One of the more positive things the Soviet Union gave the world (aside of, you know, the defeat of Fascism and all that) is Socialist Realism. True, this art wasn’t as adventurous as what was being produced at the same time in the West, and true, it fourished in no small part because everything else was illegal. It nonetheless presents rather sweeping images of things like the Soviet war effort–the sort of public art we rarely have these days. Andrew Sullivan (of all people) has some nice samples on his blog today. You should take a look.
Posts Tagged: painting
15
Oct 09
iPhone art
David Hockney has become a professional gadget nut–or, at least, as close to that as a professional artist can be:
Hockney first became interested in iPhones about a year ago (he grabbed the one I happened to be using right out of my hands). He acquired one of his own and began using it as a high-powered reference tool, searching out paintings on the Web and cropping appropriate details as part of the occasional polemics or appreciations with which he is wont to shower his friends.
But soon he discovered one of those newfangled iPhone applications, entitled Brushes, which allows the user digitally to smear, or draw, or fingerpaint (it’s not yet entirely clear what the proper verb should be for this novel activity), to create highly sophisticated full-color images directly on the device’s screen, and then to archive or send them out by e-mail…
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.
Hat tip: 3QD