Pros & Amateur Artists Use Brushes App for iPhone

We update our Fall 2009 “Brushes” New Yorker story with a new video circulating on MyModernMet of a Beyonce iPad Finger Painting by Kyle Lambert.

Our minds remain boggled over the explosions of average-person creativity opportunities that exist within Apple products. This Beyonce painting is just one everyday example of creativity waiting to be unleashed.

Earlier story resumes:

Remember finger painting? Most of us gave us finger painting as preschoolers but now we’re back in artistic form, using an iPhone app called “Brushes”, which allows users to paint on the white digital canvas of an iPhone screen or iPod Touch, with our fingers.

Last summer Jorge Colombo drew a New Yorker Magazine week’s cover using Brushes, an application for the iPhone, while standing for an hour outside Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in Times Square.

Watch the video

More than 100,000 people have downloaded the application.  The Brushes Gallery on Flickr has 10,000 items (you must join group for free) and the results are amazing!

via Flickr user GfreenAlso last month, Canadian artist Matthew Watkins, who contributes to a blog fingerpainted.it that celebrates the joys of Brushes, opened the exhibit “L’arte ai tempi dell’iPhone” in Bari, Italy.

Stopping by Fingerpainted, they are promoting another iPhone user generated Flickr gallery First&Faves, in which Mia Robinson has opened a curated, online gallery. Fabulous! Here she features Self portrait, by Blu. Yanaka.

Self portrait, by Blu.Yanaka on Flickr’s First&Faves galleryEven pop artist David Hockney uses Brushes, having fashioned perhaps a thousand images.

Over the past six months, Hockney has fashioned literally hundreds, probably over a thousand, such images, often sending out four or five a day to a group of about a dozen friends, and not really caring what happens to them after that. (He assumes the friends pass them along through the digital ether.) These are, mind you, not second-generation digital copies of images that exist in some other medium: their digital expression constitutes the sole (albeit multiple) original of the image. via New York Review of Books

Hockney produces dozens of sequential studies, sending them out in real time, so that his friends in America wake to their own account of the Bridlington dawn—two, five, sometimes as many as eight successive versions, sent out minutes apart, one after the next. ibid

iPhone app Brush-produced works by David HockneyThe artist uses only his thumb, although most users of the Brushes application trace brushstrokes with their pointer finger.  These Brush-produced Hockney images are at the New York Review of Books. Amazing!

“It’s a supremely mobile way to paint, allowing one to work quickly in cramped, dark spaces. I’m intrigued by the idea of using iPhone paintings as a way to take readers to places where photography is inappropriate or forbidden. Unfortunately, iPhones are taboo at the Supreme Court, so I chose Bar Pilar on 14th Street Northwest instead.” Patterson Clark, 54, is an artist for The Washington Post.

Learn more about Brushes and its modest download price at the website. Anne

More reading: David Hockney’s iPhone Passion New York Review of Books

iPhone finger painting application Brushes catches on Washington Post