James Faure Walker
Painting the Digital River: Before and After
I use paint programmes to extend what I can do in painting. For thirty years this has been liberating, and unsettling. Painters lean on history, and distrust new technology. A few painters, the algorists, grasped the significance of computer graphics as far back as the sixties. I was a late starter. The first software I used, Dazzle Draw, was jagged, like moving lego around on a fizzy screen. But it was painter heaven – I could put yellow over black, and do dozens of pictures before lunch.
​
Digital art emerged in the eighties as a techno avant-garde, at odds with ‘traditional’ art. Painting was seen as obsolete. Some manifestos declared that come the year 2000, art would become dematerialized, delivered through virtual reality and the Internet. Flat art – painting – would be over. I stayed on as a sceptical observer. I was also troubled by an art world unwilling to acknowledge that any of this was art at all. Eventually, I gathered my thoughts into a book, ‘Painting the Digital River’, published in the USA in 2006.
​
The prototypes of that time, presented in ‘art of the future’ shows, have not withstood the different future that actually arrived. We are not immersed in artworks, but in Facebook. Ironically, traditional artists, like watercolourists, use social media as much as anyone else. Some digital art has persisted - as coding, artificial life, robotics, web activism, performance, or sampling wikipedia as a vast image bank. Elsewhere it has been repurposed as art history, collectible in specialist galleries. Traces turn up in apps, or in lo-fi iPad versions. It is everywhere, no longer exclusive. I make pictures that don’t necessarily look digital, or take on digital themes. I follow Spielberg in finding the technology more potent when it is invisible.
Biographical notes
James Faure Walker (born 1948) studied at St Martins (1966-70) and the Royal College of Art (1970-1972). Before integrating digital methods into his work he had exhibited his paintings widely (Hayward Annual 1979; a solo exhibition at Manchester’s Whitworth in 1985). He was one of the founders of Artscribe magazine in 1976, which he edited for eight years. His book, ‘Painting the Digital River: How an Artist Learned to Love the Computer’, was published by Prentice Hall (USA) in 2006. Till 2014 he was Reader in Painting and the Computer, at Chelsea, University of the Arts. In 2013 he won the Royal Watercolour Society Award. He is the Hon. Treasurer of the RWS.
​
He began using paint software in 1988, first with an Apple II, then with an Amiga. Also in 1988 he exhibited in Art and Computers, Middlesbrough. From 1990 onwards he was a regular exhibitor and presenter at ISEA (the Inter-society for the Electronic Arts) and at SIGGRAPH, USA, from 1995 to 2007. He exhibited at the DAM Gallery, Berlin, and in 1998 won the ‘Golden Plotter’ prize at Computerkunst, Gladbeck, Germany. His work featured in ‘Digital Pioneers’ at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2009. The V and A owns thirteen of his works.
​
It was through these conferences that the digital art community came together as an international movement. Such gatherings are now less necessary. What was once experimental has become commonplace - an app on a smart phone. Yet the willingness to rethink the fundamentals, the freedom and pragmatism, remain its legacy. He collects how-to-draw-books from the 1880s to the 1950’s, fascinated by the similar layout of page and computer interface, and by the wayward ideas expressed about teaching, and about the purpose of art.
