P#44: An Old Chair, A New Way of Doing Things

Old World Meets New Technology

Bert Monroy: Old Chair is just a little collection of items outside of a little curio junk shop kind of a thing that used to be here in Berkeley. It's a chair, a table with a little basin on top, and some stuff in the window behind it, and some tiles. (click the image for a larger version)

Now, what's really different about that painting from all the others is that that's the first painting I did on the Wacom Cintiq. The Cintiq is the tablet that's built into the screen so you're actually working directly on the screen.

At that point, I felt like I had gone full cycle to the way I was traditionally trained. I found myself holding the stylus like a paintbrush and working directly on the screen. There is something to be said for the hand eye coordination. When you're actually looking at your hand doing things, you can get into a lot more intricate and detailed work than you can if you're holding a little bar of soap off to the right, or left if you're a lefty.

When I went digital, there was a thing that was a little unusual at first, holding that little bar of soap, that mouse. The controls were a little limited at first. It wasn't until the optical mouse came out that I actually switched to the tablet because at that time, I was working on two cinema displays, which is a lot of screen real estate.

I'd have to keep lifting that thing and twisting it around until I could get the cursor to move across that much screen. Many times, it would jump back. That was a problem with the optical mouse, that when you're moving them many times, the cursor would suddenly jump to another spot.

Worst of all is that I tend to work with very tiny brushes. All of a sudden, "Where's my cursor? Where's the brush?" I wouldn't see it and I would have to start around, and there it is. I see it at the menu, and then I slowly watch that brush go down to where I wanted it to be, and then I started working.

Whereas I switched to the tablet, then I knew exactly where my cursor was at any time. If I wanted it to be on the upper left, I would click on the upper left. It gave me more control over how I was controlling that curser and I also started holding instead of a bar of soap, I started holding the stylus like a pencil.

Then when the Cintiq came out, all of a sudden I was painting on the screen. I started holding the stylus not only like a pencil but like a paintbrush. I started being able to go in there and do much smoother strokes and so on, because I was working directly on the screen, or directly on the canvas.

That painting is a little more organic looking than some of the previous ones but the previous ones were really made up of thousands of little shapes, little paths, little polygons that I created and then filled the gradients and so on.

The detail is a lot tighter whereas in this one, the details are a lot of rough things, scratches, cracks in the grout between the tiles and the wall, scratches on the old chair, and so on. I was able to do those because I was actually controlling the brush strokes directly on the screen. That one changed the way I worked.

In Conclusion

Technology gives us new ways of looking at traditional subjects. In this painting of an old chair, Bert demonstrates how powerful those changes can be.