Linux MyPaint, GNU image manipulation program, acrylic paint, paper, scanner
July 2020
8 years later: phone arts won the battle and lost the war (to the usual tide of techno-inertia)
I feel badly about starting a battle and not noticing a return salvo for eight years. But here it is: Jeremiah Johnson's Erased Tom Moody Drawing:
Phone Arts was an early 2010s effort to make and aggregate art on smartphones. Looking at the tumblr archive, it was hyperactive around 2012 and gradually trailed off, possibly because the novelty of phones wore off or because everyone succumbed to the mass stupor characteristic of these devices.
My battle cry was a primitive MSPaint drawing pasted into a phone-shaped vertical rectangle.
Playing Rauschenberg to my De Kooning, obliterating my image and adding a frame and caption-plate was much wittier than the other response I got, a big brown bowel movement plopped on top of my artwork.
sketch_p8a (installation)
Instead of a virtual painting this is a different kind of ersatz painting. I printed out sketch_p8a at 12 x 12 inches, on sturdy (100% rag) paper, and glued the paper onto a 12" x 12" Fredrix canvas stretcher (no canvas, just paper on wood), then photographed it on a wall (actually the floor but whatever).
In the "virtual" version I digitally cut-and-pasted the .tif file of sketch_p8a onto a photo of an existing canvas.
I guess this is sort of about making paintings without paint or canvas. Clearly the medium -- although dead -- still has its attractions.