I thought about that question all my life and my father before me. What have we not done? The answer came to me when Dr. John Randall from Texas Instruments walked into a gallery that had my work. To make a long story short, he built me a robotic painting knife that could replicate my hand application of paint on the canvas so perfectly that it blew my mind. We have put paint on brushes, knives, we've splashed and coated a woman and had her crawl around on the canvas, why not a robotic painting arm? You have to tell it where to put the paint, how much, what shape or direction of brush stroke and even program the way the fibers lift off the canvas at the end of a stroke. You input the same knowledge as you do your arm and hand with a brush, it's just a different tool. How will it lead to a new art? Because the artists can now take on compositions that a Master would have had fifteen helpers helping them with. You can program works of art so complex that with out it you would have a hard time keeping all the components balanced in your mind, but now we have silicon memory to help us. Is more complex or more labor important, we don't know yet cause the technology hasn’t been out there for the artists to use. It's to the future students to take this new tool to its greatest potentials so we will have to see. What took me four months to create by hand now takes a week. What could I create now if I put four months of work in a painting with it? I think the future has to be a fusion of technology and art. I know that with the capability that John gave me, I could not be creating the painting that I am. My hands and eyesight just could not take it. Just my guess!
Here is a link that might be useful: The Evolution of Painting
