Our collective toolboxes share a history. Timeless tools outlasting millennia by artists, designers, and polymaths alike. The need for these tools is rather paramount more than ever in any point in history. Digital media is just that, it’s digital and not grounded in the real world. I see mirrored texture maps on models in blockbuster movies, and let’s not get into the crumbling nature of audio engineering running rampant as budgets shrink as does what’s considered acceptable. The bean counters run the show now right into the ground with no gestures of making amends.
The bar hasn’t just lowered, it’s nearly nonexistent. In some cases it’s become a limbo-inspired chokehold to the ground. The sameness of repetition in a computer needs far more deliberate strokes, tweaks, and further thinking in order to produce something truly memorable and grounded in reality. Film was magical, and it was also forgiveable. The world of 4K, even 12K clearly exposes the missing, generic details that were added like a cheap coat of paint on a rusty vintage racer. It may be able to still go fast, but it’s lost its spirit and passion for the race track and country road.
Endless imagination fueled by intuition. That’s where the magic happens. Our most intense ideas sometimes spark in the middle of the night. Electrical impulses igniting our gray matter in a myriad of chromatic aberrations and expanding and retracting attenuations. I haven’t bought a Design Marker, Prismacolor, or tube of Windsor Newton watercolor for 40 years. Technology comes and goes, but the analog tools that I grew up with are still active in my creative arsenal. I have two toolboxes filled to the brim, yet most of the time I choose a pen and a scrap of paper.
Our tools assist us in illuminating our creations just as monks illuminated medieval manuscripts. Their own beauty on full display each time they’re sun-kissed as my bottle of “Dr. Ph. Martin’s 30C Pumpkin” awaits its ascension in providing richness to my next sheet of Arches cold-pressed 300-pound goodness. The caustics, glints, and glimmers of the bottle itself deserve their own credit. Not only the shape and thickness of the bottle, but also the design of the label allowing sunlight to illuminate through the lettering I find just lovely.
Further inspection of the bottle reveals additional intentional details worth noting. Notice the three graphic icons on the side. “Technical Pen, Brush, and Airbrush.” It’s crystal clear in such a classic, vintage manner. One bottle, multiple uses, and those were just three suggested use cases. We know the possibilities are endless. An Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat of sorts. Even colors not found in the visible spectrum on full display. Magenta streams of consciousness unabashed and fully aware of their limitless abilities of creation.
I’ve been using this particular watercolor since I was just a teenager 40 years ago. It’s still just as potent in purpose and saturation further supporting my creative expressions both commercially and personally. Every tool aids me in telling stories sometimes reimagining old ones from a new perspective. Some, like this bottle of radiant watercolor, still showing up in full vibrancy never fading into mediocrity that occurs in the daily digital realm. A reality. A history. Artistic ambition never replaced by the flavor of the week digital incarnation.
While embracing our childlike curiosities through artistic expression we understand we have no need to bow down to any sense of public opinion. Divinely appointed, we artists know full well our passion in pursuing truth over popularized false substance. We wield weapons of mass instruction awakening the minds of the many who choose the natural world to one augmented and empty. We breathe soulful expressions of clarity into existence far removed from blind prompts sporting the lowest common denominator.
Don’t settle for what someone else lacking in vision considers good enough. We know in our gut and our heart center that the joy we bring to the world is what makes dreams possible. Natural expressions that not only reflect and redefine reality but generate endless variations of our dreams freshly kindled around a collective campfire. We share our stories through patterns, riddles, puzzles, and prose. Looking back I feel as though my passion for art and design chose me rather than the other way around.
“Ode,” published in 1874 in Music and Moonlight
We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;—
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.— Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy