I spend a fair bit of time with tools like Photoshop and Corel Painter, but in recent days, I’m more excited about painting on my iphone with a tool that’s not all that far from a toy.

NermalWorks InkPainter provides a surprisingly satisfying simulation of brush and ink painting on my iPhone, complete with ink that bleeds and spreads on the “absorbent” paper if the “brush” (fingertip) slows or pauses. Don’t be silly, though – of course I’m not fooled. But it looks pretty good. Even to someone who loves the tactile mysticism of ink on rice paper and has a bit of experience with it. Resolution is, well, “soft,” when images are exported, but I’m not trying to blow them up to poster size, anyway, so it’s not a big deal. (Images are 320 x 480, if you can believe it.)

A moderately persuasive experience of the tactile quality of ink on rice paper does provide some trace of the immediacy of liquid ink drawing, and I can open InkPainter for a few moments in the middle of a hectic day. A tiny time-island of gestural experience, quick and casual enough that it doesn’t need to be prepared for or judged in any way. If nothing much  happens, it’s no big deal. If something with a little energy or rhythm does pop up, it’s a gift, to be worked up further with other graphic tools, or tossed in a digital drawer. The tool cost 99 cents (plus tax).

On the higher end (on a computer, not a phone), Corel Painter provides an acceptably convincing experience of working with chalks and brushes on intricate textured surfaces, and one can even make simulated watercolor streams run down a digitally “slanted” page. Gee whiz. A slick Wacom tablet lacks the tactile feedback of real ink, oil paint, pencil, watercolor, or charcoal, but one can have an enormous range of responsive mark-making at one’s fingertips, not to even mention the aesthetic possibilities of complex layering.

What led to me to really immerse myself in Corel Painter for a season, as I prepared for an exhibition, was the fact that I could pick up or put down a complex project instantly, without setup or cleanup. With my daughter less than a year old at the time, along with a pressing teaching schedule and a trip to Ireland, substantial, extended studio time just wasn’t realistically going to happen. Painter helped me to survive creatively, under pressure. Screams or crashes from the next room? Shut the laptop and run to check it out, and come back later.

InkPainter makes drawing even more available. Realistically, I can’t always have a sketchbook in my hand or my laptop open (not to mention a drawing tablet), but I’ve generally got my phone in my pocket. I do use more complex drawing apps now and then on my iPhone, like Autodesk’s Sketchbook Mobile, and that program has dozens more options than InkPainter, including layers, brush modifications, resizing of elements, transparency… and so on. It’s only around a dollar, too, and it’s well-spent, but…  Generally, if I want a full set of digital drawing and painting tools, I’ll fire up my computer. I’m fascinated by Sketchbook Mobile’s range of possibility, but in reality, I rarely use it unless I unexpectedly find myself stuck in a waiting room with an extended stretch of time in front of me.

NermalWorks’ InkPainter, on the other hand, simulates one thing – brush and ink painting on absorbent rice paper. The algorithm it uses is pretty convincing – it feels good to use, and I like the results, though the resolution’s quite low. I don’t wish for more options panels. There’s color available, within limits, and one can “add water” to the ink to make it more transparent. (One thing that feels unnatural – “diluted” ink bleeds on the page to full, dense black, unlike “real ink.”)

I just want to pull out my phone and sketch with a tool that feels good in my hands (even though I’m always aware that the brush is a hoax, that the paper is a digital illusion). For all its limits, and with several more powerful painting and drawing tools available on the iPhone, NermalWorks InkPainter is still the one I find myself reaching for the most lately. If I want actual ink, I’ll get some ink out, but if I’m out in the world with a moment to spare, InkPainter scratches the inky itch.

In the “organic” world of physical objects and the human mind, sharp differences tend to smudge into soft transitions as materials or processes mix and interfere with each other. Sharp distinctions soften as edges are manipulated. The simplest image for this is a hill. One can cut a vertical face off of a pile of dirt with a shovel, but it quickly becomes a slope over time. One can push at materials and get a feel for how a variable situation responds in the moment, whether one is pushing ink around on a printing plate or overdriving an electric guitar. Properties of clay, wax, ink, and paint vary with the warmth of the day and the artist’s hands. With sensitive materials, it’s never the same tool as the one you remember from the day before, and that need for continual rediscovery leads to all kinds of promising surprises.

In digital media, all gradations are designed and programmed – a tawnier red is simply a different number in a system of colors, and all blending is done with algorithms. There is no “in between” in any situation, except one that is mapped by a programmer with a specific point of view of what, for instance, color, is. Programs like Corel Painter are astonishing in their simulation of color mixing, light reflection, fluid transparency, etc., but in some basic sense, they don’t even come close to the range of possibility of a cheap box of paints. One can try new combinations of options and in some programs one can design new logical procedures from existing components, but at some point, one comes up against a wall: one is limited to the tools and options that the programming team thought of. And the display resolution. And glassy flatness. (In practice, there’s often a sense of limitless possibility with digital tools, which is also real. But I’m following a thread here, ignoring my own obvious objections for the moment…)

Of course, I’m familiar with the other side of this paradox, and if I wasn’t astonished and seduced by the range of possibility that digital cinema, still image, and sound tools provide, I wouldn’t have spent the last several years working with them. There is still something missing for me, and it’s worth trying to articulate. In my experience, few of those who know how to use the tools even perceive a problem. On the other hand, few of the people I know who shun them for more physical media have enough working experience with digital media to be more than petulant or mutely resistant. They’re just not “that kind of person,” which is a lousy reason to choose a tool.

These days, digital “resolution” is astonishing, whether you look at cinema or use sound tools. One can perceive the issue better by looking not at the impressive level of focus and forests of options, but at the edges, at the margins where information becomes distorted as the tool fails to handle the information that’s arriving. In a nutshell, for reasons I alluded to before, physical, or analog distortion tends to be “soft,” while digital distortion is always hard (unless it’s modulated by one or another kind of “simulated” softness. The simulation can be convincing, but it’s not an oil painting or an acoustic guitar.

Why should it be? Well, it shouldn’t, and there’s nothing wrong with these tools. What strikes me as wrong is an emerging society that has no visceral concept or experience of a non-virtual world. I teach students who are puzzled by my suggestion that a good reproduction is not the same thing as an oil painting. A digital version certainly has more “features” (scaleability, portability, etc.), and if the digital print has the same hues in the same relationships, well, what’s the problem? Why would one want to see a piece of music played live? Why watch movies on film?

Over 1600 images on 111 sheets. This “block” is threaded through in a variety of ways to create three distinct pieces of animated visual music. This installation, which includes both video and still images, will appear as the centerpiece of “Time & Attention,” opening at Ironton on October 23rd. Esoteric secrets of abstract animation will be laid bare. Related drawings, prints, and cinema will also appear. Movie bits will appear on this site as the show approaches. Contact me to make sure you’re kept informed.