When doing the still life assignment, I started to think more deeply about how tools lead our creative process and influence our perspective on creativity.
Let’s compare creating a line art with pen and paper vs in illustrator. One difference everyone would notice is that illustrator smoothen your lines, and you won’t have wiggly lines that take practice to avoid when using pen and paper. Just through this seemingly minor difference, we could start to get a sense of how tools affect our creativity. You could in a way view such feature of illustrator both liberating and constraining. It for sure allowed us to draw straight line when it’s our intention, freeing us from practicing for years (reminds me instantly about the famous story of Da Vinci: when he first learned drawing, he drew an egg repeatedly for 3 years), but it might at the same time take away our ability to draw messy lines which embedded a sense of free spirit. Does illustrator make it easy for everyone to draw but on the other hand, limit the range of idiosyncrasy? After all, we do tend to draw abstract geometric shapes with illustrator. The least I could say is that tools have their own ideologies and beliefs, after all, they are human creations. The popularity of illustrator might contribute to the culture of what we view as trendy and beautiful, or it could be the other way around, our perceptions give birth to that tool.
To open up the limitation of the tool, it might be interesting to abuse the tool intentionally to create new forms of artwork, completely going against what the tool is best at doing. Joe O’Donnell (seen on the left), which Christine has written a great blog about, used intentional wiggly lines to approach illustration in a new way.
After this class, I had a new realization. Beauty is so intentional, and the way we create beauty is through a string of conscious decisions. We also judge art so much by how much we see the intentionality. If we view Jenny Holzer’s work in another medium like instagram, would we appreciate her message? The intentionality might be the location. And intentionality could be the tool as well. Are we consciously choosing the tools for the work we create?
When camera first appeared, it gives birth to a whole new category of art. What if we could create or following my last blog post, remix the tools that we had?
Let’s dwell in that vast possibility for a while.
