At first glance, the room looks like a typical painter’s studio. Completed paintings hang on the walls, an assortment of frames leaning against the walls beneath them. A half-completed canvas stands on an easel at one end of the room; in the opposite corner are an acoustic guitar and an electric bass, evidence of the artist’s other interests.
But there’s something missing from Roger Pearce’s studio on North Kahshe Lake Road. Where are the jars fi lled with brushes, the waste bin overfl owing with empty paint tubes, the spatters of paint on the fl oor? Above all, where is the light that usually streams into a painter’s studio? Pearce’s studio is dim and shadowed, kept that way by a heavy blanket pinned over the room’s south-facing window.
The answer is seen on Pearce’s desk, where a powerful computer hums quietly. The screen is awash with colour, displaying a vivid garden scene. This is Pearce’s main workplace now, the digital canvas where he creates his paintings.
Pearce has been a painter all his life. He can still recall the image that convinced him to pursue a career in art – Salvador Dali’s Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War), which he saw when he was 14. “I went ‘Oh my God.’ I want to do that.”
He attended Ontario College of Art in the late 1960s, a time of enormous creative fervour and political turmoil at the school. “I didn’t fi nish the course, which was the way to go at the time,” he said with a chuckle.
In the mid-1990s, Pearce was hitting his stride as a painter. But his creative life was going to take an unexpected turn thanks to the arrival of digital media. “I was probably peaking as a painter when I moved in to this, but I couldn’t resist,” he said.
‘This’ is a collection of software and hardware that allows Pearce and thousands of other artists to paint and sculpt on the computer. The artistic output is most often seen in the movies – some of the programs Pearce uses have also created orcs in Lord of the Rings, the ape in King Kong, and nearly everything in Beowulf.
Pearce prefers to stay away from animation (“You just can’t do everything in one lifetime, sad as that may be,” he admits.) Instead he creates portraits, landscapes, and abstract works. Some of his works begin as three-dimensional creations – the garden scene, for example, can be rotated, walked through, and seen from above in a way that blurs the lines between artistic image and landscape architecture. Some of his abstract works include objects that are sculpted in a three-dimensional program such as ZBrush, then carried over into a two-dimensional painting program like Corel Paint. Pearce’s website includes 3-D renderings that are available as threedimensional computerized creations or as two-dimensional paintings, depending on the client’s preference.
The technology has advanced at bewildering speed. “I never thought we’d be here already,” Pearce said. The ideas about how to use it are expanding even faster. Renderosity, one of the online communities for digital artists, has about 450,000 members, ranging from curious high school students to professional animators who work for Hollywood studios. Trying to stay on top of it is impossible. “It’s like climbing this ladder that keeps going up faster than you can climb it,” Pearce said.
The growth of digital media has raised a number of questions about art. Is it possible to buy an original of a digital image? If Pearce prints one of his works, is it an original or a print? And how do you show this work – will future art collectors simply hang a plasma screen on the wall and store their art collection on a hard drive?
It has also opened doors for artists to collaborate with each other, and even to profit from their work. Renderosity has a thriving marketplace where one can buy everything from textures and colours to complete models and scenes. Pearce has become an exporter of Muskoka rock – he finds rock outcrops that have an interesting texture, photographs them, and sells the textures to other artists. The next step is to create three-dimensional models of individual stones, and offer them for sale. His own work can include textures and shapes created by others, or digital images he has captured – the bark of a tree in one of his paintings, for example, was created by photographing a tree in his front yard.
Some critics disparage that approach, saying it’s not “real” art. “Some people think artists should do things the hard way,” Pearce said. “That’s crap. Artists have always done things faster if they can. If the old masters were alive today, they’d absolutely be using this stuff.”
While many of those who work in digital media are hardcore technology lovers, Pearce is not afraid to combine media. He’s currently experimenting with a process that will see partially-completed digital works printed on canvas, which he will then complete with paint.
He continues to work with paint in other ways, too. His alter ego is The Painting Doctor, an expert in art restoration and repair. Thirty years of painting has taught him quite a bit about the technical side of art, the craft elements such as how canvas, paint, varnish and other materials behave in various situations. “I’ve always been a technical artist, fascinated by the materials. I just didn’t realize I was becoming The Painting Doctor,” he said. He’s now built a business repairing paintings that have been ripped, damaged by water or smoke, or simply weathered. Only once has he turned down a job, when he was asked to repair a painting that had been treated with a badly-chosen varnish. (After consulting with paint manufacturers, he found that the only solvent that would remove the varnish would also have removed the paint. He returned the painting to the artist with a bit of advice: “Don’t do that again.”)
Satisfying as The Painting Doctor work is, Pearce’s real passion remains creating his own work. While the technology that drives the digital art world continues to press forward, a certain maturity has begun to set into the work itself. That wasn’t present a decade ago, when the technology was still very new and the gee-whiz factor still dominated many artists’ thinking. Now, artists are using pixels and digital tablets just as they used paint and brushes or chisels and stone: as a way of exploring questions, of creating beauty, of challenging the viewer. As a way of making art.
It’s analogous to the arrival of digital music, Pearce said. When synthesizers came on the scene, everyone was using them to replace brass and stringed instruments. Now, music producers are more likely to use both digital sounds and real instruments, depending on the sound they want to achieve as an end-result.
“You can get so far away from making art,” he said. “It’s nice to get back to it.”
Artist Profile: Roger Pearce
Roger Pearce
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