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Jorge Colombo is amongst the artists using the Brushes application on the iPhone as a digital palette and canvas. The iPhone is great for everything from gaming, social networking and figuring out where the heck you are, once you get lost. But you wouldn’t have thought it would be a great tool for artists. Until now. Meet Jorge Colombo. He’s an artist from New York and he has been using the iPhone as a digital palette and canvas, allowing him to instantly capture the city he lives in. He has been using the Brushes application on his device to paint with a flick of the finger. The video above features an interview with Mr Colombo discussing his work and allows you to get a snapshot of just how he does it. (see video here) |
Jorge Colombo is a local artist who uses software on his Apple iPhone to paint photos of famous New York scenes from scratch. The process takes anywhere from a few minutes to a half hour. Watch the video as Colombo walks Tech Reporter Brett Larson through his latest project. Jorge Colombo was born in Portugal and moved to the United States in 1989, according to his Web site. He has lived in Chicago, San Francisco and New York City (since 1998) with his wife, artist Amy Yoes. He has worked as an illustrator, a photographer, and a graphic designer. Since 2003 he started working on digital videos. (see video here) |
In the early 20th century, the photograph still seemed new. The German intellectual Walter Benjamin tried to understand how photography changed art: it replaced the "aura" of the masterpiece with a new, democratic way of making pictures. Going on for a century later, we're living in the midst of a technological revolution that has left photography itself behind. Here's the latest: artist Jorge Colombo makes pictures of New York street life using the Brushes application (bought for $4.99 -- "a great leveller") on his iPhone. The results are impressively delicate and lively. Lots of people take photos on a phone -- the casual record of what you see is fun to share. Colombo's pictures are a creative extension of that: he sketches what he sees in New York, and these fast, fragmentary glimpses of a car park entrance, a pizza joint, a view between buildings have an impressionistic immediacy. He can "draw in the dark", working on the illuminated screen to depict the city by night. They are not pretentious, they do not claim to be more than a sort of visual diary. But they show that a sensitive eye can use any medium to respond to the beauty of the world -- whether it's a brush or Brushes. |
[...] The touchscreen is also crucial to the illustration application Brushes. As a professional illustrator, Jorge Colombo has had some experience with computers, but he didn't like "drawing in one place and seeing the image in another." When he discovered Brushes, however, he was smitten. "There's something tactile about working with my fingers directly on the screen. You can be just as organic and casual as you would be with a brush." You can see the evidence in Colombo's impressionistic images of New York, many of them nocturnal city views that would be hard to achieve with traditional techniques. Using his iPhone, Colombo needs no forward planning, no bulky equipment, not even a light source. "The image itself is illuminated by the screen," he says. "I can be drawing in the dark." Like Chilvers, he hopes the cheapness and ease of use of such tools will encourage widespread dabbling. "Amateurism is often underrated. I like to see people playing with artistic expression, not to make a living but just for the pleasure of it." (see complete article here) |
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