Introduction

I’d like to quote from the book Paris in Our Time (Albert Skira, Paris: Editions d’Art,1957).

The author was describing the transition from Realism to Impressionism around 140 years ago, when the artists of the day were freed from the constraints of their studios by the new technology of its day, paint in tubes! They went outside to paint what they saw in the real world. Their joy of discovering freedom of expression unleashed the powerful, most universally loved period of art, Impressionism. One needs only to spend some time in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, or the Impressionist wing of the local museum, to feel the exuberance that this freedom of movement released in this prolific group of artists.

Yet this quote could describe the movement of making mobile digital art that has arrived all around the world simultaneously. The Impressionists were friends who shared their works with each other, exhibited together, shared the same philosophy, and were wholly rejected by the Salon in Paris, the art establishment of its day. It took them twenty years to gain recognition from the art establishment. iPhone artists, separated by distant locations and different languages, have found a home together on the photo-sharing network Flickr, where they share their work in groups dedicated to iPhone and iPad paintings, photos, and collage. Over the years they have established amazing friendships and collaborations. Despite their worldwide separation, since 2010 they have exhibited together, in shows dedicated specifically to mobile art, in New York, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Chicago, Washington DC, Connecticut, Wisconsin, Maine, Toronto, Hamburg, Milan, Herzegovina, and the UK. It seems that in this day and age of instant communication, it will take mobile art considerably less time to become an accepted art medium.

But the art establishment is another story. Like any institution, the art world profits from the sale of works of established artists, whose work has a market, and a high market value. Where does the work of new artists and their new forms of art fit into this equation? With rare exceptions, it doesn’t. New visions take some time to gain acceptance, and art history has taught us that it’s not unusual for an artist to spend a lifetime creating art in obscurity, only to get recognition after his or her death. Today, obscurity doesn’t exist for anyone with computer access or a smartphone. You have the freedom to publish your work in an ever growing number of blogs, photo-sharing networks, social networks, or your own web portal. Now, the cream rises to the top in an extremely democratic fashion.

Mobile Art—It's Not All About the Apps

The art world changed with the opening of the iTunes App Store. There have been 800,000 apps and over 40 billion downloads since the opening in July 2008. Most iPhone and iPad users acquire apps to help them find their way around, make them laugh, or amuse their friends in some way; some find apps to be useful tools they use frequently in their daily lives. Then there are the artists like me, who have hundreds of art or photography apps that they use depending on the image, the mood, and the vision. The apps “Brushes” and “SketchBook Pro” have a huge presence in this book as most of these artists came to mobile art and these popular apps from traditional painting. In 2008, the translation to this new canvas was painless and mostly playful. Since then, this art form has produced many masters and works that will no doubt one day be considered early 21st century masterpieces, as you will see in the following pages.

The App Store still provides the kid-in-the-candy-store experience for all artists and aspiring artists as new tools with new functionality appear daily, to the delight of endusers. Obviously, tools are important, but they don’t do anything by themselves in the same way as a computer, a pencil, or a paintbrush doesn’t. A computer is just a box and a pencil is graphite in a wooden case; like the iPhone or the iPad, they’re moot without human interaction. It is the artists who extend their thinking, apply their skills and sensibilities, adapt to these new kinds of tools, and make them sing. Gauguin said, “The Painter is not the slave either of the past or the present, either of nature or his neighbor: he is always himself.” In this case, each artist brings that “self” to these devices and, with the help of thousands of specialized apps, creates mobile art.

Mobile Digital Art/Art History

New art movements usually are torn from others, Realism giving way to Impressionism over the course of twenty years, Surrealism and Pop art spinning off from Dadaism five years and then fifty years later. Marcel Duchamp’s readymades and Kurt Schwitters’ elegant collages gave way to the Surrealists, who returned to reclaim the importance of technical proficiency. But it didn’t matter, since the changes in thinking had already occurred. Now there were no rules. The Dadaists and Surrealists gave way to the Abstract Expressionists, Pop artists, and Conceptual artists, and again, there were no rules. If freedom for the artist was fundamental to these art movements, the mobile art movement in the 21st century takes artistic freedom to a whole new level. Through the sheer power of the web, which is the glue that holds it together and the fuel that drives it forward, this movement has levels of interactivity and communication that artists of the past could not have even imagined.

Some art movements are born from wars, like Dadaism, which reflected the human condition after World War I, Abstract Expressionism, which followed World War II, and the Pop/Psychedelic art movements during the Vietnam war. Mobile art was born of technology, but in a post-9/11 world with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although it’s technology that’s the binding force here, the movement takes place in a time when the prevailing mindset is that anything’s possible, anything goes.

In the past, one could produce a chart that linked one art movement to the next, but art made on the iPhone and iPad is influenced by the diversity in the world and in the world of artists who are all sharing the same studio space. The iPhone art movement has Realists, Impressionists, Dadaists, Cubists, Surrealists, Abstract Expressionists, Pop artists, Conceptual artists, technical artists, musical artists, video artists, process artists, and is inclusive of all styles of art generated by artists worldwide. The common thread is that each artist picked up the iPhone or an iPad and made art using whatever skill set he/she brought to the iDevice.

The mobile artists’ impact illustrates an important aspect of modern art, the unexpected unity created when two dissimilar concepts are combined to create a new relationship, in this case ubiquitous cellphone and fine art. For the viewer, this departure from the norm is as liberating as Duchamp’s drawing a mustache on the Mona Lisa, maybe easier because he/she already has the technology in his/ her pocket.

Sometimes the construction of a new art movement requires the destruction of another one, but here there is no destruction, just a new toolbox, with app developers vying for the masses to create with their latest and greatest tools. New technology has a long history of creating new art. In 1841, the American artist John Rand patented the first collapsible metal tube, made of tin, for artists’ oil paint. Before that, artists had to be their own chemists, grinding colors and mixing them with oil and paint-thinner. To work outdoors, they had to transport their paint mixtures in leaky pig bladders, which allowed the paint to dry out quickly. Paint in tubes was the new technology of the day that drove the Impressionist artists outdoors and facilitated the creation of the most beloved movement in art history. Renoir was quoted years later, “Without paint in tubes, there would be no Impressionism.” In mobile art, the leap in technology wasn’t pig bladders to metal tubes, but the introduction of the iPhone and App Store.

The introduction of photography was another monumental technological shift in art history, not just as an emerging art form unto itself but to facilitate various applications within the art world. Painters used photographs as a source of accurate perspective, some even projecting the images onto canvas as reference. Then there were those who saw different possibilities for this new medium, using photography as a way to combine incongruous elements to achieve unexpected emotional content.

The Berlin Dadaists coined the term photomontage just after World War I. They wanted a word to describe their new technique of introducing photographs into their work and took the position that photos, text, drawing, and found scraps could all be considered a photomontage. John Heartfield, an icon in the history of photomontage, said, “A photograph can, by the addition of an unimportant spot of color, become a photomontage, a work of art of a special kind.”

This kind of out-of-the-box thinking is pervasive in mobile art, where elements of photography are easily combined with text, painted elements, and anything you can find on the web. A Dadaist finds a scrap of paper on the street and uses it in his/her collage. One hundred years later, the mobile artist searches Google, pulls the relevant image off the cloud and uses it in his/her collage. It makes me wonder what the artist will be doing a hundred years from now …

What Defines Mobile Digital Art?

Usually when you try to trace the history of any art movement, it’s impossible to pinpoint the exact moment it began. In the case of mobile digital art, the second the iTunes App Store opened, the mobile digital art movement was on. In July of 2008, the App Store opened with a few thousand apps, some dedicated to painting and some to photo manipulation. Artists began gravitating to this new computer platform, making art from day one. As the App Store grew, the number of apps to make art and photography multiplied exponentially. The media started to recognize the work that began popping up in different visual forums, but it was Jorge Colombo’s New Yorker cover and David Hockney’s iPhone sketches that brought worldwide attention to this new medium. Talented artists began making art exclusively on the iPhone. Although one could describe the work as an extension of digital art, since many iPhone artists began there, many more traditional artists who had never touched a computer began making art on their iPhones in droves. The introduction of the iPad further established this mobile platform as a tool for content creation because its size makes it more acceptable to a greater range of artists.

Mobile digital art includes any works made by any artist on these devices. This includes music, video, and animation, but of course it would be hard to feature any of these mediums here in this book for obvious reasons. It is important to recognize that these alternative forms of artistic human expression are also represented, with a vast array of developers, artists, and apps to make it happen.

An art movement from the past would be defined as when a group of artists, together, create a similar style of art. Here we have a movement that is stylistically diverse yet banded together by the use of common technology. For this reason, this book has been divided into three sections that represent different stylistic approaches to these devices.

Section 1: The Painters

The painters represent the largest group of artists worldwide to pick up the iPhone and iPad for artistic reasons. Their diversity would be hard to represent, even though this book attempts it by presenting over forty traditional painters. At this point in time, it leaves out many, many talented mobile artists, easily enough to fill another book.

Section 2: Photographers, Collage, and Photomontage

Photographers were selected for their distinctive iPhone-centric approach to this new art form. Collage and photomontage artists use mobile devices to create complex compositions. This section also includes some “iPhone mash-up artists” who use multiple apps to create their mobile art.

Section 3: Abstract, Background, and Conceptual Art Apps

Art apps like kaleidoscopic apps, fractal art generators, and abstract art generators are apps many mobile artists use in the creative process. These apps are used by many artists to create stand-alone art, but are also used as part of a multi-app approach to making art. For conceptual artists, this is a new arena where the app is the art.