Sometimes I feel like the computer is taking over the world. It pervades every aspect of our lives. Not only do I use it to keep my journal, store my pictures, archive my artwork and send messages to people, but many other things as well. I use it to find reference photos, new artists and music. We use it for making travel plans, purchases, finding local restaurants, looking up word definitions, reading the news. My husband uses it to watch movies, order videos sent to our house, get involved in politics and store a huge collection of music, and then play it as well!
The sad thing I find is that when I have a free moment my first impulse this past week is not to go step outside and feel the sun, but hop on the computer and see if I've gotten any new email, or if anyone's been to my website, or commented on my artwork, or added to the art forum I participate in. It's almost like the computer is becoming my community. It's just nice to have an instant group of people there, who share a specific interest with me and can provide me with advice, support and feedback. Likewise with my new membership on ArtWanted.com. I enjoy immensely participating in the forums, especially critiquing other artists' work. It's been a long time since I've been an active part of a community of artists.
Back when I attended junior college, it was so new an experience for me to be surrounded by other art students that I threw myself into it headlong. Long after classroom hours were over and it was dark outside, I would be in the building with other art students, discussing, arguing and criticizing each others' work, standing half a room's length away to scrutinize and tear apart a half-finished painting, analyzing the balance of the composition, the color scheme, the value control; suggesting different directions an idea still in the form of a crude sketch could take, scratching our heads over the muddle of learning to mix colors. It was the best time of my life, I felt.
A few years later when I attended the Academy of Art College (now University) in San Francisco, I found a similar environment in attending workshops. These were hours where classrooms not in use by instructors were set aside and assigned a model to pose for students to come in and practice drawing. An attending teacher would supervise and give students help when asked. Although I found to my surprise that when some teachers took it upon them to circle the room while the model took her break, commenting on everyone's work, they were met with quite an amount of silent hostility by students who didn't welcome the criticism. Perhaps they were there only drawing for their own purposes, or they didn't appreciate a teacher different than theirs giving an opinion? Whatever the case, although I was surrounded by other students, it wasn't quite the same as my time back in junior college. The same excitement and eagerness to share wasn't present. Many of the students had high goals to work with prominent design studios, video games producers, comic-book publishers, animation studios or sic- fi film directors, and were jealous of each other's talent. They could be very protective of their ideas, hiding their sketchbooks from others' view, resenting the neccesity of group critiques in class. Nevertheless, in spite of having to learn caution about who I approached with requests to view their artwork, I still had the benefit of being able to find my friends (or instructors) and ask for help on a concept or painting and receive constructive replies.
Today as I am getting back into painting, I sorely miss that interaction with other artists. I was thrilled to learn of a local critique group being formed by an artist who lived nearby. Unfortunately at the time, my husband was working evenings and I could not attend the meetings since my daughter goes to sleep at eight (the time of the critique groups) and I couldn't afford a babysitter. Two months passed. Isa was a little older and able to survive Daddy putting her to bed. Excited at the prospect, I emailed the critique leader, letting him know I now could attend, asking when and where the group met, since when I had last been part of the email correspondence they were debating where to hold the sessions.
I waited his response with anticipation, picturing in my mind a group of ecclectic people seated around someone's living room, on sofas, kitchen chairs hauled in, or cross-legged on the floor. Holding pieces of artwork in various stages of completeness. Oil paintings, watercolors, acrylics waved before my eyes for perusal and commentary. I imagined which of my new paintings I would take along, and felt quite nervous about the prospect. I thought all these other artists would be established professionals, probably part of the local arts organization I've seen in several shows set up at the nearby library and the park downtown. I'd admired their work, spoken to some of the artists at the outdoor event, and determined to get up my nerve to join the organization. I tried to prepare myself for an oncoming onslaught of criticism, and to sharpen my mind to be able to find helpful, honest and insightful things to say about others' work, remembering the terms and words thrown about at art school, useful in talking about paintings but not a part of my everday vocabulary now, growing dusty in my head.
My disappointment was great when he wrote back saying it had been a failure. Only one person had showed up to his first meeting, so he scratched the idea and created a blog online. I visited his blog but found it unsatisfactory, thinking a forum format would be more useful. For a few months I continued working by myself, thinking often of that non-existant critique group and how much I would have liked to be part of it. Thus I was quite ecstatic to find online an art forum that I found friendly and useful, right from the start. Even more than putting my own work up for commentary, I enjoyed commenting on others' pieces, studying them closely for color harmony, unbalanced compositions, focal points and proportional flaws. But it doesn't make up for the group in person. There's nothing like sitting with a real-live artist in front of you, the texture of canvas under your hands, the smell of fresh paint not yet dry. Even now when I break out my gouache or watercolor palette, the particular scent of the paint brings back flooding to my mind moments laboring over a past painting in that same medium.
Talking to someone with text on a screen just doesn't compare to that. I need the real, breathing world in front of my face, but when that's not available, I make do with one made up of pixels and glowing light (which hurts my eye and gives me a headache, I'll let you know!). The one advantage to the online forum, I will admit, is the vast array of artists I can communicate with. Not limited to persons within a specific mileage of physical ground, I can reach a community of thousands, if not millions, of artists worldwide.
It puts me in somewhat of a mental quandry. Do the benefits of a wider audience outweigh the pros of a physical presence? More and more nowdays I head to the computer for my communications. It makes me kind of sad. I am so glad for my little daughter, who drags me out into the "real world" with her. She insists on everything physical and immediate. To her the computer is a light-emitting box that we spend too much time sitting in front of. Even now she's bringing me her socks, pulling my coat down out of the closet, crying over the struggle to put on her shoes... I have to comply, so I leave you for now; to tramp across the wet grass, swing on the blue metal bars, pull dead flower-heads off stems and inspect insects in the dirt. It's just as satisfying as getting paint on my fingers.
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