Michael Ananian

Like most art professors during the height of the pandemic, I had to teach remotely.  I got a Cintiq 16 Wacom Tablet so that I could create drawings that students could watch progress in real time.  I started practicing and making digital drawings to become a better and more proficient online drawing teacher.  After a while of doing this, I realized just how much fun it was to draw digitally!  I also started to see many advantages: for instance, drawing with a "pencil" that always stayed sharp, being able to work in "layers" much like a printmaker might, "layers" of line in which the lines and layers are transparent/visible--as opposed to smudging, and changing the format or "canvas size" at will.  I noticed that for details, I could zoom in on an area and work on it, in such an enlarged state, that when I zoomed back, the detail was really breathtaking; something I could never do witha traditional drawing.

I rely lots on mimesis of traditional drawing media, such as: hard pencils, colored pencils, and charcoal, but nevertheless, I have experienced something that seems very much different in character and mood than traditional drawing; it might have to do with how digital line work looks when it is enlarged.  It might also have something to do with the fact that light is behind and through the image, something akin to a photographic slide--but even the slide analogy seems insufficient to describe this sensation!  No matter how I might characterize it, it very much has its own life, a separate entity, a new genre of drawing--not merely a new drawing tool or medium but an unique art form.  I know that many people have already realized this, but it has been revelatory for me.

Most people seem to call this realm of art "digital painting."  But, it's pretty clear that I relish line, which I think firmly situates what I'm doing within the field of drawing.  I'm very aware that Renaissance tempera painting and Paul Cadmus's paintings argue for calling what I do "painting."  But really, I was thinking more about line and cross contour related to Western and Middle European drawing and printmaking, like Durer's engravings and woodcuts, so I cannot help but think of what I'm doing as "digital drawings."