With technology today, can anyone be an artist?

In today’s society we are surrounded by vast amounts of new and creative technologies, which can enhance our minds to make us even more creative and imaginative with the right software in one’s computer.

Technology can really enable us to really dig deep into our creative minds with just a click of a mouse, which then can produce some fine art.

Artists today can be from the “traditional media” or the “new media”. The new media is the usage of digital image enhancement and the traditional media is the use of traditional methods using either art, hand Painting, Sketching of Photography on any raw materials.

The question is really can we compare Art today with some of the great artists of our past for example the likes of Van Gough a famous painter from Holland in the early 1800s who was renowned for cutting his ear off and producing some fine paintings like “Starry Night” and “Café at night” and of course we have to mention De Vinci an Italian painter from the 15^th century who has produced well know classics like “The Last Supper” and “Mona Lisa”.

Immediately on looking at this, one would start to compare on what was mentioned, but before one does, we should mention some other mediums like famous photographers. Let us take Lain McMillan a famous Scottish photographer who captured the photograph of the Beatles album cover “Abbey Road” which has the four band members walking a zebra road crossing at this location.

Another one of the great photographers of the past was W.D Hogan a Dublin based photographer in the early 1900s that was renowned for taking legendary photographs of famous Irish people like Michael Collins with one famous image of the signing of the treaty which later led to civil war in Ireland and a division of a nation. So what do we perceive as art today or can anyone class themselves as artists.

Today we live in a world of vast technology and human interactivity which enables us to communicate from person to person using modern technologies. Let us take Photography for example. Photography is a growing trend today and especially during the “Celtic Tiger” when a lot of money was floating around and people had disposable income to spend on new equipment. Camera sales rose to a new level, specially DSLRs (Digital single lens reflects) which are built for high resolution and sharp imagery results; professional photographers use then as part of their livelihood, good quality and great results depend on it.

Compact Cameras also soared in numbers and nearly everybody had one. Compacts are very handy in that you can fit them in your pocket or handbags, but, DSLRs looks more professional and expensive and really looks good hanging over ones shoulder you might say.

Local Photography suffered a bit, especially Landscape photographers whose bread and butter and livelihood depended on this. This boils down to everyone owning a digital camera and basically going out taking their own photographs, maybe the picture and the result would not be as good as a professional photographers work, but cheaper for the amateur in the long run and maybe a sense of achievement  along the way.

Technology today has come a long way since the dark room labs filled with chemicals, where one stayed in there for hours on end, trying to produce a picture that was worth while showing to the public and maybe one would produce a piece of art if one was lucky in the end.

Being a photographer in this digital age has made photography or any other art form a lot easier to produce good standard work quickly and with economic efficiency.

In today’s society nearly everyone owns a mobile phone, including kids. Kids these days are brought up been “digital natives” and technology is their first language. A lot of kids today have camera phones and you can find them snapping away at different things, resulting in them uploading images onto the internet or on any giving social network like Facebook or Bebo, etc. This can help expand their creative side.

Today we have computer programs or software that can help us improve our work dramatically. Let us take Adobe for example which gives us great programs like Photoshop, Dreamweaver, etc. Photoshop can be used for a number of things and quite a large program in which you can digitally manipulate any image in a good way or a bad way depending on the person using it. It is a great aid in expanding your creative style. Photographers or artists use this software, either by using an aid like a graphic pad; this is useful if you are a sketcher, where the pen can be used with precise accuracy and resulting in some superb quality.

One has looked at just a few ways in where technologies have brought us today and we can look at this either in a positive or a negative way. The positives are that we can create anything we desire with the right software and push our creative selves to any given level if we want to and by producing this we can do it quickly and efficiently at a relatively low cost.

One could look at the negative side of this and say that, technology is an easy way out of things, there are many shortcuts and not enough learning, for example in the past one put pride and sweat in their time to produce great art. In a camera or paint brush in the past, there were no automatic settings or graphic pads to help us bypass the real learning of an art form.

Are we all artists deep down or just using technology to cut corners? One can question this, but deep down we all know who we are and what we aim to be, either by using the traditional means of media or the new age of technology.

By Murt Mulcahy