Patrick Usher is a 23 year old Irish artist, he is best known for his net art piece Digital Classic. He takes inspiration from artists such as Beksinski and jean michel Basquiat. In his early life he was into classic art ever since he visited Italy as a young man. As he grew up and he started surfing the web he was able to find new inspirations. Usher also has an infinity for the outdoors, he enjoys gardening and sports. These influences are seen less in his works but I’m sure in the future he will incorporate these influences into his art In recent times Usher has started incorporating more abstract imagery into his work. in his 2021 piece titled Digital Classic he explores symbiosis and the origins of art and compares and contrasts them to modern digital art. Usher is an artist with a bright future and as his skills grow so will his works
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This piece of Net Art is called “ Digital Classic” for me this piece is an appreciation of both modern digital art and Classic art. In this work I attempted to illustrate the timeline of art history. We all know classic works like the Mona Lisa and Starry Night, these artworks where created by people hundreds of years ago using a brush and a canvas. In today’s age we still use these same technique’s but what we now have is digital art created through the internet. The online world has basically over taken our lives, it has become one with us. Our phones are often described as an extension of ourselves likewise with our social media’s. In my Net Art I wanted to depicted how our art in both a modern and classic context can also be described as an extension of ourselves. I decided to name my work “Digital Classic” because now a days we see the work of past generations as classics. Old poetry , old music and old movies seem to be held in higher regard than modern works. Why is this ? I believe it is because we view their works as classics for their time. If most of these works where created today they would be described as dated. I wanted to mix the dated “ classic “ aesthetic with all the technological “digital” advancements of today thus creating the name “ Digital Classic”. I would just like to take this time to thank you for reading this and viewing my art work, art is often subjective and as they say beauty is in the eye of the beholder but either way I am happy you took the time to view my work.
For this project I was tasked with exploring the theme of symbiosis through Net Art . When I first read the brief back at the start of the year I was not familiar with the term “ Symbiosis” so the first step was to research it. Research – When first starting this project I quickly realised that research was going to be very important, I first Googled the definition of Symbiosis. Nationalgeographic.org describes it as Subject – Once I was familiar with the meaning of symbiosis was, I then had to try and think of a symbiotic relationship that I could potentially base my net art piece on. The obvious option was to go with humans and technology, but I wanted to take a slightly different approach. Ever since I was young I had a fascination with art, in recent years this evolved into me creating my own art. So for this project I wanted to take a deeper diver into the relationship between classic art, modern digital art and the humans that both consume and produce the art. Much like with symbiosis the art work of today directly benefits from the art work of the past. Case study- For this project I thought it was important to have a relevant case study. I wanted to chose someone’s work that had both elements of classic art and modern digital art. After looking into this for quite some time I discovered the Polish artist Zdzislaw Beksinski. Beksinski was born in 1929, through most of his life he created artwork that was quite apocalyptic in nature. But the interesting this about Beksinski is that he lived from 1929 to 2005 this meant that for the majority of his life he had no option but to create art with a brush and canvas. But in the 1990’s he started working on digital art. He created some of the most interesting works I’ve ever seen. This for me was an interesting case study as it demonstrates how someone’s art can go through such a drastic metamorphosis in one artists lifetime and how his early art directly influenced his digital art Early Art Beksinski Digital Art Beksinski “ A term describing any relationship or interaction between two dissimilar organisms. The specific kind of symbiosis depends on whether either or both organisms benefit from the relationship.” Once I understood the definition I was then able to learn more about the topic. I watched some useful Youtube Videos and also took some notes from lectures. Process of creation - With all my research and case studies behind me I was able to then set off on the creation of my own Net Art piece. I decided to create my work in premier pro as I am quite familiar with that app. I first had to gather a folder of classic art images and modern digital art images. I then used glitch and distortion affects to create a dark and moody look. I thought I used a fair mix of classic art pieces well known to most and some lesser known net art pieces. In the end I was happy with how my work turned out. If given more time I would have also liked to explore different types of symbiosis.
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