Art?

 My two fans will already know that occasionally when I have a photo that goes beyond pointless into just plain bad, instead of just tossing it I'll play silly photoeditor games for a while. It's just a bit of fun, really: how can I make this thing look completely different and yet still almost somewhat identifiable? The added challenge is that I use a fairly simple free editor with limited abilities. I've never set my hands (brain?) on Photoshop, and while I'm debating trying out GIMP, it seems a bit selfish to download it onto someone else's computer just so that I can play.

Um, yeah. Still don't have a computer at home. I spend enough time on computers at work or here at Dad's place, and frankly I enjoy both the down time and the lower bills. That's not the topic at hand, though.

The topic, such as it is, is about at what point a little bit of digital fiddling becomes art. Let me say from the outset that I'm not denigrating digital artists in the slightest (some of them are absolutely incredible) or for a moment calling my silliness art. It's not. It's me taking a crap photograph and trying to make it more interesting to myself.

But there's also no denying that when I'm playing around like that I'm making aesthetic choices. I'm trying things out, keeping some effects and discarding others, and in the end coming up with something that looks as close to the way I wanted it as I can make it with my limited software. Is that any different than, say, this? This below, I mean:

This is one of my better spider drawings from a number of years ago. It's a Thin-legged Wolf Spider (Pardosa sp.) carrying an an egg case on her spinnerets. The original was done in Wolff's carbon pencils.

Hmmm. Can you believe that I only just now realised I used a Wolff's pencil to draw a Wolf Spider? Entirely coincidental, honestly.

This was done for a display and to some people would be classed as illustration rather than art (although anyone who thinks that illustrators aren't artists is talking through his hat, to my mind), but here you see a choice of subject, a choice of medium, and working until I ended up with something that looks as close to the way I wanted it as I could make it with my limited abilities.

Is that different than playing with photos, then?

It's a fine line. I'll admit that my definition of art is a little old-fashioned, although knowing that helps me to do my best to try and broaden it. One of my blocks is effort. I put effort into drawing; I put very little into photoediting. My reflex is to think of the one with effort as being somewhat closer to real art.

It's not always true, though. Art can be an innovator like Jackson Pollock splashing paint on a canvas, or Banksy quickly spray painting a stencil on a building. And yes, there are plenty of people who would argue that neither of those people made (or are making) art, but there's no denying that what they produced makes -- or should make -- anyone with an interest in art at least stop for a moment to think about it.

Things turn pretty philosophical for me after that, and frankly I'd like to wrap this up and do some other stuff. I guess in the end people have been debating about what art really is for... well, probably since cave paintings, and whether my silly photos count as any sort of art fit in there somewhere. That's it for me today, though. Twitter users, don't forget that I become @PeopleOfCanada for a week starting tonight. Non-Twitter users? I don't know what to tell you.