See, back in the day before digital when I had pretentions about being an 'A'rtist I was very much a believer in using the appropriate form to convey the idea. If the ideas called for a painting you used paint, if a photograph you'd pull out the camera etc. I still believe in this approach to a degree even now, but it was a much more tactile world back then. When you went to see an exhibition of paintings or drawings you wanted to see the brush-work, the subtle nuances & blending skill, the application of detail. Artwork had a 'body', and the hand of the artist was part of the joy of making the effort.

Digital threw a lot of that thinking up in the air, in some ways good and others not so good IMO. What was and is of promise is the sheer potential of an artist's reach in terms of audience, not unlike the advent of printing way back in history. There's also a sense of democratisation of the means of production for those visual ideas, meaning that we now have the contributions of a great many more obscure creative minds than ever before rather than the condensed authority of the officially sanctioned few.

What isn't so good from my point of view is that people's choice of medium (or emulated medium) often seems arbitrary to me these days. I get that many arn't really looking to convey ideas or meaning at all, and thats fine. But from an aesthetic point of view in a digital realm I'm not entirely sure what trying to emulate brush-stokes specifically is really all about. To me brush strokes are a function of the form & activity of painting, an indicator of the economy of the painter's desire to convey an idea quickly, or expressively. In the case of expression brush strokes seem to me intrinsically about the hand of the artist, as much about the quirks of the individual hand as anything else. Digitally emulating them seems pointless, unless digitally painted using a tablet & pen.

(?)

 

PoserPro2014(Sr4), Win7 x64, display units set to inches.

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