I always thought digital art was just for kids until I saw a show in Portland last month

My cousin dragged me to a gallery showing digital paintings on big screens, and the detail in a piece called "Neon Rain" was like nothing I'd ever seen. It changed my mind completely about the whole medium being serious art. What's a piece of digital art that made you see it differently?

3 comments

3 Comments

umaf443mo ago

My friend got a digital frame for Christmas that cycles through different artists. One morning I was making coffee and saw this piece called "Morning Commute" by someone named Lorna Mills. It was just these weird, glitchy GIFs of animals on subway cars, but something about it stuck with me all day. It wasn't about being pretty or having crazy detail like your Neon Rain piece. It felt more like a funny, sad joke about daily life. That's when I got that digital art could be about a feeling, not just how real it looks. What kind of stuff was in the Portland show besides the big screens?

blake3023mo ago

My own digital art skills peaked with Microsoft Paint in 1998. Seeing a piece by Beeple a few years ago was a real wake-up call, showing what the medium could actually do. It made my old pixelated sunsets look pretty sad.

lopez.brooke1mo ago

Gotta disagree with @blake302 on the Beeple thing - I actually think that whole "Everydays" project shows the worst parts of digital art, like it's just about cranking out wild sci-fi scenes for attention instead of making something that actually means something. The stuff in that Portland show was more like "Neon Rain," which was this huge cityscape where the neon signs were actually coding scripts that scrolled in real time (nerdy, I know, but it made the piece feel alive in a way paint never could). There was also this artist named Sabrina Ratté who had a piece that was just glitching shapes that kinda looked like furniture melting, and it hit me harder than any perfectly rendered dragon or spaceship ever would.