Unapologetically Digital

My upcoming Tiny Gallery show features all iPad work

Brookdale Park, Fall 2023 (all rights reserved)

The moment my friend Janice Belove handed me her iPad and Apple pencil and I made a bright red slash across it, I yelped with delight. I knew in that moment I had to have one. The bold brush stroke on that glass backlit screen was so unexpectedly vivid, it was like the shock of seeing a professional baseball stadium lit up at night for the first time.

Three iPads and two years later, I am a prodigious iPad artist, toggling between the programs Procreate and ArtSet4. My iPad accompanies me on all overnight trips. It came with me to the south of France. It’s a sketchbook and a canvas, self contained, no muss, no fuss.

This coming Sunday, Nov. 12, is the opening my very first solo exhibition, and it’s all prints of my iPad art. It’s at the Tiny Gallery in Montclair, where these prints, approximately the size of business cards, will be displayed in tiny gold frames. I have been at two openings there and it’s a blast. And apparently some people collect these Tiny Gallery pieces. There’s also going to be an art sale featuring not only some of my work at bigger sizes, but work of some of the other artists who’ve had shows there.

There’s always been some derision in the art world of digital art (and this precedes AI) as something less than. Something not quite fine art. Even when David Hockney did it. And there’s the squirrelly issue of how to sell iPad works. They can be sold digitally as NFTs, though that might be a dead market after the cratering of crypto. Or they can be printed, as mine are. But printed art is infinitely replicable and the market is unregulated. Last spring, Christie’s offered David Hockney iPad prints with a price estimate of $70,000 to $100,000. Yet here’s somebody offering a Hockney print for $15. (How dare they?!)

It may be a tiny show, in a Montclair front lawn, in a box a little bigger than a Little Free Library. But Francesca Castagnoli, the gallerist, in oohing and aahing over my collection of iPad paintings, has made me feel very big. Hope you can join us for the reception. It’s Sunday, Nov. 12, from 1 to 4 at 8 Stanford Place in Montclair.