Painting - xkcd Paintings
So a couple days ago last week, on
xkcd there was a great webcomic done by Randall Munroe.
I adore xkcd, and the webcomic was titled
Click and Drag.
You can view it above. What rapidly becomes apparent as you look at it is the incredible scope of this particular webcomic. What Randall has done is created actually a much more intricate, massive image that is fully scrollable. There are probably more than a hundred little inside jokes, pieces of art, nuanced characters, or lines throughout this massive image.
It really got me thinking, partially in awe, but also in terms of the digital divide for us between computer generated work and physical mediums. The two are irrevocably split in many ways now, even people skilled in one medium, may not ever pick up skills or have needs to in the other. I know many painters who profess no skill at all in cgi, and cgi artists who have never mixed paint before in their lives.
If you wanted to, at proper appropriate scale print out this comic it would be incredibly large. Probably impossibly large, and without the scalability would be impossible to really appreciate as a piece of art.
And yet here it is, freely available for anyone to look at.
Everything on the internet, for the most part is freely available to look at. It's our art, ours, as artists, we took it back. We took it out of the hands of museum curators, or critics, or reviewers. We put it up where we will in our own little slices as we choose. It shocks, or confronts...or it doesn't. It's available for the viewing, or it isn't. We archived it, this is ours, put up on the internet. It's us.
Anyway, I took these and did some work painting the otherwise black and white images. It was a lovely exercise in working on my cloud paintings. I hope you enjoy.
