talk on conference website
Radical Digital Painting groups and presents several ideas and artifacts related to contemporary painting and contextualizes its connection to historical processes and digital technology. It is inspired by and is a continuation of Radical Computer Music.
Through demonstrative, interactive performance lectures, American artist and educator Jeffrey Alan Scudder presents homegrown software inventions and new theories about painting and picture making.
He has performed 60 times since 2016 across the US and Europe, mostly in art schools for students, and often with collaborators Goodiepal, Casey REAS, Julia Yerger, and Artur Erman.
A Google search for “digital painting” today mostly brings up Photoshop tutorials related to translating age old representational painting techniques to computational media, but the topic of digital painting has much more to offer fine arts in terms of poetry and theory.
Painting software today has largely developed out of a need for traditional artists to keep up pace of work in large scale mass media production pipelines, like those of video games and movies. Few systems have been developed to explore the spontaneity and spirituality present in modernism and contemporary art and further develop the language of painting in general.
Jeffrey has created several programs that highlight abstract expressivity, play, and improvisation over production quality and technical control.
In addition to software demos, new theoretical models of image resolution, computer literacy, and picture making are illustrated, described, and connected to the history of abstraction in drawing and painting. New ways of approaching drawing are also presented.
He presently spends all his time traveling, performing, and continuing to develop his software and media performances.
As of Summer and Fall 2018 he is traveling and lecturing with the Danish composer Goodiepal and his band GP&PLS throughout Europe. Jeffrey’s work Ten Minute Painting is now a part of the International Goodiepal Collection at the SMK Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen, Denmark.