the joy of the monitor screen

[egypturnash]

Research for a future project. I want to experiment with a certain look that a few computer art pioneers exemplified - undirected, painterly, abstracted work on crude materials, not trying to simulate other media, not yet capable of the unearthly perfection of today's hardware. Stuff that would be captured as a photo of a monitor, reveling in the visible phosphor dots.

David Em is easy to find. He bought davidem.com. The images up on his site only hint at the low-res joy of the reproductions I saw back in the eighties; they're captured without the phosphor masks, the visible artifacts of the medium that were as much a part of it as the texture of canvas and brushstroke is of a painting. I have a few examples in this old book on mid-eighties computer graphics that show this...

Richard Berry is harder to find. Googling for him is obscured by the guy who wrote 'Louie Louie'. All I can find are a few artifacts, like the cover of the game based on Neuromancer and the covers he did for one edition of Gibson's cyberpunk books. He started, I think, with an Apple II, and made stuff that really embraced the crudeness of the medium - strikingly garish, with all these distinctive experiments with the evolving capabilities of the tools to smear and distort his work around. Fucking hideous from one perspective, and wonderful from another. I halfway remember funning across his site a few years ago, and seeing work that was just as joyously embracing the garish craziness of things like Painter's then-new 'liquid metal' brush.

If anyone with better search skills than me can hunt up a collection of his stuff online, please let me know!

edit: Um, actually, his site is the top hit for googling for 'richard berry artist'; something in me looked at the front page and just said "this is not the Richard Berry I'm looking for, it's a pretty common name". Thanks for making me look deeper at it, Rik.

(And while I'm talking about artists who I've liked but not necessarily been influenced by - check out the photo manipulations of JK Potter sometime. Yummy. Unfortunately jkpotter.com seems to be down.)

Comments

[postrodent.livejournal.com]

Richard Berry apparently went on and founded Braid Media Arts with a couple of other guys. A bunch of his stuff can apparently be found here.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I found that page in my searching and thought it was... some other Rick Berry, you know? The front just didn't jibe with what I remembered at all of his work. But in the middle of all the painterly stuff is a revisitation of his cover for Neuromancer. Shame he doesn't have any of the crusty old 1984-era stuff I'm looking for up, although I can understand why - I don't want to show any of my work from 84...

And it turns out the cover of the Neuromancer game was by Darrel Anderson.

Heroica

[eselgeist.livejournal.com]

I met Rick Berry in front of his work on display at Boskone several years ago; it was my one brush with the Named/legit/pro illustration world. He was the guest of honor and he was very nice. He was definitely one of the pioneers in digitial illustration in publishing. And the original cover to Neuromancer is the first example of this(!) The anecdote he told me was that after he made it, the publisher said it didn't look "computery" enough and so he went back in with acrylics and painted onto the print out (that purple "halo" effect and some of the wispy blue highlights) at the last minute.

He also came around to my scant single panel. I didn't have much on display, just a few pieces. He was a little surprised by my technique, but he didn't bat an eye at the subject matter and then actually said that he liked "Clean Fun", since he liked dogs. This made me giddy as a schoolgirl.

He said that he could draw with a mouse(!) Because that's what he learned with, because that's all there was: those old clunky bricks that Mac's had for mice.

He told me to keep up my efforts and I beamed like an idiot the rest of the day. Then he went away and that was that :D

Re: Heroica

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I'd seen his work before Neuromancer, in some of the weird computer magazines I read. Here and there.

Most of the pro artists I've briefly met were pretty nice, and encouraging. I need to work on the nice thing myself someday. *grin* I sent some email asking for pointers to the really early digital stuff to the address on what turns out to be his site, but it bounced...