Digitally Enhanced Painting

Every time technology moves ahead, invading the world of art, we are presented with exciting new opportunities along with difficult challenges. Such is the case with the advent of digitally enhanced painting. Digital enhancement allows us to push the envelope, invent new forms of expression, add rich dimension to old forms, and step into the refreshing world of the unexplored.

Although digital enhancement is resisted by some people for what are probably excellent reasons, it is embraced by others for reasons just as laudable. One of the most persuasive arguments for digital enhancement is that art is not what is painted on the artist's canvas with a brush; it is the magnificent thing in his soul that he is trying to convey somehow to canvas so that it can be communicated to others. Digital enhancement allows the artist to go beyond the limitations of what can be done with the brush and more fully achieve what is in the soul. In this sense, it violates none of the purposes of art but actually helps fulfill them.

As artist Joseph Nechvatal stated in his paper given at the "Photography, Painting and Sculpture: Working Digitally" conference in February 2005,

For me, the digital has brought back from the dead the practice of painting. It has made it alhve. It has made it bloom in the enthusiastic and relevant sense of the word alive - but it has made painting alive in a more specific sense also, as I began mixing my digital painting practice with

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at the colors seen on screen will print exactly as they appear (3). Of course, there are objections to digital enhancement, and some of these are peculiar to the medium. Jerry Lodriguss raises an important question of ethics: "Now, with the increased popularity of digital imaging, there is literally no limit to the amount of processing that can be done. The question is how much should be done?" (4). Lodriguss resolves the issue quite simply with his opinion. "It's simple to me. If you enhance something that is already there on the original negative to bring it out and make it more visible, that's OK. If you add something that wasn't there on the original negative, you've crossed the line from a documentary art form into a fictional one" (3). Whether a photograph or a painting, the concept is the same. The ethics of digital enhancement are only violated if the artist tries to put across a digital enhancement as a fact instead of an expression of art. Although some people try to criminalize the computers employed in digital enhancement, Lodriguss rightly urges us, "But let's not try to question the ethics of the tools of digital enhancement. Tools don't have ethics. People have ethics. Again, it's not the tools, it's what you

Category: Science - D