March 2013

Another painting found on phone arts, posted by Bonjour Jean-Jacques.
The smeary, broad-brush style and photographic aura recall Joy Garnett's oil paintings of natural and man-made disasters, based on media images. But the image is so ambiguous there's no clear evidence of a disaster or a media reference. Something in the atmosphere of this phone-made pic gives it a sinister reading: what might be fires in the windows of a high-rise could also just be ceiling lights flared out by the lens; the suggestion of billowing smoke just a swipe of a finger on glass.

Also unclear is the relationship of photo-made and handmade marks. Whereas a painterly photorealist starts with a blank canvas and renders with eye and wrist (either eyeballing an image or gridding or projecting it to make a drawing), many digi-painters start with an existing pic right on the phone and, using filters or virtual brushes, smear on top of it or drag parts of the image around. That looks to have been the case here. The marks, especially in the lower left, have that characteristic Photoshop smudge look, as if the fingers of a right hand made an arc from right to left, "pulling" an image out of itself in a way that is supposed to look like oil painting but inevitably signals "Photoshop smudge."

It's also hard to tell from all the blurring and smearing what the scale of the buildings is or their relationship to each other in space. The pillar in the center suggests a high-rise tower but do the orange windows belong to the same structure? Are they in the foreground or background? Too many spatial cues have been rubbed out. These aren't matters of pressing concern, though. Despite hints that all may not be well in world of this phone, mostly we are enjoying the light, hazy softness, and greying colors of the image.

Found on phone arts:

Can't remember if Gerhard Richter ever attacked himself with a squeegee, the way he famously did with newspaper icons and at least one family member. And also am not sure if the above is really an image of "Jenny Thiesen" or a classically featured surrogate. But it's a successful portrait, combining the class photo vibe with face-recognition eeriness, like an official scan gone wrong. Or rather, gone wrong in an artistic way. We're used to pixelation noise but I like that the pixels are in turn blurred and smeared - errors of errors - while not interfering with the timeless Western beauty coveted by the old masters as well as every advertising hack and blogger looking to goose stats with a pretty face.