September 8, 2000

Internet becomes virtual gallery

for artists willing to go online

“The technology is us, man … Natural and artificial? Obsolete distinctions.” — David Porush

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“The most important thing in art is The Frame … (W)ithout this humble appliance, you can’t know where The Art stops and The Real World begins.” — Frank Zappa

Theoretically, technology and art erupt from opposite ends of the brain. Less theoretically, purists scoff at art created with digital technology’s helping hand.

Such criticism raises a question: What holy tenet of creativity makes an artist’s traditional analog tools fair game and Macs and mouses off limits? Ask Boulder’s Rob Barnes, who creates fine art prints with heaps of hardware and a wall of software, and he’ll tell you a story or two.

“I’m getting scared,” Barnes once told his partner Cathy Berkley. “Anybody can buy the software I’ve got and do what I do.”

“Rob, they’ve been using paintbrushes for thousands of years,” came her response. “It’s your mind.”

Now 51, Barnes took a roundabout career route before getting off at the full-time artist destination. After a stint as a “San Francisco psychedelic hippie in Haight-Asbury,” Barnes returned to his hometown of Atlanta to go to college and study art, with an emphasis in photography. After graduating in the early ’70s, he took a job at “a small little TV station I thought was going to grow, called Turner Broadcasting.” He worked as Turner’s chief photographer for a stretch, then joined the founding CNN team in ’79. As the corporation’s IS director, he helped put in place the first television newsroom computer system, which only now is being phased out as the industry standard.

In ’86, Barnes traded Atlanta for Mountain View, Calif. and CNN for Apple, and worked in development for products such as the Newton, the Apple II and the QuickTime VR Authoring Studio.

After 25 years in corporate America, Barnes “had had it.” Multimedia was supposed to be the future, he said, but CD-ROMs only have a limited shelf life, dictated by the ever-changing drivers in the operating systems of choice. “I wanted to create things that were not obsolete in three years,” he said, “but were unique expressions of the human spirit and just made your life just a little better.”

He left Apple in ’96 and scanned the country for a new place to set up shop and pursue his first loves of art and photography. After considering locales like Austin, Texas, Tucson, Ariz. and Bellingham, Wash., Berkley and Barnes settled on Boulder in ’97.

Post-relocation, Barnes has spent a good deal of his waking hours holed away in his Boulder studio, at once honing his craft and producing his first series of 14 prints. The work itself is hard to pigeonhole, images of landscapes both real and imagined, filtered through the respective analog and digital Cuisinarts of Rob’s mind and his small army of Macs.

Rob might start with some photos of the real world — of a mountain range or an urban intersection, for example — then digitally manipulate them into something that’s partly real and partly surreal, both digital and natural. Or he might create a digitally realized landscape from scratch.

Then he sends it out and has a limited edition of 50 printed on high-grade paper, breaks the source CD in two and sells prints for $850 to $3,000. (He also has smaller versions printed that are unlimited editions, available for $200 unframed.)

Cathy took a stab at describing her partner’s style: “It’s cutting-edge and digital, but it doesn’t fit into an established niche yet. It’s not photography, and it’s not painting.”

Cathy, who currently works as a strategic Web consultant and lists positions at Apple, Sun, and as a high school principal on her resume, recently helped Rob unleash his art on the world as the business mind behind Berkley / Barnes Fine Art. The pair unveiled their online gallery (www.berkleybarnes.com) in May of this year, paralleled by a brick-and-mortar opening at the Mercury Framing Gallery in Boulder.

Marketing fine art prints on the Web is not a one-step process, noted Berkley. “The sale of well-known art, the sale of well-known photography on the Web, that’s happening now,” she said.

For lesser-known artists, connecting with an audience via the Web is not quite as easy. “You’re not going to go on a search engine and say, ‘I’m going to look up art.'” The Internet gives artists the opportunity, however, to reach a potentially worldwide audience, provided like-minded artists and patrons find each other.

Two other pervasive issues: the undying conflict between art and commerce (“Most art isn’t made to be sold,´ said Berkley) and the risk of rampant piracy within the Web’s inherent nature to infinitely replicate images.

Barnes’ defense has been to “throw away a lot detail” of works displayed online, reducing them from their original size of hundreds to megabytes to a few hundred kilobytes, making the image an indication of the work rather than the work itself. He also uses Digimarc’s embedded identification technology to authenticate and track his work.

To date, Barnes has sold 18 of his prints, including several to tech companies and five on the Web to buyers in Atlanta, Boston, California and England. The Web site is already profitable, and Rob is at work on pieces for his second show, slated for 2002. Not bad for a debut performance.

“It looks like a real thing that somebody photographed, but when I think about it, it could never be,´ said Jay Nelson, a local buyer of two works, “Cube of Fire” and “Sky Shadow Collage.” Added Nelson: “This is the first time in history (an artist) can have a big audience. The Internet could be a giant virtual gallery.”

for artists willing to go online

“The technology is us, man … Natural and artificial? Obsolete distinctions.” — David Porush

“The most important thing in art is The Frame … (W)ithout this humble appliance, you can’t know where The Art stops and The Real World begins.” — Frank Zappa

Theoretically, technology and art erupt from opposite ends of the brain. Less theoretically, purists scoff at art created with digital technology’s helping hand.

Such criticism raises a question: What holy tenet of creativity makes an artist’s traditional analog tools fair game and Macs and mouses off limits? Ask Boulder’s…

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