Me and the Digital World

Mr. Danita is a big fan of old school electronic music, but I don't share that taste myself. He's all exited about a new record from a band called Daft Punk, and he showed me a quote from an interview they had about their new record:

"We really felt that the computers are not really music instruments, and we were not able to express ourselves using a laptop. We tried, but were not successful."

Which are pretty big words for artists that dress up as a bunch of robots and play electronic music, but he explained that the record was made with real instruments on a real studio and not using a computer to create their music.

At that moment those words resonated deeply in my mind, because I feel the same. I feel an immense respect for digital painters and artists and admire their work, some of my favorite illustrators are digital, but for for me a Laptop has not been an instrument of creativity. I have a good deal of digital tools in my studio... a touch enabled digitizer display, a huge monitor and a powerful computer, an army of styluses for my iPad... But I have not been able to be lured into the digital world.

For me, creating an image is a complete sensory experience, I must feel what I am doing in order to make it mine. The feeling of every crease on the paper when I am sketching, how the texture of the pencil changes when the lead is eroding as you draw, the texture of the wood when I apply paint to it, how the brush gives in when you put pressure on it and how the paint responds to even the tiniest amount of water it encounters, the smell of fresh paper and paint, the colors of a hundred tubes of paint waiting to be used and even the sound of the scissors when I cut and paste paper for my collages.

All of that allows every piece of work to make it mine, and it made me remember how in love with the world I am, it makes me feel alive and in touch with my work, every fiber of myself is placed on everything I make, and when I am done I have something I can touch, admire and pass around for others to see, to give meaning to. That's what I love.

When I see the images being prepped for reproduction on my computer, all I see is pretty image that is nice to look at, but that's all. But then when I have something in my hands again, prints of my work, I remember that I was an active part of the creation of that object, because the image in it, it's soul, came from my heart, and my hands. And it makes me so happy to touch the lush paper and to smell the drying ink! It's a real thing that I can enjoy!

Sometimes I wonder if it's just out of rebelliousness that I don't care about moving onto more digital work, but if a bunch of famous robots thought it was time to back to the roots, why change what keeps me alive and I love doing?

What do you think? Am I being a dinosaur that refuses to evolve, or I am just a crazy girl who loves to get her hands dirty with art?