In Brooklyn, Artists Gather for an MS Paint Nude Drawing Course
SUNSET PARK, NY — The model let her purple silk kimono fall to the floor and assumed a classical pose, standing atop a small stage at the front of the makeshift classroom. The leader and organizer of the day’s event, 43-year-old German artist Aram Bartholl, announced that he would give everyone in the class five minutes for the first sketch, so that they could practice their speed drawing, and let intuition guide their initial attempts.
The model nodded to Bartholl. She crouched down, set the timer on her iPhone for five minutes, and then reassumed her pose. The room went silent. The artists leaned forward into their MacBook Airs and iMacs and fired up their specially downloaded versions of a 1980s-era painting application.
They chose their brushes, their spray paint cans, their bendy line tools: The first-ever Paint Figure Drawing class had begun.
It happened in Brooklyn this past weekend: A figure-drawing class where artists could use only ancient drawing programs like MS Paint, that oft-mocked painting app of Microsoft Windows lore, or Paintbrush, an image editor for Mac that is similar in utility (or lack thereof) to Paint and that was last updated in 1988.
Two nude models alternated poses before the class. About 10 or so young artists, all of them in their 20s and 30s, most of them male, would attempt to sketch the models with the extremely limiting digital tools at their disposal.
There were certain ground rules, of course: No touchscreens were allowed; typical modern graphic tools — iPad styluses, Photoshop, and Adobe Illustrator — were similarly banned. Use of a two-button mouse was required.
“Put away your tablet,” read an announcement for the event, whose cover art appeared to be created by running the spray paint can over an unpaid-for stock art image, “and show off some true mouse skills.”
It sounded like a practical joke: a satire of Brooklyn, or the art world, or Bill Gates-era Microsoft, or all three. I attended the class, I’ll admit, schlepping out to the stony coast of remote Sunset Park, because I thought it would be funny. I imagined a bunch of weed-addled art-school dropouts Beavis-giggling into their computers, tracing out crude stick figures in neon colors.
I mean: Drawing nude models in MS Paint? What level of artistic sophistication could you possibly achieve in Paint?
Even Bartholl, whose challenging explorations of the intersection of technology and culture have won him international acclaim, acknowledged that a drawing event in 2014 dedicated to Microsoft Paint carried with it a certain “ha ha” factor.
He dismissed the idea, however, that the event was satirical, or a prank. He dubbed the event an exercise in “computer retro,” invoking nostalgia for simpler software programs and suggesting that Paint and applications of its ilk allowed for a purer drawing experience than more advanced software, which can run artists hundreds of dollars per year.
You could also say, if you wanted to be charitable, that a Paint-based workshop embraces and builds upon the idea of artistic constraints: Limits you place on the implements at your disposal can often inspire greater creativity and more intriguing works.
The view from the stage. I am in the back of the class, fittingly. (Aram Bartholl)
And, lo and behold, once the laughter died down, and the kimono dropped, and the drawing began, that’s exactly what happened. I idly tried to participate from the back of the class, but my first sketch made the model look like a grizzly bear wearing an unflattering sweatsuit. When I lifted my head, however, to see how others in the class were faring, or flailing, I was stunned: Their works looked like actual figure sketches, MS Paint be damned.
The artists in attendance — most of them striving illustrators hoping to break through in the New York scene — showed exceptional talent, especially given the crudeness of their palettes. Stealthily I closed my program and pretended I had never even attempted a work. I stood up and joined Bartholl as an observer.
The sketches started out rather traditional. Here, for example, is a typical line drawing of the model reclining:
That’s already better than anything I could do with Paint. But now look at the ways in which these artists co-opted, subverted, and generally squeezed every last drop from the pulp of their Paint programs in order to represent a nude model and her surroundings.
Artist Nick Fox-Gieg captures the model with varying shades of gray:
Here, Fox-Gieg uses the paint bucket to fill in a black background, and then uses blues and oranges to striking effect:
A refracted, fractalized take on the sitting man. I enjoy here the use of bisecting polygons to suggest the curves and angles of the back:
Again, color is used to suggest depth and the different parts of the female body:
Here’s one of my favorites, a ghostly take on the male figure using nothing but rectangles, squares, and transparency effects:
Another take on the male figure, by the same artist:
Perhaps the most detailed sketch of the model, the room, the scene:
A portrait of a sitting man, done completely with words pasted on top of each other:
Even Bartholl seemed surprised by the ingenuity of some of the illustrators. “These artists have real skill,” he noted, appraising one of the works. By the end of the class, after which each artist had drawn 10 or so illustrations, Bartholl was so taken by the obvious success of his students that he suggested they print out their works and hold a formal showing. (For now, you can view many of the images on Bartholl’s website.)
The Paint Figure Drawing Class probably won’t graduate to a gallery. But it did give me a new opinion of the capabilities of that eternal punchline MS Paint. Far from being good for little more than stick figures and horrible spraypaint doodles, for the first time I saw Paint as an actual canvas for creativity. For a moment, in the silence of the classroom, I looked around, and in all directions there were artists churning out, at high speed, some truly fascinating figures on Paint.
Turns out it is, in this case, a shoddy craftsman who blames his tools.
