Chansons, croissants, accordeons

I didn´t make this title up.
I once knew someone who had a french
music sampler with this title. If I was french,
I would take this stereotypical way of thinking
about France as pretty racist.


Look what I did today!
I coloured a drawing...BY HAND! With real colours!
They actually EXIST and aren´t some digital, virtual
computer-cyber-robot colour. Its a very touching
and moving feeling to see this drawing hanging on
my wall right know being completely done
traditionally. I am by no means an antimodernist
(hey, the internet, you know? Good stuff to some
extend), but it gets really funny when you´re
not astounded by what you can do with
computers and photoshop, but by what you
can do with your bare hands and a couple
of crayons.



I like to believe that when people first used
Photoshop or Corel Draw (or whatevvva!) they propably
though "Wow! That´s like really drawing... but on
a PC! Wow! I can undo and save anytime! I have
every colour of the universe at my very fingertips!"
But after all the sensory deprivation I feel the
backward effect - colouring an image with
crayons is like "Whoa, this is like Photoshop...
but this is actually, physical colour!"
Modern times are strange for sure.
No wonder many people are looking for
the "authentic" experience. And even when
you´re one of those "I do everything in vectors because
it is SO perfect and SLICK", you should feel the
experience of applying actual color on actual paper with
actual pens and brushes (and no layers), when the only
way to UNDO is not to press Ctrl-Z (or whatever the
Apple equivalent of that is) but to either cover it up
or deal it with.



Screen capture of the month!
"Minister of drink" really has a lot of charisma.


It´s like in real life (not that drawing ISN`T
real life): When you fuck something up, you can´t undo
it. It happened and you have to deal with it. And even
if you throw it away, the picture existed. Tell me what
you will, but digital images aren´t real. (Unless, of course,
you have a different concept of reality, but I am not writing
about philosophy here.)

I am not saying all digital art is bad; just look at utterly excellent stuff
like my blog-partner McRae does - he does is with a
lot of historic reprise like art deco, with an ironic twist -
I mean, 50 cent looking like a 1920ies painting?

WHAT I am trying to say is that the real experience
can´t be substituted by menues, editing windows,
programs and Wacom tablets. Because it´s always
a simulation. You´re drawing, but you´re drawing
in THE MATRIX, dude! It´s not the REAL THING.


And you might think you can live with all the commodities
and do without the stimulating tradititonal way of
shaping images (which is as old as mankind itself;
how long does digital image editing exist? Maybe
twenty years?), but when nobody is going through
traditional drawing and painting anymore
and learns everything in front of a flickering
computer monitor and not making piles of
papers but storing everything in folders on the
harddrive, then something important is lost.



Advertisement: Frederik Jurk uses
Faber Castell PITT artist brush pens.
Only the black one, though.


I am not joking here. Don´t tell me asian
brush painting can be experienced on the same
spiritual level when imitating it in Painter
with custom brushes. I am not so much pointing
at the RESULTS, but the process that leads
to it. Looking at a blank, new piece of paper
is vastly different from opening a new files.
Drawing for me isn´t all about realizing pictures
in my head, but about the physical feeling,
moving my hand, my arms, feeling the pen,
smelling the paint, feeling the structure of the
paper.