Presentation 4 // Digital Painting & Drawing 2
Video Description
The second session on Digital Painting and Drawing, presented as part of a series focusing on a variety of aspects of Digital Art, features three American Artists from the global Techspressionism network. Colin Goldberg, Cynthia DiDonato, and Cynthia Beth Rubin, present work in a session moderated by Gregory Little. @Techspressionism.
Synopsis
Click a time code to jump to that point in the video, or an artist’s name to learn more about them.
Presentation 4, "Digital Painting & Drawing 2," is the second session in a series presented with the American Maker Space in Qarshi, Uzbekistan, and is hosted by Gregory Little. Little opens with a definition of digital drawing and painting▶ 0:00, the Hello Uzbekistan exhibition that led to the series▶ 3:20 and early computer-graphics pioneers▶ 5:50. Colin Goldberg then presents his path from traditional drawing and painting to Techspressionism▶ 8:53. A second artist shows how a video shown in Urgench was built with iPad apps and free tools▶ 16:35, and Cynthia Beth Rubin describes how her painting background shapes her digital work▶ 22:03. In the discussion, the artists compare digital and traditional processes▶ 30:16, printers and a laser cutter at the makerspace▶ 33:21, working across many iPad apps▶ 36:21 and mixing physical and digital media▶ 39:27. They explain vector versus raster graphics▶ 42:31 and free tools such as Inkscape and GIMP▶ 45:41, talk about choosing where to put your energy▶ 48:44 and meeting across time zones▶ 55:01, and discuss building worlds in Minecraft▶ 58:08. They end with encouragement to beginners to join the co-working sessions▶ 1:04:16.
This summary was written with AI assistance from the recording’s transcript and reviewed by the archive’s editor. The timestamps link to the moments discussed. Please check details against the video.
Participants (4)
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Cite this session
Hello Uzbekistan Presentations, “Digital Painting & Drawing 2,” published May 18, 2026. Techspressionism Video Archive. [DOI pending Zenodo deposit]
Gregory Little
Well, hello everyone. We're all really happy to be here today at your American maker space in Qarshi. We're coming to you virtually from all different parts of the United States. And today we're going to present the second installment on digital drawing and painting. So before we start, what is what is digital drawing? What is digital drawing and painting? I think well, here's a definition by Alvie Ray Smith, an early computer digital artist.
Gregory Little
You have to think about tools. The computer is the tool that creates a traditional media called painting. And basically, it's a new tool and an old medium. So, these are the artists that we'll be talking with today. You probably just saw them on the screen or you probably see them now. We want to remind you that this is part of a series and I think there at least two more sessions. My name is Gregory Little.
Gregory Little
I'm not going to be presenting my work today. But I'm an artist, a teacher, and a theorist I work with poetic imaging of science and I use painting, drawing, digital painting, digital drawing, animation, virtual reality, kind of whatever I need to make my point. And we are all part of a group called Techspressionism.
Gregory Little
And Techspressionism is a relatively new term and it was first used to my knowledge by one of today's artists, Colin Goldberg. It is an artistic approach. I don't know that it's a movement but it's an approach to technology using technology to express emotion in visual art. And we're part of a tradition of Expressionism. There was early Expressionism, Abstract Expressionism, Neoexpressionism and now Techspressionism. And we're part of a large global network.
Gregory Little
We have monthly salons that include meetings like this, also virtual meetings. We have co-working sessions where artists come together and discussion ideas and encourage each other and give each other feedback. We organize international and national exhibitions of our work and we have many interviews online. So the reason we came to Uzbekistan was because of this exhibition called Hello Uzbekistan which was held at CAMUZ in Urgench. I's what brought us all here. Only a small number of Techspressionist artists could be in the exhibition because of museum space and other issues but we made a digital video to display which is what you're seeing in your American Makerspace in Qarshi. The digital video screen was part of the exhibition in Urgench and Samarakind. The director of the museum, Shirin Tashova, who is pictured here on the left, was wonderful to work with.
Gregory Little
I encourage you to contact her. She was helpful in getting us started with making connections investing with shipping details, arranging the exhibition in Samarkand, which you can see a shot of here. So if you ever go to Urgench, I'm sure she'd be happy to talk with you. And show you the collection. Before we start today with presentations by three contemporary artists, I would like to acknowledge some of the early artistic developments in computer graphics.
Gregory Little
I want to go back and look at the pioneers. The pioneer is a person who was one of the first to explore a new area and we owe a lot to those early pioneers from the 60s and 70s who brought us where we are. These were artists and researchers who had to basically build everything from scratch in the this is Ivan Sutherland. As you can see in 1963 he there's, no keyboard there, and there's no mouse. There is a very crude monitor and but he is drawing on the screen in 1968 using an application that he developed and the hardware called sketchpad.
Gregory Little
This is Douglas Engelbart, a research engineer. I spoke to him actually on the phone prior to his death. And he gave the mother of all demos in 1968 where he basically introduced modern computing. He built a mouse, he shared screens, there were hyperlinks, there was all sorts of stuff. Another one that fascinated me early on was this project by Eric Müller. He was not an artist, but he thought, "I wonder if I could get the computer to daydream," which fascinated me because it seemed to mean that if we could daydream and log the results of the daydream by the computer, we could use those results to do stuff, to create new worlds, surrealist imagery, whatever came come to mind. But the fact that the computer could be an emotional tool, that sort of beige box on my desktop could be told to dream fascinated me.
Gregory Little
So here here's an example of some of his pseudo code. The idea here is that he is trying to get revenge on Harrison Ford because Harrison Ford refused to help him as a young actor. So he's revenging Harrison Ford. Another pioneer was Harold Cohen who was a painter. He was a he was a traditional abstract painter in London and he decided he wanted to do this. So he created a one of the first artificial intelligence programs called Aaron. Aaron was a hardware software combination a robotic system that made paintings. On the right there you can see the first one first little robot which he called a turtle which kind of moved around on the canvas and dropped lines.Another artist, another painter, who started working with digital imagery was Vera Molnar. She was a French painter and she decided early on that she wanted to learn Fortran and Cobalt which is a pretty arduous task.
Gregory Little
These are some of the paintings that she created. Cynthia Beth Rubin who's with us today is an early pioneer. She was working in the mid to late 80s with Artronic, creating some of the first computer imaging projects. Cynthia, I owe a debt to because she is the person who got me hooked on this medium early on.
Gregory Little
Joseph Nechvatal is an artist whose work I first saw again in 1986, seemed to be a big year at Brook Alexander Gallery. I think it was in New York City. And he fascinated me because he was the first artist that I had seen who really took the underside of computing, the fear, the viruses, the cyberpunk nature and the information overload, and embedded that in his paintings.
Gregory Little
So that really interested me at the time. So my point is that digital painting comes from many disciplines. It's rooted in research into human machine control. It's influenced by electrical engineering, mathematics. It is a research based discipline and it's shaped by computer science. So I would argue that digital painting or digital imaging in general, digital art in general, has as much a debt to this these areas of research as it does to art history or the history of painting.
Gregory Little
Around 1990 these computers appeared. These were no longer dedicated paint systems. These were kind of general computers that were now powerful enough to run commercially available digital painting software. Although I do recall that it could take sometimes 30 minutes to rotate 30 seconds to rotate a simple selection or move an object across the screen.
Gregory Little
But these were commercially available. So I bring you to Colin Goldberg. Colin in his work combines traditional painting very successfully with digital drawing and digital mixed media. He first arrived at the term and the concept Techspressionism in 2011. He founded the Techspressionist Artist Group about six years ago and it has grown to over 350 artists across 45 countries with 85,000 Instagram tags. It's pretty amazing. Colin
Colin Goldberg
Received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant and a New York State (I don't know what that stands for) grant and has a solo exhibition. Absolutely aren't. Thank you. Solo exhibition scheduled for summer of 2027 at the Cape Cod Museum of Art. So Colin, take it away. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Greg. So my name is Colin Goldberg and I'm a Techspressionist. I coined the term Techspressionism in 2011 to describe my artwork which explores the expressive potential of digital media. In this presentation, I'm going to share my journey from traditional drawing and painting to Techspressionism. So, I started out with a love of drawing and painting since I was a kid. This is a colored pencil drawing that I did when I was a high school student. I studied the works of the surrealists and adopted some of their ideas into my work.
Colin Goldberg
This is an acrylic painting called Sky People, which was also done done in high school. We got our first family computer in the 1980s, a Commodore 64. I began to explore digital drawing for the first time. Back then, there was a tool called the light pen that allowed you to draw directly on a monitor or TV screen. Amazingly, this cost only $40 back in the 1980s.
Colin Goldberg
In college, I studied painting in Binghamton University in upstate New York under an abstract expressionist painter named Angelo Ippolito. He encouraged me to abstraction. He introduced me to abstraction and encouraged me to move to New York City after graduation to pursue a career as an artist. This is an oil painting from that time period.
Colin Goldberg
After graduating from college, I moved to New York City in 1994. As a freelance designer in ad agencies and media companies, I helped launch brands such as Popular Science Magazine, Snapple, and Merrill Lynch onto the web. Through this work, I learned how to code HTML, as well as tools such as Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, which I later incorporated into my artwork.
Colin Goldberg
I do all of my digital drawing in Adobe Illustrator using a Wacom tablet connected to a Macintosh laptop. In the late 90s, I began experimenting with abstract digital drawing for the first time. I called these works Metagraphs. I made the drawings in Adobe Illustrator, which is a tool used to create vector graphics. Vector graphics represent the lines, forms, and colors in an image with math and code instead of as a grid of pixels like a JPEG image. This allows the work to be scaled to any size and remain razor sharp. Vector art is usually used for commercial work such as logos and illustrations. I decided I wanted to eventually produce my work at a large scale, so I adopted this format for that reason early on. Here are a few works from this series.
Colin Goldberg
This piece from my Metagraph series entitled kneeling Icon was produced as a large-scale digital mono print on vinyl which was later purchased by the Hurst Corporation in 2023. Here it is installed in Hurst Tower in New York City. In 2021, I had animated the piece and minted it as an NFT. In 2022, I combined the physical artwork with the animation, turning it into my first augmented reality artwork. When viewed with an AR app called Artivive on a mobile device, the artwork animates directly on the gallery wall. I collected 23 of these works into my book Metagraphs, which was published in 2023 and was the first augmented reality book of abstract art on Amazon. When viewed with the Artivive app, the drawings appear to animate directly on the pages of the book. I also created an original soundsscape for each of the 23 second animations.
Colin Goldberg
In 2005, I began experimenting with running painted surfaces through my inkjet printer for the first time. I printed digital drawings directly onto the painted surface and then painted back into them, repeating the process to develop compositions with multiple layers of print and paint. I hacked my printer, removing the roller wheels so they would not smudge the print on the thickly painted surfaces. Here are a few works on paper from this time period.
Colin Goldberg
To create the work, I paint on paper or canvas, photograph the painted surface, and import the photo into Adobe Illustrator. I then do a digital drawing superimposed on the image and print this directly onto the painted surface. After developing a body of works on paper using this technique, I went back to school, entering the MFA program in computer art at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.
Colin Goldberg
I began experimenting with running small canvases through my printer and stretching them up to create my first Techspressionist paintings. Gregory Little, our moderator today, was one of my graduate advisors in this program. As a grad student, I took a class called digital mixed media and learned about ink aid, which is a special primer that allows for high quality inkjet prints on a variety of media, including acrylic and oil paint.
Colin Goldberg
In 2014, I was awarded a Krasner Foundation grant, which I used to purchase an Epson 9800 large format printer. I still use this machine in my studio today. Here are a few paintings created over the last 5 years. I'll close with this piece called Nodingham, a recent painting approximately 3x5 ft in scale.
Colin Goldberg
Once there's paint involved, I no longer consider a digital art. I call it Techspressionism. Thank you, Colin. That was excellent. Okay. And now we'll move on to Cynthia DiDonato, an artist living in North Providence, Rhode Island. Providence, one of my favorite towns. Cynthia is a retired educator, excuse me, who taught English and art in high school as well as technology in education to graduate students in college. She was initially a water media artist, earning signature status at Rhode Island Watercolor Society and the New England Watercolor Society.
Cynthia DiDonato
She began creating digital artworks in 2014. She is an interdisciplinary artist whose focus is abstract digital and analog art and moving image animations. She creates very personal artworks envisioning seen landscapes and unseen mindscapes. That's curious. She creates her artwork on an iPad and with a MacBook and she has exhibited, as you can see, internationally.
Cynthia DiDonato
So, take it away, Cynthia. I think you're muted. Good evening, Makerspace Creatives. I'm delighted to be here on this panel with Colin, our founder, Cynthia Beth Rubin, who has been an early adopter, and with Gregory Little, who has a long history in digital artwork. The first slide here depicts the beginnings of the digital video that you saw at the Urgench Museum and it I began with an image of a piece of wood that I warped in Procreate. You should know that in place of Procreate you could use Krita particularly on Windows machines and it's free and very powerful. Next, I created the this image that you saw in Efekt and Luma Fusion video editing on my iPad. And you can do the same with Photomosh or using Da Vinci resolve. Again, both free items.
Cynthia DiDonato
This of course rendered a video that is very different from the initial piece that I started with. Obviously, next I moved the piece, the video, named "No Words", and I worked in Kinoglitch this time, which is a program that can be used on the iPad and iPhone. And you can substitute Photo Mosh, which is a Windows program, and hopefully, get some interesting results.
Cynthia DiDonato
This is the final animation that was in the digital reel in Urgench. Next, I'd like to talk about my inspiration for the work that I do. I'm always looking for textures and interesting images as I walk around in this world. The first row shows you the digital still of a painted floor or I should say paint spilled on a floor which I brought into Procreate. And I created a number of layers where I manipulated that floor and added shadows to create depth and again you could use Krita for that and named the piece "No Rhyme or Reason " on the extreme right. The second row shows you my work with physical art.
Cynthia DiDonato
Not only do I use photography, but I use physical art that I create. This is a print that I actually made with a Gelli pad and then I brought that into excuse me Procreate and again created many layers in which I manipulated that initial print. Moving along, another way I create is using digital brush strokes in Procreate and manipulating those brush strokes in whatever way I want. And of course, as you can see, I arrived at the piece called 'Counterpoint"on the right. "Counterpoint "is one of the latest pieces that I've made.
Cynthia DiDonato
Lastly, here's another video animation called "Subterranean.", and I thought I would include it. I don't know if it's running, but Zoom doesn't behave sometimes. There it is. And I want you to know a quote that I really love that I'd like to share with you. And it was written by John Laceda, who's an American film director. Previously the chief creative officer of Pixar Animation Studies Studios, excuse me, and he said, "The art challenges the technology and the technology inspires the art." I would love for you to visit my website. Follow me on Instagram and if you too have an Instagram account and you decide to experiment with some of the softwares I mentioned, I would love to see what you produce. Thank you today for having me.
Cynthia DiDonato
Thank you Cynthia that was great. I love the way you mention all the software and show your process. Really cool stuff. Okay. And our next artist is Cynthia Beth Rubin. And Cynthia, as I said, I've known since the early 80s. I guess I don't have a bio slide for you,
Cynthia Beth Rubin
Cynthia. Maybe I missed it. I think I missed it. You missed it. It's okay because I explain one people know. Do you want me to just say a little bit about myself? I do. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, my background is in painting. I studied painting both in undergraduate school and graduate school. So that's a very important influence on my work and I started working on computers as Greg just mentioned in the early 1980s and I'll talk about that a little bit more as I go along in the presentation and I've been very fortunate to have had my work shown in many locations around the world and mostly through associations. I encourage you to join groups. We have these groups called ISEA and SIGGRAPH that we can tell you more about. And right now, in fact, I think there's an open call for digital art I just got today from SIGGRAPH, which is an international group, but mostly based in North America.
Cynthia Beth Rubin
So, I can send that to people. That's been wonderful for me. And I was fortunate because I was early to get some of the early grants. So, I usually put that on my resume, but many people here have gotten grants and I think we're all award winning in one way or another. So when people tell me to introduce them as award-winning, I'm like, you know, if you've been doing it long enough and you enter enough things. So, let's get going with the work. Okay. So, here's the piece that Greg just showed you, one of my very early pieces.
Cynthia Beth Rubin
This predates scanning. And it's important to know that in the beginning when there was no scanning, everybody drew things by hand. Those of us who were software users drew things by hand. So, there were the people who programmed their work. But I drew things by hand. And I was still painting. And I wanted to put this in actually against the wall so that you can see it. This picture of it in my living room. It's actually right behind me as well. That the physicality what it meant to make an actual object as opposed to doing this kind of this is a very early piece before there was even the possibility of gradient. So colors were all flat in the very beginning.
Cynthia Beth Rubin
So the idea of moving to something that was no longer an object and that made people question this article on the left says in Italian is it really art? So by 1991 I was able to scan some architectural forms very flat into the computer and I was still drawing by hand. Here you see tulips drawn by hand mixed with some basic forms really getting into digital painting. In 2011 I had an artist residency in the French Pyrennes the mountains on the border between France and Spain but on the French side and the city sponsored it the city called Arosert. I thought they made up that name tech but that it's actually the name of the river. I went out and did drawing because one of the requirements of the residency was that I engage with something local. So I just went into the mountains and did these drawings with a Wacom tablet and a little computer and then after I did the drawing I photographed the space.
Cynthia Beth Rubin
So the mountains. So I got to know the mountains by drawing them and then I imposed the drawing on top of the photographs or the photographs I combined them. But usually people were doing the opposite. Here I went a step further and I actually inverted. I made the dark colors the light colors. I reversed it and put that on top of the image. And so I got something that really brought out the forms of the mountains and also made it feel like night, very dramatic. And it was a very interesting process to mix the two. So this is my current work. After the trip to Uzbekistan, I was really struck by the history of astronomy, the research in summer and looking at thinking about different ways that people have represented the calendar and the moon and then pomegranates which of course were everywhere in October, but they also are a symbol of the new year in fertility and also new year in many traditions.
Cynthia Beth Rubin
And so I've grabbed onto the pomegranates. I started using a calendar from a Hebrew calendar that was done in Germany in the 1600s. It's at the New York Public Library. So I've been able to look at it and then looked at the diagrams of what the scientists are doing today. And first I made this image which worked for me but it also seemed to be very much an illustration. So I started breaking it up. I printed it out. I cut the print. I actually drew on top of the prints and then I did some drawing on paper. But in preparation for this talk actually I went back to drawing and in Gimp which is software I didn't know but which is available to you. So took a pomegranate to the public library where they have PC computers and Gimp and started drawing. And I did a lot of erasing also to make layers because layers are very important where you can have different colors and textures.
Cynthia Beth Rubin
And here you can see that I started combining different layers and I got different colors coming through and different textures. And if you use Gimp you have to export. So I had a slide of that. Then I took my digital drawing and I put it on top of the photograph and I got this which I personally really love. I feel like it combines the organic feeling of the pomegranate. I experimented with wildly different colors. This is a Photoshop image, but you can do this in GIMP. And so, and erasing between them in order to get what I really wanted at the end and to shock myself into thinking differently. So, here are just a couple color variations. Making it lighter turned out to work the best. And I put it back into the image that I was working on before that had the drawing and some of the symbolism and up in the upper right is a graph.
Cynthia Beth Rubin
And then I started working further to integrate it and make it feel less like an illustration and more like a painting that you could move around in and really relate to different parts of it and have colors moving in and out of your attention area. This is a detail from that which may work on its own. I'm still working on this and thinking about it and actually through Techspressionism we have a group that gives me great feedback. So that's where I am now. It's been a pleasure talking with everybody. Okay. So just a reminder our Well, thank you Cynthia. That was that was great to have such a long wonderful history with this process. Yeah, so we have like two more sessions coming up. May 14th, collaboration between artists and scientists. Second, a revised or revision, I guess, and then a 3D digital sculpture and worlds.
Cynthia Beth Rubin
So if anyone has any questions, I'd love to have a discussion. So, does anybody on the maker space end have any questions for us? No. You may want to stop the share. Not at the moment. Okay. Yeah, great. Okay. So,
Discussion
I guess I have a couple questions. Cynthia, since you were you were just speaking, I was wondering how is your process, this is interesting to me. How is your process in digital media different than the original painting process, the traditional painting process? Great. Well, as we all know, traditional painting, especially for those of us who started with oil painting, so this is like ancient history, but with oil painting, there are some real constrictions. We used to talk about thin on thick. You could not put thick. You had to start with layers or the paint would crack and very much involved with it being an object, and process. So it was an actually ironically more of a linear process than digital is. Digital can be you can go in and out of it. You can go you know back and forth doing all kinds of different things.
Discussion
Take all and I do a lot of what Colin showed so Colin may also want to jump in here of printing out drawing on it getting back in being able to photograph. So, yeah. Colin, do you want to address that? Yeah, sure. You know, I think that you coming from a traditional drawing and painting background and then in parallel kind of experimenting with computers. You know, eventually those two things crossed over and I remember I was actually in my parents' garage. I had my printer set up in there and I didn't want to get paint all over the room that the computers were in. And I thought like I wonder what would happen if I, you know, painted on something and ran it through the printer. And the first couple experiments, you know, resulted in sort of smearing of the ink and everything else like that and then I popped out the wheels and then and then it worked.
Discussion
And you know a lot of what I ended up with was through the process of experimentation with different media. And I actually ended up starting with house paint which was a latex based paint that was sort of iridescent and it allowed for a very sharp print because of the makeup the latex nature of the paint but also the iridescence is something that I couldn't achieve with an inkjet printer. So I think experimenting with materials is a lot of fun. And actually you guys at the maker space, you really don't need to use any specialized materials like Inkaid. Like you could literally draw on a piece of printer paper or even use watercolors on a piece of printer paper and then run that through your inkjet and just see what happens, you know, and that's kind of how I got involved doing that.
Discussion
Does the maker space have laser cutters? Laser It is laser cutters. They don't
Discussion
Have inkjet printer they have a printer that is a laser printer. Laser printer. Yeah which actually gives very good quality probably. Oh you do have what's Yeah, we have what is that? What are we looking at? This is a laser cutter. It's a laser cutter. Terrific. I've seen, you know, I've done some work where I put layers of paint down on paper or cardboard or something like that and then ran it through then put it in the laser cutter and etched through the surface revealing colors underneath. I mean, there's all kinds of drawing techniques you can use with the laser if you don't cut, but actually just sort of etch or burn into the surfaces. There's a lot you can do with that as well. And with laser printers, you know, I mean, I've tiled images using 8 and a half by 11 inch standard US-sized paper and made eight foot images by tiling laser prints together.
Discussion
So, there's a lot there. There's a lot you can think about. The other the other thing, you could do with a laser printer is make stencils and then use traditional media to draw. But it would be excellent, right? Yeah, laser cutter is an amazing tool. The laser. Cynthia DiDonato, this is kind of a probably a difficult question, but how do you how do you keep growing as an artist? What helps you develop? What brings you to the studio the next day, so to speak? Well, first of all, being part of the Techspressionist group really has helped me to grow. Seeing the work of other Techspressionist artists has been extremely meaningful.
Discussion
Consider also our co-working group which really inspires me and I think it's inspired others to go beyond where we are. In fact, we influence one another which I think is a real positive. So I think that helps me to grow. The other thing is learning and experimenting with new softwares. For example, I'm getting more involved with moving image animation. So, I'm I've been learning Motion and Final Cut Pro to increase my skills and understanding of where I can go with this and also developing other themes in my work is I think important. So, all of those factors go into helping me to grow and I hope to continue to grow. I think it's something I consider myself a continuing learner. Never stop learning. Excellent. I love that attitude and I love the all the software that you were using. I mean you just in the presentation today there must have
Discussion
Been six, seven software packages. Yeah. Yeah. One of the things about using an iPad is the number of apps that are available. And sometimes I'm in and out of five of them. So it's helpful. Alan, I see you raised your hand. Yeah. I want to ask Colin what role, if any, vector image production still plays in his work. It seems like he's moved more towards various kinds of raster graphics.
Discussion
No actually, I pretty much exclusively do my digital drawing in vector format, specifically in Adobe Illustrator, but there's also an open- source alternative called Inkscape. So, those of you in the maker space, you might want to experiment with that. You might already be using it for, creating images for the laser etcher because I know that's used quite a bit for laser etching and also using a plotter. But for vector art, I mean, all of the drawings that I do that I print onto various media and even drawings for my animation, I start with vector art and ultimately they end up becoming bit maps to be displayed on the screen like JPEG images or even printing. There's a process called rasterizing where you put in the vector image into a bitmap program like GIMP or Photoshop and it'll turn it into a grid of pixels at a specified resolution.
Discussion
But all of the work that I do now I do in vector. And I like the fact that with vector art you can zoom in indefinitely. So, if you create something that has all this intricate detail, but there's a certain little bit of it that you really like, you can zoom in indefinitely and it just stays sharp. Same thing if you want to blow something up to large scale. That was the initial reason that I started working with it. And it was actually a computer science graduate student at NYU that explained the difference between vector and bitmap graphics to me back in the 90s. And I thought, well, this makes total sense to print things large down the road. And at that point, there was no commercial large format printing that was, you know, affordable at all, but I thought eventually there would be.
Discussion
So, yeah, it's big part of my process. But, oh, excuse me, but Colin, maybe this is what Alan is referring to, and I might be wrong, but I think don't you actually use paint? Like, forget about vector or analog. Don't you actually, you know, human painting. Don't you combine that with your vector? And maybe that's where he's thinking of the roster because it has such a well I mean you know like physical media like paint certainly that's you know a big part of my work. So but the digital component is all vector-based
Discussion
Digital drawing. And but you mix some though you mix them don't you a bit. Yeah. Yeah. For some of the work, you know, the paintings and the works on paper involve physical media, but like the metagraphs are straight digital. So, some of the work that I do, I do consider digital art, like things that are created wholly on the computer. And then especially work that's screenbased, like animation for instance, I would consider that digital work, you know, maybe Techspressionist in spirit, you know, but there's a distinction there. And I think a big reason that I came up with this term to Techspressionism is because the work that involves paint, I just couldn't really call it digital art. It didn't make sense to me, you know, and I tried to come up with a term that actually embodied what I thought the work was, you know, so that sort of fit.
Discussion
So, we have a very attentive, listener in Qarshi. I'd love to know if you have any questions. The woman in Oh, I think she's shaking her head now. There's no question. I just wanted to mention something with regard to Colin's mention of vector art. Procreate, which I use is raster based. And of course, as Colin points out with the vector, the larger you get, the sharper it still is, whereas with raster base, it's made with pixels, square pixels that can get blurry when you, enlarge it. So, it's important with me to make sure to choose, a high resolution when I start working in Procreate, in order to be able to make it as large as I'd like. So maybe we can give just a really quick explanation here. When you're doing vector, the computer is remembering lines, outlines. And when you're doing what we call raster, the computer is remembering a pattern of little boxes of color all over the screen.
Discussion
And so obviously for something that looks more like a painting, you want to have little boxes of color. But for something that's more like a drawing, when the computer just records the idea of outlines, you can blow it up. You can enlarge it without losing anything. Or a more technical explanation is the computer is struct in vector graphs constructing the entire image from equations. Right. Whereas in raster it's a line of numbers in memory. Right. And I think Yeah. I think it's interesting because yes in vector the formula for a circle or the formula for an arc or whatever is recalculated with a
Discussion
Variable as it gets larger or smaller. Whereas in bit mapap or in raster you have a pixel grid that like say it's 1920 by 1080 that means there are 1920 pixels across the width and it's a grid it's fixed and each piece of the each level of the pixel is stored on the hard drive. So when you try to resize something that's 1920 x 1080 that's over 2 million pixels. Let's say you double its size to four million pixels. Where do the other two million pixels come from the ones you already have, right? Yeah. You have to you have to figure out how to create the pixels. Yes. Which is what I do with my patented software. Hey, Greg, do you mind if I just quickly share my screen? I think I could do like a one minute demo of what that looks like. So, yeah, go for it. So I launched so I have llustrator open here.
Discussion
Can you guys see my screen? Yes. So, say, you know, like a lot of what I do is I start out with just kind of like gestural drawing, which is in the spirit of the abstract expressionists. So, say I make a mark like that, and then I use these 3D tools in Adobe Illustrator that allow you to take that mark and rotate it in space. So one of the things that I use is this wireframe format that allows you to come up with these kind of technological looking images. And then I can take that image and manipulate it and expand it. So after that I can also apply some different transformations in it. And this is where it gets really interesting with Adobe Illustrator. And let's see, like say I do this pucker and bloat filter. So that kind of like makes it shoot, you know, it squeezes the image. So with vector art, what I'm going to do is I'm going to zoom in and zoom in.
Discussion
So you could see that you can continue zooming and then you start getting these really kind of wild sections within this composition and it's something that can be done, you know, fairly rapidly, you know. So if there's a part of it that I really like, I can then crop it out or actually if I want to convert it into something that's printable, I could select it and then go in and actually like rasterize it. So yeah, like in here. So you could rasterize it and then select a certain resolution like and then you could see once it's rasterized, you could see the pixels. And that's something where if you were opening it up in Photoshop eventually you'd zoom in and see these pixels. So that's kind of, you know, my quick minute demo of vector versus raster, but you could also use those tools like Inkscape
Discussion
To create vector drawings. Perfect. Yeah, that's what I was going to talk about Inkscape. Inkscape certainly for the maker space, it's a free program open sourced like Gimp. So, you know, you can get that instead of dealing with Adobe Illustrator if you decided. Yeah. Yeah. And if you're careful with how you save files, you should be able to move back and forth between Gimp and Inkscape and then back again, right? Yeah. With Inkscape, you would be saving it as an SVG file most likely, which is an open- source format versus like a PDF or Illustrator format, and that's yeah, scalable vector graphics. And then you could that's usually the format that you would use for like a laser etcher or like blotter or something like that. And then if you wanted to bring it into GIMP you would open that up and it would then rasterize it and you could save it as a JPEG or a PNG file.
Discussion
And a lot of actually a lot of 3D programs will import scalable vector graphics and you can then do a lot of 3D transformations. Yeah, that's true. We've talked about people using Blender which is also open and you can bring in the 2D drawing and play with making it more 3D also once you get it into Blender. So yeah it's great the workarounds of going back and forth different pieces of software is really important. If you're using MS Paint, for example, I know a lot of people use Microsoft Paint, but it doesn't have all the color manipulations that Microsoft Photo has, but you can do something in Microsoft Paint, bring it into Microsoft Photo, and then go back out. So when you know we use more expensive programs that have everything in it in one piece of software but what many of us who started early on are used to the fact that you just have to move around and find the software that does what you want it to do.
Discussion
Yeah. Yeah, I always find myself frustrated because I'm in between changing my intentions because the software won't exactly do what I want it to versus learning from the software versus finding a workaround like you're saying. And there's so there's this kind of mix intentionality that occurs. It's interesting. You can always go to writing your own, you know. Yeah. Well, you could. Yeah. Well, you could. Yes. I'm a terrible programmer. But what I say is one life to live. You can decide that you want to I mean writing your own is wonderful and it inspires people and you produce fabulous work Alan which people can see in the moving image program once we get that video online. But then you don't have time to go
Discussion
To the New York Public Library and photograph the books or go. It's a 225 mile drive for me to go to the New York. But what I mean is it's not the just what I mean is that you have to choose where you put your energy and some of us you put your energy into writing software or you put your energy into researching historical artifacts or you put your energy into reading philosophy because a lot of people get inspiration from reading philosophy. So each of us has to make some choices about where we're going to put our energy. And what I love about Techspressionism is that much of the digital art world has moved into only honoring those people who write their own software. If I can say that the history has been written to primarily honor the people who wrote their own software instead of or in addition to I'm not saying it's an either or but included I believe need to be some of the people who were really putting their time into how can I push this medium I mean Roz who's on here as well is and she spoke in our earlier session on digital paint was really somebody who took the tools that were designed for the commercial world and went how can I make art out of these and that was very brave you know and even a lot of artists that are not at all recognized as digital artists for instance Frank Stella who's you know passed away recently but a very accomplished contemporary artist used digital tools in creating a lot of his compositions and sculptures, 3D modeling tools and things like that.
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And you know, almost nobody really thinks of him as using computers or digital art because he never made a point out of, you know, talking about that. But I think it's interesting that a lot of people and I would I would say the majority of contemporary sculptors at this point probably use 3D modeling tools in some fashion, you know, but that wouldn't make them digital artists. Every almost almost every serious photographer on the planet is using powerful digital tools to manipulate their photograph. Exactly. Absolutely.
Discussion
Yep. Well, I mean a lot of as you mentioned the sculpture sculptor Colin, a lot of sculptors hire someone to do the digital. True. So there's a whole industry like that as well. Right. I just want to interject that this topic brings up the whole thing of the kind of atelier of old you know in the Renaissance. There were schools of art and teams and you know I started when I started I was painting but I was also one of the earliest to do a website. I did early HTML and
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To Cynthia's point like you can't do everything. So now I work with a young coder who, you know, when I talk about these interactive pieces about 911, he goes, "Oh, Roz, I was only 10 years old, you know, when 911 happened or, you know, there but it's we work online. I've never even met this coder and I have a little team when I work on my Diamond Scapes. It's a narrator, someone I've worked with since I worked at the World Trade Center 20 years ago, and this young coder and we get together and I do believe this is building. You're still the artist with the ideas, but one of the things I love about digital is it is it kind of brings back that whole working together like Techspressionism. We're learning from each other all the time. And it's just a fascinating place to be in this changing world and you know, you really read about it in arts and leisure in the New York Times.
Discussion
It's but that's one of the things of being ahead. You always have to give things up if you're going to be a leader in something that's new and this is still considered new even though it's pervasive now you know it is pervasive but we're talking a different language and I think most of the people are just using it like you would a spoon in the kitchen you know whatever and also the thing that I like that inspired me early on was were the salons where there's you know sort of a critique aspect or people giving feedback on the work that was something that I really didn't have access to after graduate school. That is, you know, I like that in graduate school there were these structured crits or critiques where people at least in my experience who were not at all working with computers, glass boat blowers and sculptors would see my work and give me feedback that had nothing to do with the technical nature of how the work was created.
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It was really about the ideas and some of the, you know, the formalist aesthetics of the work. And after that, you know, I think artists become very sort of siloed. They can where they're interested in their work. They might see other work in gallery spaces, but there's not a whole lot of opportunity for groups of artists to get together and share each other's work and talk about it, which I think is something that's, you know, really special about the Techspressionist community. Yeah. And that's actually what we do. We have a group that's a Techspressionist group which you're welcome to join. It is at 10 o'clock at night for you and it will probably and it would go until one o'clock in the morning. So drink a lot of coffee so it's very late. But we also unfortunately it there is no Zoom simultaneous translation into Uzbek but there is Russian and so we have the ability to turn on captions in Russian or any language that Zoom happens to have.
Discussion
And so if you want to stay up late one night people in Uzbekistan we meet and then go around in the group and say what we plan to do and then we give everybody an hour to organize what they're going
Discussion
To present or to get some work together. So we actually really start the talking at what would be about 11:15 at night for you. So very late, but we do have people from India, for example, who join in and then we try to have them go first so they can sign off after a while and get to sleep. So it'd be wonderful if you're interested in joining that. We also record them. So like, you know, if you want to look back or, you know, at Techspressionism.com/salon There's an archive of all the recordings. So you can go back and you could actually look through also all the different past topics. So there's a bunch of different ones on AI. There's some that specifically focus on photography or sculpture. So there's a big archive of all of the salons, over a hundred of them online. So that's something where you can view it at any point.
Discussion
You know, you don't have to stay up late for that. And we actually have one coming up today, a live salon that's all, artists from France that Cynthia Beth Rubin actually helped organize and brought in some of her colleagues and friends. So, I think that's, you know, the international nature of the group is something that's really special and the ability to be involved with artists, and the museum in Uzbekistan I think is just amazing. You know, it's something that I never would have anticipated. And everybody in the group brings their set of colleagues and contacts you know to the experience. I want to add something to what Cynthia said. I mean the co-working group one of its tremendous advantages is that the broad expertise that every each person brings in terms of software and approach is extremely helpful in stimulating your imagination about where to go.
Discussion
I almost always find a new way to think about things from that. And even though I'm using only my own software, it doesn't matter. It's still the ability to think about, you know, how to how to manipulate images and things like that they bring because of all the different kinds of software they use. I mean, I also participate in critiques with some of the cooperatives I'm a member of with manual artists, and that's useful and interesting, but for people like us, the co-working group is a very powerful way to advance your own your own imagination. Okay. I see we have a question from the maker space. You're muted, I think.
Discussion
Yeah, I have a question. Sorry if it's out of topic. I guess it might be out of topic, but can Minecraft be considered as part of art? Oh, because we have a lot of guys who are really into Minecraft. They creating their own worlds in both like creative modes and survival. That's the
Discussion
Reason I'm asking. And I'm myself a big fan of Minecraft. I have my own world there. I could respond to that. So I have an 11-year-old daughter and she loves Minecraft and she's created these worlds that, you know, when she's showing me these things that she creates, it is just amazing to me. She creates even like little animals and has names for them and they walk around and the spaces are completely interactive. And she actually made a little studio for me in her world. So, she takes me into the studio and says she put a hot tub in it, which I like, of course. And so, but I think, you know, did she did she give you hair in that world? Well, I don't have an avatar in it, but she probably I don't know if she would, honestly. She likes to make fun of her bald dad, but you know, I don't think that she considers it art.
Discussion
But I think for me, I mean, I look at it as complete, you know, creativity. I mean, it's really amazing. And I think even people who are budding architects like you know I mean she's 11 but I see what young people are able to create and the fact that also there's a whole culture built around Minecraft with its own music and creators for music in the game. I mean it's pretty amazing. Yeah, I've had a lot of students in the past who used Minecraft to build their own worlds as solutions to some of the problems that I gave them, assignments that I gave them. So, yeah, I mean there have been museum exhibitions of game art. So, you know, it's there's precedent. Yeah, for sure. We will be talking about some of similar approaches and the session in two weeks on May 21st. But it just occurred to me if a lot of people in Uzbekistan are using Minecraft, I think it would be interesting to somehow schedule a time when you could show us what you're doing.
Discussion
Absolutely. I would love that. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Do you think that's possible? I think so. Yep. We could ask our visitors, volunteers to bring their like devices with Minecraft worlds. That would be fabulous. I'd love that. Yeah, that'd be fun. Yeah, it' be really great to do it. Yeah. Any chance you could do it late at night? No, you have to do it at this hour, right? Okay. Do you are you able to access your worlds through a computer or only on like mobile devices? Some guys access their worlds through computers. By myself, my iPod. Gotcha. Gotcha. Because if it could be brought if it can be viewed on a computer, then you could share your screen on Zoom and actually, you know, people could people viewing could see it much more in much more detailed way, you know,
Discussion
If it's on the computer screen and process and interact. Yeah. Yeah. But if you can session, sorry, go ahead. Go ahead. Can we do that next session like showcasing the worlds? In the next session May 21st maybe for the last one. Yeah, for the last one. Maybe you could record some of it in advance if it doesn't work also in real time and then we could show the recording. Let's see. I don't we have a little flexibility there so we have to figure it out. But that might work or we could do a special session where you do that. And one of the things that I'm just brainstorming here is if they can record in advance or meet in the maker space and record, maybe we could show that sometime at a regular salon and people would be at home and it would be 10:00 at night, but you could sign in to talk about it from home at 10 o'clock if we had a recording of it that you I think that really dovetail into the whole the world building session even if it was a separate recording you know that could be edited in at the end or something like that because I think it's very it's very relevant and we did actually have an initiative with Techspressionism not with Minecraft but using a virtual environment called Mozilla Hubs which was an open-source platform and one of our artists created a whole virtual world where all the different artists participating had virtual studio spaces and I'm not going to make any official announcements yet, but it looks like we might be coming up with a new sort of way to have a virtual environment, you know, associated with the community.
Discussion
So, yeah, looks like that's happening with another group called Loop Art Critique. And I met with one of the artists that's involved in that recently. So, I think we're going to have a collaborative project together where we can have a shared space and you guys would certainly be welcome, you know, to come and join in and it would be a place where artists could get together in virtual space in real time. Yeah. Getting back to co-working for a moment, I just wanted to make sure that the creatives in maker space are aware of the fact that when you come to co-working, you're not required to show any kind of finished piece necessarily. It may be something that you're working on that you'd like to share with us. So, we don't want you to think that you have to come to it and have a finished work.
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Because we're all about sharing with one another and feedback about whatever you're working on. So keep that in mind.
Discussion
Don't be intimidated by the thought of coming to co-working. Cynthia and I have always encouraged that to be the case. It would also be kind of cool like as part of this series to have a session. Maybe it wouldn't need to be so structured, but to have you know people in the maker space it focus on what you guys are doing there and you know you could share a little bit about whatever projects you guys have created and the facilities. I think that'd be really interesting actually because, you know, we'd get an idea about what's happening, you know, in your space, but also like what creative people are doing. Like I think the idea of what you're making in Minecraft. I mean, maybe that could even be incorporated into something like that where something like that sort of a session could sort of be a bookend to this series of presentations.
Discussion
And it wouldn't need to be like really scripted or structured so much as you know giving you guys in the maker space an opportunity to share your work and I'm sure a lot of people in the community would really be interested in what a maker space is and what sort of you know facilities there are we do have them in the US I've never actually used been in a maker space or used a maker space but I you know I wish there was one that was around where I live honestly believe and there isn't. Well, at the college that I've been teaching at, we were we had the second fab lab in the in the world next to MIT. Wow. Yeah.
Discussion
Can't think what's the guy's name at MIT who did the fab. I can't think of his name, but he came to Lorraine County Community College to give a talk about Fab Labs. And this was after he'd created the first one. And like an eight-year-old in the crowd raised their hand and said, "Can we have one here?" And Gersonfeld, Neil Gersonfeld, and they and he said, "Yes." So they built it. So we still have a Fab Lab we've had for over 20 years. It's a really cool place. So maybe we could work out a collaboration there as well. Yeah, that's great. We actually have two maker spaces in New Haven, but cool. And I haven't been able to use them, but I will now. I'm inspired with the laser. The laser is really great. It's really very cool. Yeah. Yeah. I got to do some stuff with a laser etcher in grad school.
Discussion
I don't know if you remember, Greg, but I would I went to the Home Depot and I got these marble tiles for bathroom floors and I put them in the in the laser etcher. No one was around at the time. And it was really only supposed to be for the graduate I think architecture and engineering students, but they let the graduate art students go in there.
Discussion
So, you know, I got pieces of plywood, marble panels, and I didn't break anything. I bet I Those were those 12 by 12 pieces of marble I remember that. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. Artists are always in these places late at night, you know. That's when we That's when they give us
Discussion
Access to stuff, right? Yep. Yeah. It's true. Even working at corporations in the early days, I took a different path. I worked down at the World Trade Center and started some of the first new media departments and I was I had incredible equipment. I mean, sure, you know, Avid, I mean, incredible equipment that I would work with and it inspired a lot of my work, which was all about commerce and business and kind of poking fun of all of it. So, yeah, there are many avenues for create creating work. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of maker spaces, Providence has a community of libraries that are maker spaces and we have AS220 that was begun by, Alberto Crenca that has been a tremendous maker space for Rhode Island. That's great. So, we're getting up to overtime here. A little bit over time, but it's been a good conversation, I think.
Discussion
Yeah. Very good. So, well, are we done? Yes. Well, I have to sign off because I have to get ready for my next Zoom. So because we actually have a salon in two, less than two hours with artists from France. And if you're at home and you want to join in, you can join in. So, all right. Terrific. Well, see you in a couple hours, I hope. As long as I don't fall asleep. Okay, great.