Pixels vs paint: Do digital tools make my art less credible?

“Did you use digital for this piece?” The art tutor’s voice was accusing. It was the final session of term on my postgraduate art course at a prestigious overseas art school which I was attending online. She’d just learnt that as a concession to my disabilities, another tutor had given me permission to draw on a computer where required. It hadn’t occurred to me that this would be controversial: after all, the entire course was run digitally, through Zoom and online photographs of our work.  

But in the upside down world of traditional fine art training, an artwork is rated not just on its quality but on the difficulty of the artistic process. You’ll be marked down if you admit to using a reference photo in your studio, rather than standing in the rain drawing. So now the tutor was going through my entire term’s portfolio, checking that I had not secretly been doing digital drawing in her class. (I hadn’t, but that’s not the point). “I think you should stop using it at all,” she said, ignoring my stammering explanations of need. Worse, she hadn’t put us in a virtual breakout room for this awkward conversation, so the whole class was listening in. 

I have a brain injury, with fatigue, mobility, coordination, eye, hearing and speech problems - so no need for me to spell out the potential problems of location drawing, especially in a course that often runs at New Zealand night-time and in Auckland’s unpredictable weather. Then there’s the whole issue of composition and how to design an artwork when your eyes see several different views at once. As it happens, I’ve built a flourishing art practice in part exploiting the differences of perspective f***ed up eyes can bring. But sometimes it’s nice not to be drawing differently and to have the same opportunities as everyone else. That’s why I sometimes use digital. It means I can correct perspective and work on a painting when I am too tired to get out of bed. Frankly, without the ability to use digital I wouldn’t be able to cope with my demanding course. 

Luckily, when I went to the course leadership with my problem, they immediately took my side. A note has been sent out to all tutors making it clear that access to digital tools is necessary for me to complete the course. I’m concerned, though, what this means for my art career. The boom and bust of NFTs – a way to value digital art that like cryptocurrency and the dotcom boom has left a trail of bankrupt investors in its wake – has meant that many art collectors are pathologically scared of collecting digital work. If a painting can’t be locked safely away in a bank vault and has the potential to be reproduced indefinitely, how do you value it? When I leave the safe and accepting confines of art school, will galleries decline to represent me if I have a partially digital portfolio? Will my digital work be judged by critics as somehow lesser, because it is created with pixels rather than paint? 

The irony of this situation is deepened by the fact that in some ways disability is fetishised – glamorised – by the art training industry. I have lost count of the number of times tutors have instructed us to warm up for class by drawing ‘blind’, which is apparently still an acceptable term for drawing without looking at the paper. This is often accompanied by some patronising disabled-inspo guff about blind people seeing better in different ways. Now of course, disability informs my art, but it doesn’t always make it better. For example, the writing of this article was delayed by two hours because when I woke up this morning I couldn’t see. It’s not a better article because I spent the morning cursing at the coloured dots dancing in front of my eyes. It’s just a later one. 

At times, I get worn down by the difficulty of being different and constantly having to explain and ask for help. I try to remember that these days, most of the idiotic comments and suggestions I receive in art school come not from a desire to discriminate and exclude, but pure ignorance and a misguided desire to help. The same art tutor who humiliated me about digital drawing has been wonderful and encouraging about my traditional work, particularly about the abstract pieces I’ve produced in oil pastel to describe those awful dotty-eye mornings. People are complicated. So is disability. 

I pick myself up off the floor by remembering that all great art comes from experimentation and trying something new. As disabled people, we are the great hackers and experimenters. We have to find creative solutions to our lives. There’ll be a creative solution to this, I’m sure. For now, I just need to keep going and make sure I judge my own work on quality and not on the media I use. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have an idea for a painting about waking up to find the world covered in red dots…

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