Off the top of my head- digital life/analog life

From Model in Life Painting class

This thought just came to me and I had to put it down...so pardon me if it's raw.  But I have this flash of insight about how digital photography and videos have effected art in recent years.  Duh you might think but let me flush this thought out for a minute.

For example, I've been a dancer since I was a little girl and consequently I've done a LOT of live shows.  We used to do shows that were -when I danced at the Tikis- the same show for an entire season over and over and over again.  And the response of the audience had an immediate effect on how much you enjoyed that particular show.  I mean there were no cellphone pictures and videos capturing every moment you were on stage and tagging you with your mistakes and possibly funny faces.  Occasionally someone's dad or boyfriend would make a home movie which they would develop months later when they used up a whole batch of film, and splice the stuff together with everything else they recorded and you might go see it at their house.  Even if you flash forward to camcorders, it wasn't as immediate as it is now...no one was posting their video on the interwebs the very same day.  So the viewing was distanced from the actual performance.  In a way our experience as performers was very intimate and in the moment.  It was more like something the Buddhists talk about, mindfulness.  If the audience was lively and fun you had a fun time, if your fellow performers were in the zone you had a fun time, if things were dead they were not so fun.  But there were none of these immediate videos that we would over analyse with people criticizing themselves and each other.

Something very similar happens in painting and art.  I have been looking at the paintings of the great Alice Neel a lot lately, she died in 1984 so her work was all pre-digital age.  Some of my teachers at CSUCI pointed her out to me when I was in school there, maybe because like me painted the people around her and her friends and family.  Her work is not anatomically perfect, but it shows the full intensity of the model and that is something so much more than just painting a rendition of a photograph.  That's what I'm getting to, that I think digital photography has really flattened the way artists see the world.  Granted there are great artists doing photorealist work and maybe it's just something different than the work of the past, no worse or better, just different.  But I'm trying to understand how it digital photography affects me as an artist.   There is such a disparity of freshness that happens when working from a photograph.  You have to compensate for things that happen in photography when you paint from these cellphone pictures, for instance the perspective on my iPhone becomes skewed.  Things that are closer to the camera become disproportionally larger, and I as the artist must compensate and try to figure out how to make it the way I want it to look.  And foreshortening always looks strange in digital pictures.  I think what I'm trying to say is that I get too distracted with making things look real sometimes and I might miss the intensity of the person I'm trying to capture because I'm not looking at THEM but a PICTURE of them.  Does this make any kind of sense to anyone else?  I will put to paintings in this post one is from a photograph I took the other from a live model, maybe they will show what I want to say.

Painted from a Photograph of my friend in a stage performance 

superimposed on a made up background

All this being said, it is really expensive and inconvienient to get a live model to sit there for you!  I do manage to talk friends into modeling for me and I'm so grateful they do this for me.  I don't know  how I will resolve this imagined problem!