An image is worth a thousand images. As images become increasingly less rarefied due to the digital explosion (much like words became democratized at the time of the Gutenberg Press), the time is ripe for artists to use their imagination and intellect to harness this visual proliferation, shaping a new visual vocabulary and dimension for exploration.
The paintbrush re-ascends the throne. We are on the cusp of a golden age of painting as we load our new brush with all media. Much like the word became a necessary and valued construct to the novel, the photo becomes a key building block in the new primacy of information painting. This exponential leap forces us to rethink the picture and its inherent makeup (components). The photograph changed the painter’s role as a visual recorder of the universe but never say never... as the digital age now allows the painter to take control and asserts that the photograph, while important, is just one more component she/he loads on the digital brush. The old adage “A picture is worth a thousand words,” is now “A picture is worth a thousand pictures.” (and words, videos, etc.) Today’s digital brush is loaded not with Alizarin Crimson but with all media.
A new calling for today’s artist: Image-makers should be where wordsmiths were in the time of Shakespeare, but we have to take the reins and go for it. It is time to create a new visual vocabulary and dimension in art for understanding the information age we live in. Artists today have an opportunity to create beauty that brings sense to the world - a call to make complex things comprehensible and accessible; in the process making a radical break with the current concept of "avant-garde."
The new cave wall as ephemeral screen: The new canvas of the 21st century has no physicality and yet has an inexhaustible capacity to hold thousands of layers and bytes of visual data... a new universe for science and the human imagination to coalese in a visual explosion and intimacy that may go even beyond the senses in its immediacy and touchless touch. (Something Marshall McLuhen spoke about as regards television, "We don't just watch television, we get in touch with it. )*
*Thanks to Paul Trachtman, artist and former 'art editor-at-large' and science editor for Smithsonian Magazine.
