveland, James Faure Walker recalls the resistance he encountered as a maker of digital art…<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2016, French Michelin-starred chef H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Darroze posted a Salade Ni\u00e7oise recipe on Facebook that included cooked potatoes and green beans. The reaction on Facebook from the \u2018purists\u2019 was quick and hostile \u2013 \u2018a massacre of the recipe\u2019, a \u2018sacrilege\u2019, and a violation of the \u2018ancestral traditions\u2019 of the salad. She was warned that it is \u2018dangerous to innovate\u2019.<\/em>1<\/a><\/sup>https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Salade_ni\u00e7oise<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the lockdown I have been working digitally. Unable to get to\nmy studio, I am confined to using paint software. I have been working this way for\nmore than thirty years, but normally in parallel with physical paint. I have\nbeen in reflective mood, painting without materials, painting without a studio.\nI have been thinking about a series I made in 1990 that I called \u2018Propositions\u2019<\/em>, and have wondered how my\ncurrent series compares.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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James Faure Walker, \u2018Consort\u2019 (2020), archival inkjet print, 53 x 65cm<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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James Faure Walker, \u2018Proposition VIII, White\u2019 (1991), composite inkjet print, 76 x 102cm<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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James Faure Walker, \u2018Ever Ready \u2018Sky Prince\u2019\u2019 (2020), archival inkjet print, 48 x 60cm<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Thirty years ago there was no internet to speak of, no social media, and by today\u2019s standards computers were primitive. The printer I used, a Xerox 4020, one of the first inkjets available, has vanished, even from eBay. \u2018Computer Art\u2019<\/em> had been the subject of the ICA\u2019s \u2018Cybernetic Serendipity\u2019<\/em> of 1968, but wasn\u2019t taken to be a serious art form going somewhere. Once I discovered what you could do \u2013 in colour<\/em> – playing about on an Apple II, I was hooked. It was a gift for the abstract painter. I could work much faster than with gouache. It had the potential to outclass oil paint on canvas \u2013 no need for mixing, drying times, brush cleaning, or all those costs. Had I been sleepwalking all these years, echoing received opinions, conditioned from habit? I couldn\u2019t understand why more abstract painters weren\u2019t here ahead of me. I had thought abstract painting involved experiment and adventure \u2013 pushing the art form forward. Was using a computer just an unnecessary distraction for the busy painter? That was the response I got from an essay I wrote in 1992 for \u2018Modern Painters\u2019<\/em>. After the second essay in 1994 (which was on the ISEA conference in Minneapolis), the editor pleaded: nothing more on that subject!2<\/a><\/sup>\u2018Painting with the Computer\u2019<\/em>, Modern Painters, Summer 1992, \u2018Art and the Intelligent Lunch-Box\u2019<\/em>, Modern Painters, Spring 1994<\/span> As one painting professor put it to me at that time, painting is essentially conservative. I tried to introduce Photoshop into Fine Art departments in colleges, but without success. I would be told what it was like to be an artist \u2013 I should be intuitive, spontaneous, creative. Obviously, I was robotic. The computer was this unwelcome box of tricks, like painting-by-numbers, all done for you, best relegated to a dark room called the \u2018lab\u2019<\/em> for the graphics people. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He felt profound humility before the rites of these people, who lived so free of doubt, so far removed from any kind of modernity, as if operating by a different calendar; but at the same time he loathed their tradition-steeped intransigence, their superstition, their unwillingness to place anything above the laws of their ancestors.<\/em>3<\/a><\/sup>Nino Haratischvili), (2019, \u2018The Eighth Life: (for Brilka)\u2019<\/em>, translated by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin, Scribe: London, page 377. This passage refers to a remote village in Georgia during the Stalinist epoch.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I absorbed the mini-lectures with a blank face. Galleries explained why computer \u2018output\u2019<\/em> couldn\u2019t be \u2018art\u2019<\/em>: the paper was too thin, it would fade, and it was made by a machine, nobody would buy it. (The V&A was the great exception. It has acquired one of the best collections of early digital art anywhere. There is also the DAM Gallery, Berlin.4<\/a><\/sup>See: http:\/\/www.vam.ac.uk\/content\/articles\/t\/v-and-a-computer-art-collections\/<\/a> and www.dam.org<\/a><\/span> There was also the Colville Place Gallery in London, which opened in 1998.) It wasn\u2019t the objections themselves that got to me. It was the refusal even to look at the evidence, the slides I would bring along. These were, supposedly, open-minded visual people. I had stumbled into a brick wall. This made me all the more determined to look into what lay behind the rejection. What was threatened? What was it that needed protecting? It appeared to have more to with the failings of imagination, a lack of belief in abstract painting as a progressive force, than with the new technology itself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I did share some of these misgivings in my own mind. I was all too aware that some in what had, by then, become the digital art movement saw the rejection by \u2018the art world\u2019<\/em> as proof enough: they really were the new techno avant-garde. In the book I eventually wrote \u2013 published in the USA in 2006 \u2013 I revisited these conversations, but never took the line that \u2018digital media\u2019<\/em>, as it came to be called, would supplant painting.5<\/a><\/sup>James Faure Walker, (2006), \u2018Painting the Digital River: How an Artist Learned to Love the Computer\u2019<\/em>, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River: USA. Further reflections in \u2018Painting the Digital River:  Before and After\u2019<\/em>, in \u2018Painting, Digital, Photography: Synthesis and Difference in the Age of Media Equivalence\u2019<\/em>, (2018), edited by Carl Robinson, Cambridge Scholars Publishing. See: https:\/\/www.jamesfaurewalker.com\/river-gods-painting-the-digital-river-how-an-artist-learned-to-love-the-computer-james-faure-walker-2006.html<\/span> I never bought into the techno-futurism of \u2018Wired\u2019<\/em> magazine. All along I had felt that what you could do in the paint programme was<\/em> painting. It could move your thinking sideways, and it might take decades before it was absorbed and integrated, and treated to be as \u2018normal\u2019 as drawing. That had been the story with photography. This was certainly a challenge. Talking about it, writing about it was useful. But making the pictures, that was the real work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Andre Derain with Bugatti<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

In 2003 I had taken part in the digital section of the Salon d`Automne<\/em> in Paris. There was a\ndisplay case of old catalogues. There was a photo of Andre Derain, looking\nfierce alongside his Bugatti. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the thirties Braque had souped-up an Alfa Romeo:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He drove, at seventy years of age, like a madman\u2026<\/em>\u2026So began a lifelong affair with motor cars: a Rolls or Bentley for more stately passage, with Marcelle, and a pedigree roadster with the necessary pep \u2013 a Simca 8 perhaps \u2013 for road-hugging, accelerating, without Marcelle. And in the fullness of time, a liveried chauffeur.<\/em>6<\/a><\/sup>Jean Bazaine, quoted in Alex Danchev (2012), \u2018Georges Braque, A Life\u2019<\/em>, Arcade Publishing: New York, Page 159<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Georges Braque, \u2018Studio VIII\u2019 (1954-5), oil on canvas, 132 x 197cm\n<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

I think of the \u2018Studio\u2019<\/em>\nseries, sombre, restrained, so carefully constructed and slow-moving; those half-defined\nforms, glass, fabric, palette, door, the bird like a cut-out ghost edging\nacross. The quiet of the studio. I can\u2019t imagine a painting that is more a\nmeditation on the passing of time. At various times \u2018Studio VIII\u2019<\/em> has been on show in London, and each time I have been\nmesmerized. I think of the \u2018Studios\u2019<\/em>\nas one of the greatest achievements of twentieth-century painting: enigmas,\nimpossible to define. They lurk in the back of my mind, models of what patient\nfine tuning can achieve \u2013 whether through software or through carburettors.\nThis is how John Richardson put it at the time:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

‘Nothing in these pictures is ever quite what it seems: sometimes shadows have substance, while things of substance turn out to be shadows; forms are flattened and flatness is given form; what is hard is painted as if it were soft; what should be opaque appears transparent, and vice versa; objects are only half indicated, or they merge with one another, become something else and disappear; patterned surfaces are introduced for no logical reason, while lines frequently lead nowhere and define nothing.<\/em>‘7<\/a><\/sup>John Richardson, \u2018The Ateliers of Braque\u2019<\/em> (1959) \u2018The Burlington\u2019<\/em>, reprinted in \u2018Braque\u2019<\/em>, Abbey Library, Meridiane Publishing House, Bucharest 1977, page 23<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Braque had come to London in 1933 and 1934: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He and Marcelle were chauffeured around by Ben Nicholson, squeezing with some difficulty into the British painter\u2019s elderly Austin \u2013 in motoring terms, rather a comedown \u2013 the little car filled to bursting with its foreign dignitaries.<\/em>8<\/a><\/sup>Alex Danchev (2012), \u2018Georges Braque\u2019<\/em>, page 192.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leafing through the \u2018Life of Bryan\u2019<\/em>, an anthology of recollections of Bryan Robertson, this anecdote came back to me, as symbolic of the modesty of English abstract painting, always in debt to Paris or New York. At the Whitechapel in the fifties Robertson had put on eye-opening exhibitions for a post-war London public: Pollock, Rothko, Rauschenberg, Johns; and the New Generation shows that put Caro, Riley, Hoyland and many others on the map. There are motoring stories in the book, including some on Bryan Robertson\u2019s wayward driving. I got to know him in the 1970\u2019s, and like many in the book I found his generosity and humour inspiring. He was connected to everybody \u2013 I had a long conversation with Motherwell, and met Sutherland, and there was the Lee Krasner painting hanging in the dining room. I last saw him when we shared a taxi back from Patrick Heron\u2019s opening at the Tate in 1998 \u2013 Bryan always took taxis even when broke. He didn\u2019t rate Heron\u2019s painting at all. Nor apparently did David Sylvester, at least he hadn\u2019t written a word on him since 1952. Nevertheless, it was Sylvester who had curated this exhibition, and it was beautifully set out.9<\/a><\/sup>Robertson and Sylvester had always been rivals. Sylvester had also applied for the Whitechapel job in 1952.<\/span> He probably was supposed to have written the catalogue, but in the event he came up with just one page, where he had as much to say about Bacon as about Heron. The catalogue, incidentally, included a long interview with Heron, and several reprinted essays as fill-ins: one by Alan Gouk, and one that I had written on Heron\u2019s paintings of the 1970s, both from the catalogue of his 1985 Barbican show. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Heron\u2019s most daring paintings were the \u2018wobbly-hard-edge\u2019<\/em> paintings of the seventies. Some were shown at Waddington\u2019s in 1975, along with paintings of the fifties at the Rutland Gallery that had been shown in New York soon after they were made. I wrote a review for \u2018Studio\u2019<\/em> magazine. It was typeset, but never published.10<\/a><\/sup>The new editor, Richard Cork, felt that painting had had its day. We interviewed Heron for the second issue of \u2018Artscribe\u2019<\/em> in 1976. He designed the cover, and was a great supporter of the magazine. At the time, after the Guardian articles, his star was not in the ascendant. Bert Irvin was on the cover and interviewed in the first issue.<\/span> I sent the review to Heron, which is how I got to know him and his red Mini. Those seventies paintings were hot-coloured and uncompromising; there was nothing soft and inviting there, scarce any evocations of Matisse. They were not, in the words that Greenberg always intended as a put-down, \u2018easy on the eye\u2019<\/em>. The red\/green borders flashed optically. They were bracing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Patrick Heron, \u2018Complex Ceruleum in Dark Green Square: March \u2013 August 1977\u2019, oil on canvas, 154 x 154cm\n<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Patrick Heron, \u2018Complex Greens, Reds and Orange: July 1976 \u2013 January 1977\u2019, oil on canvas,\n102 x 152cm\n<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The Tate show was superb, but had been curated to link the late garden paintings with the early Braque-derived works, which some had dismissed at the time as \u2018Bric-a-Braque\u2019<\/em>. The \u2018wobbly-hard-edge\u2019<\/em> period of 1972 to 1983 was hardly present. Whether this selection played to Heron\u2019s strengths or not, it set the tone for subsequent exhibitions.11<\/a><\/sup>I discussed this in \u2018Patrick Heron\u2019<\/em>, in \u2018100 Reviews Backwards\u2019<\/em>, (2002), edited by Matthew Arnatt<\/a>, Matthew Collings<\/a>, Cornelia Grassi<\/a>, Verlag der Buchhandlung, Walther Konig.<\/span> Heron died in 1999. Some years before, Heron had spoken of seeing the large Matisse, \u2018Bathers by a River\u2019 <\/em>(1909 \u2013 1916) in Chicago. Matisse worried over it for eight years, making drastic revisions, and it remains quite an awkward, even ugly composition. Heron knew the rationale behind the modifications, but what fascinated him was the surface treatment; not the rethinks themselves, but rather, their residue; that is what he wanted to recreate. He didn\u2019t want the stress or uncertainty. He didn\u2019t wrestle with intractable problems, at least not on the canvas. He rarely revised. He did not want to leave any trace of effort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Bryan Robertson book lifts the curtain on a world of patronage: connoisseurs\nand critics pulled the strings. It was top-down. Artists knew when deference\nwas advisable, and that was the way things worked \u2013 discreetly – which was\nfine, as long as you were connected. But the Establishment did not speak with\none voice, nor was it infallible. There were many variables mixed in. Nevertheless,\nit is striking that a fair number of Bryan Robertson\u2019s proteges ended up running\ninstitutions. He was often called the best Director that the Tate never had,\nand this was one of his legacies. In pre-Wifi days a senior person at the Arts\nCouncil told me they were setting up a local network in Brighton. I thought,\nhow can they manage all that wiring? I realised they meant people-in-the-know,\nwith connections. Now we have Facebook, and anyone can post their work, whether\nblessed from above or not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I missed in the Robertson book was real intellectual muscle, the\nplay of ideas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was in New York over Christmas 1974, with my wife, and we arranged with \u2018Studio International\u2019<\/em> to interview the leading critics. Looking back, we should have been more alert to the change of mood. Roberta Smith, then a fledgling critic, spoke of lyrical abstraction being \u2018over\u2019<\/em>. Harold Rosenberg boomed out: \u2018who needs a field painting?\u2019<\/em> Rosalind Krauss sensed an ending.12<\/a><\/sup>\u2018The Activity of Criticism\u2019<\/em> by James and Caryn Faure Walker was published in two parts in Studio International in 1975. Part I (Max Kozloff, Darby Bannard, Rosalind Krauss, Harold Rosenberg) March\/ April pages 83 -87; Part II (May\/ June) pages 184 \u2013 186. We didn\u2019t have any introductions, but \u2018Studio\u2019<\/em> at the time was still a respected journal that opened doors. When I asked the editor what questions to ask, he suggested we find out who was worth looking at. I was taken aback. Were we that provincial?<\/span> We also interviewed Clement Greenberg, but he didn\u2019t want the text to be published; he didn\u2019t care for my \u2018thinking in stereotypes\u2019<\/em>. I liked his aphorisms \u2013 \u2018time sorts it out for the squares\u2019<\/em>. I did interview him again, in some depth, in 1978.13<\/a><\/sup>Artscribe\u2019<\/em> 10, 1978, Interview with Clement Greenberg. It was republished in \u2018Clement Greenberg, Late Writings\u2019<\/em> (2007) edited by Robert C. Morgan<\/a>, University of Minnesota Press<\/span> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had first encountered Max Kozloff in about 1967 when I was a student at St Martins. He sat in the audience listening to a panel of London critics pontificating, and stood up to asked them to explain why they were so utterly mediocre. In his SoHo loft in 1974 he spoke of the fallacy of the oracular, all-seeing critic, putting their experience on a pedestal \u2013 he had Greenberg in mind, but this would have applied to those paternalistic London critics too. He predicted, correctly, that the next decade would be preoccupied with issues, with ideological turbulence. He spoke of the three C\u2019s<\/em> \u2013 criticism, collusion, corruption.14<\/a><\/sup> The magazine, \u2018Arts\u2019<\/em>, had lost respect because it was widely known the first section was paid for by the artists themselves, it was just PR. Today, with house magazines such as for the Tate and RA, the blurring between celebrities, experts, press releases and reviews is just about complete.<\/span> Kozloff had misgivings about artists as critics, thinking particularly of Judd and Morris. He saw their writing as manipulative, as an extension of their art, from fixed positions, imperious, spotlighting just one or two individuals. Useful advice for anyone setting up a magazine where most of the writing would be done by artists.15<\/a><\/sup>One answer would be to have a wide range of voices, and debate, to make it a proper forum.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through the 1980\u2019s abstract painters were put on the defensive. A new electronic paintbox, undermining whatever confidence was left, was not welcome. New critics had different agendas; figurative art made the headlines; it had become a globalised art world; pluralism reigned. The paintings of Polke and Richter were abrasive, objectionable, but stimulating and unavoidable. In one of the few blunt passages in the Robertson memoir, Norman Rosenthal spoke of the reaction against his 1981 Royal Academy exhibition, \u2018A New Spirit in Painting\u2019<\/em>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

‘Bryan turned furiously against me. We didn\u2019t really have a reconciliation after that. The art world is a very fickle world and art has many mansions. I went against what he stood for. Bryan was a wonderful person and I owe him a huge amount, but in the end he only believed in his glorious days with abstract expressionism and its spin-off in England, and that\u2019s not enough. The reality is something else.<\/em>‘16<\/a><\/sup>Andrew Lambirth (2019), \u2018The Life of Bryan: a Celebration of Bryan Robertson\u2019<\/em>, Unicorn Press: Norwich, page 295.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I took Al Held to see Bert Irvin\u2019s ACME show in 1980. He said that it wasn\u2019t possible to paint like that any longer. I didn\u2019t agree, but over the years his remark has resonated. \u2018Fundamental painting\u2019 was also in the air then – Brice Marden and others. Held called that subdued painterly minimalism \u2018wrapping yourself in the mantle of great art\u2019, with paint dribbles like Cezanne\u2019s tears. It was easily satirised. Perhaps that is always a good test: I wonder how much contemporary abstract painting falls into that trap, where the difference between the authentic and the parody is undetectable.17<\/a><\/sup>What has been described as \u2018Easy-Listening Fundamental\u2019 <\/em>has returned: painting reduced to the paint itself, to \u2018materiality\u2019<\/em>, perhaps just the one colour savoured and inflected with discreet brushing \u2013 ideally with a catalogue endorsement from a heavy-weight critic. It is a taste for static, tidied-up compositions that ask no questions. John Hoyland used to say he preferred a little venom mixed in with the decoration.<\/span> Held was a veteran of abstract expressionism; he had lived through the struggles, the schisms, the eventual decline. For his generation the hot energy of Abstract Expressionism would not easily merge with the cool detachment of the \u2018post-painterly\u2019<\/em>– whether that was hard- or soft-edge. It was a compromise too far.18<\/a><\/sup>Thinking back, you could interpret the distinction as being between paintings made on the floor and those made on the wall. On the floor, in acrylic or watercolour, you can downplay the drawing and the brush-marks, and blend colours; you can crop wherever you want. The canvas on the wall is a literal confrontation: you have gravity, space and illusion. Shifting from one to the other can have consequences: Heron broke his leg badly in a canoeing accident with Bryan Winter in 1967, which is why he came to work on gouaches, horizontally.<\/span> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his 1986 text \u2018Working Space\u2019<\/em> Frank Stella wrote that what abstraction had promised in the sixties, it did not deliver in the seventies: those hopes had turned to ashes; it had lost its ability to create space. He wrote of the then current obsession with the tactility of pigment:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Abstraction seems to be lost in a dream in which the materiality of pigment reveals painting. It puts too much hope in the efficacy of clever, random gestures. What is needed is a serious effort at structural inventiveness\u2026. We need ambition to drive abstraction out of its miasma of self-satisfied materialism.\u2019<\/em>19<\/a><\/sup>Frank Stella (1986), \u2018Working Space: the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures\u2019<\/em>, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London England, P. 66. Stella developed his thinking from re-appraising Caravaggio, for the dynamism and plasticity of the figures in space . He also argued that Kandinsky\u2019s later works had been vastly underrated. That was also my view, especially after seeing the 2009 Kandinsky exhibition at the Centre Pompidou. Stella has also had a reputation as a petrolhead, and gave a lecture series after being penalised for speeding.<\/span>  <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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These thoughts were not at the front of my mind whilst making that digital\nseries, \u2018Propositions\u2019<\/em>, of thirty\nyears ago. I was entirely preoccupied with the task at hand: creating a\npassable picture through tricky software, and then coaxing it through a\ntemperamental printer to become \u2019output\u2019. For a few years I had been learning what\nI could do from the available systems. My printer could not manage anything\nlarger than 6\u201d x 8\u201d (15cm x 20cm). No five-year old today would put up with the\nflickering screen, the time lags, the eight or sixteen colours. Nothing looked\n\u2018real\u2019. It was closer to Lego than to Winsor and Newton. But if we could\ntime-travel back to the thirties, and show it to someone at the Bauhaus, they\nmight have taken a second look, and seen some potential. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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James Faure Walker, \u2018Proposition IX, Figaro\u2019 (1991), composite inkjet print, 76 x 102cm<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Harold Cohen, \u20180305-08\u2019 (2002), digital print created with AARON, a computer programme written by Cohen<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Roman Verostko, \u2018Cyberflower, Sunshine Version I\u2019 (2008), plotter drawing on paper \n<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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James Faure Walker, \u2018Proposition IV, Monopoly\u2019 (1991), composite inkjet print, 76 x 102cm<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

I assembled the small prints onto metre-wide foam boards. I could never see the picture whole till it was assembled. The necessary workarounds, the problem-solving required in a developing art form with hardly any practitioners or precedents, left me with a great respect for the pioneering algorists, such as Harold Cohen and Roman Verostko – they wrote their own software.20<\/a><\/sup>Roman Verostko has recently had the honour of seeing the Verostko Center for the Arts open at St Vincent College, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, USA. See http:\/\/www.verostko.com<\/span> My pictures represented what I could achieve within the limits of the equipment. I was speculating about what would be round the corner, the computing power that would make \u2018real time\u2019, \u2018high resolution\u2019, \u2018user-friendly\u2019<\/em>, more than the empty phrases of sales talk \u2013 what was known then as \u2018vapourware\u2019<\/em>. We now take the speed for granted. We don\u2019t even notice the processing. At that time you could easily get lost, so you had to read the manual. Lateral thinking was a must. I called one piece \u2018Figaro\u2019,<\/em> not after the opera, but after the Nissan Figaro, the retro design that came out at the time. I enjoyed the carefree mobility of dots. Another picture came out looking like a Monopoly board. I had spent hours watching my daughter learning to ride in a large barn, going round and round the perimeter. It was a very disciplined riding school off the Lea Bridge Road. I was tempted to parody the narrow-mindedness of constructivism. In software, geometric determinism is a given, it doesn\u2019t have to be underlined. I made a framing border out of greenish permutations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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James Faure Walker, detail of \u2018Proposition IV, Monopoly\u2019 (1991), composite inkjet print, 76 x 102cm \n<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

I never managed to get these pictures exhibited. I had a Nissan Micra hatchback, and they could just fit in the back; that was how I showed them. Gallery people would not accept them as valid, either as prints or paintings. I had sold some previous digital works to the other<\/em> ICA – the International Colour Authority, who predict colours for the fashion industry. They told me I would get more for them as tea towel designs than as art. It was frustrating. Most responses were on the lines of what artist does this remind me of? Few would look at them in their own right. Bert Irvin suggested I showed them to Chris Betambeau at Advanced Graphics, the silkscreen printers. I had a good meeting with Chris, but in my case the shift to screenprint was not feasible. Limited as I was by quite a crude inkjet printer, I could at least print all the colours simultaneously, instead of in a sequence of layers. On the computer I was free to revise the design throughout the process; I could run though endless re-iterations. Also, the costs involved in silkscreen printing were a consideration, and I knew it was unlikely that I would sell any of the prints.21<\/a><\/sup>Chris Betambeau died in 1993.<\/span> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was using paint software every day, and transferring what I was\ndiscovering into the way I thought about paint and brushes in the studio. It\nwas unsettling. There were many failures, but in the end it was invigorating.\nPaint was just paint, a means to an end. I couldn\u2019t go back to thinking of\npainting as so charged with magic it would always surpass what you could come\nup with in a print, a photo, or a digital image. Here was a new and undeveloped\nmethod; it allowed free passage between disciplines; each exclusive, and till\nthen protected by a closed-shop mentality, a fixation on materials and crafts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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James Faure Walker, \u2018Ethodyne\u2019 (2020), archival inkjet print, 57 x 64 cm\n<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Albert Irvin, \u2018Palace\u2019 (1997), acrylic on canvas, 183 x 153cm\n<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Albert Irvin, \u2018Kepler II\u2019 (1998), screenprint and woodblock, 122 x 92cm\n<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Looking at Bert Irvin\u2019s recent paintings I wondered whether what I was looking at derived from silkscreen: his thinking was changing. There was a lift, a vitality, an economy in the distribution of colour. He was adapting to the discipline of silkscreen, the sequencing of layers. I asked him about this, and it was like pressing a button. Of course, he said, absolutely. In his excellent book, Paul Moorhouse recounted how Irvin had been sceptical at first:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018\u2026thinking the technique removed from the direct expressiveness of the artist\u2019s hand, and primarily a means of making flat, hard-edged, rather impersonal marks and images\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Working with Betambeau opened Irvin\u2019s eyes to the potential which screenprinting possessed for vitality and immediacy… Between them they found a way of working which permitted the spontaneity, degree of improvisation and painterly \u2018touch\u2019 that Irvin required, while placing all these things in the context of the discipline necessitated by printmaking\u2019.<\/em>22<\/a><\/sup>Paul Moorhouse, \u2018Albert Irving, Life to Painting\u2019 <\/em>(1998), Lund Humphries: London, page 109.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

He made the initial brush marks in black, arranged in layers, tested against\nswatches of colour. So the colour choice was separate from making the marks. This\nmay seem artificial, inhibiting, and at odds with working on a canvas all at\nonce, as a whole. (It has some parallels with paint programmes, except in the\nprogramme you can keep changing the colours after<\/em>\nyou have applied the paint.) But the point is not the relative merits of paint\nversus printmaking: it was the stimulus; Irvin\u2019s imagination was set free by\nmoving into an unfamiliar discipline, absorbing the insights. Beethoven called\nhis new Broadwood piano \u2018the cathedral in\nthe living room\u2019<\/em>; it didn\u2019t stop him composing symphonies. I can\u2019t see that\nplaying with free-floating geometry is going to block the progress of abstract\npainting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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James Faure Walker, \u2018RAP\u2019 (2020), archival inkjet print, 52 x 70cm<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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James Faure Walker, \u2018Aerodyne Drake\u2019 (2020), archival inkjet print, 55 x 68cm\n<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

I have stuck with the simple methods I developed early on \u2013 before\nPhotoshop or Painter were around. In a programme (coincidentally also called \u2018Studio 8\u2019<\/em>) there was a shortcut called \u2018spare page\u2019<\/em>, reached by the keyboard shortcut\n\u2018J\u2019<\/em>. It was a hidden \u2018canvas\u2019<\/em> where you rehearsed whatever\nyou were planning to draw on the main image area. It was as if for every\npainting you had an empty canvas on the wall next to it, on which to try things\nout. What happens, needless to say, is that the \u2018spare page\u2019<\/em> gets more interesting than the self-conscious main \u2018canvas\u2019<\/em>. (Painting tutors notice something\nsimilar about the drips and casual marks a student makes when cleaning brushes.)\nAnother method is an extension of \u2018cut-and-paste\u2019<\/em>.\nI make drawings to be harvested for components. Forms can be rotated, squeezed,\nmade translucent, softened, multiplied, turned into patterns; brushes can be\nmulticoloured\u2026 it can be like wandering about in a cubist kaleidoscope. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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James Faure Walker, \u2018Ferguson\u2019 (2020), archival inkjet print, 57 x 66cm\n<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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James Faure Walker, \u2018Ekco\u2019 (2020), archival inkjet print, 49 x 62cm<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The SIGGRAPH Art Gallery has been the premier showcase for digital art, part of a vast annual computer graphics conference held each year in a different US city. I have exhibited there eight times. \u2018Art\u2019<\/em> was a loose catch-all. You did not need encyclopaedic expertise in art history, but you did have to innovate, to \u2019envision\u2019<\/em> the future. Quite a few times my submissions were rejected by the jury. I would get well-intentioned feedback: nothing new there, too much like painting. They recommended I look up an artist called de Kooning. I looked him up in \u2018Makers of Modern Culture\u2019<\/em>. I had written the entry.23<\/a><\/sup>Makers of Modern Culture: A Biographical Dictionary, (1985) edited by Justin Wintle, Routledge & Kegan Paul: London.<\/span> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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James Faure Walker, \u2018Airflo\u2019 (2020), archival inkjet print, 52 x 65cm\n<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Ritz \u2018Airflo\u2019 1934 wireless<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Marconiphone T18DA, 1949<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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James Faure Walker, \u2018Marconiphone\u2019 (2020), archival inkjet print, 55 x 70cm\n<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The abstractness, the rootlessness of digital work is a problem: the over-designed feel, centralised and tidied-up in a spatial vacuum. In this recent series of mine one theme has been the vintage radio. I have a1950\u2019s GEC beside me as I work. There were bizarre Art Deco designs in the thirties, streamlined cabinets \u00ad – the look of the modern, of new tech, which now lives on, whether it works or not,  in the limbo-land of the vintage.24<\/a><\/sup>A good source is Tony Thompson (2007), \u2018Vintage Radios\u2019<\/em>, Crowood Press. The Ekco AD-65 of 1934 was designed by Wells Coates, the architect of the Isokon building<\/a> (the Lawn Road Flats) in Hampstead. He also designed the shops for Cresta silks, the firm set up by Tom Heron, Patrick Heron\u2019s father, who was a friend.<\/span> Whatever happens when you mess around with oil paint the scent of linseed connects you with the art of the past. Digital processing has no aroma. \u2018Computer art\u2019 <\/em>was once something new. Now, as my New York colleague, Annette Weintraub, puts it: \u2018Digital has become kind of transparent and almost a guilty secret. So many artists use it and bury it in their process.\u2019 <\/em>There are courses for how to draw portraits on iPads – I prefer paper. Anyone can go fishing with camera, phone, Google, and mix the images up. You can sample anything from socks to Hubble photos. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is there still a down side? I have the speed, the resolution and\nprint quality I would have once craved, but working via the screen remains a\nlimitation, without the connection to a \u2018physical\u2019 picture. I probably over-produce.\nOnly a small percentage, less than five per cent of finished work, gets properly\nprinted. The editing is where the real work happens. Is it all \u2018virtual\u2019<\/em> until printed, transcribed or\nimprovised in paint on canvas? Is it a sub-category? Even if that were the\ncase, I have visited a new dimension. I am learning all the time, exploring\ncomplex colours and patterns, weird shapes, arbitrary lines, accidents when\nsuperimposing one picture over another. One difference from regular painting is\nthe opening up of a vertiginous depth in the picture space: the eye travels\nunimpeded by surface obstructions, forward and back, even when the forms are chaotic.\nIt is like driving without brakes or speed limits. No restraints, nothing to\nstop you making something outrageously complex, simple or absurd. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What of the future? These past months the conversations about painting – even the commerce – has happened online.25<\/a><\/sup>See: http:\/\/matthewburrows.org\/artist-support-pledge<\/span> No physical exhibitions. Artists keep going, one way or another. The prejudices of the past may not matter so much now. All it took was a handful of misconceived exhibitions, a few grandees saying digital art was rubbish, the vested interests of colleges, and the waters were poisoned for a generation. The crossover between painting and modernising technologies \u2013 whether cars or computers \u2013 should give us a boost. We pay lip service to the radical movements, the inventions of the past, but when it comes to adding boiled potatoes to the salad we throw up our hands in dismay. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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James Faure Walker, \u2018Mullard\u2019 (2020), archival inkjet print, 65 x 76cm<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In his third piece as a writer-in-residence at Instantloveland, James Faure Walker recalls the resistance he encountered as a maker of digital art<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essay"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/instantloveland.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/instantloveland.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/instantloveland.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/instantloveland.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/instantloveland.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3768"}],"version-history":[{"count":74,"href":"https:\/\/instantloveland.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3768\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3867,"href":"https:\/\/instantloveland.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3768\/revisions\/3867"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/instantloveland.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/instantloveland.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/instantloveland.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}