Painted ETC is Australian artist/academic/dude Ry David Bradley's blog about painting. Sort of. It's also about photoshop and computers and things like that. I don't know. But it's definitely about Art. A specific kind of art with a definitive look and feel. It's the kind of art that Bradley does, and that a lot of other people are picking up on too. I guess you could call it a movement, but, I wouldn't. Because that would be like, too much of a commitment. Confusing right? Don't worry though I did an interview with Ry David Bradley to try and figure out what exactly is going on at PE.

1. Painted Etc seems to be about the intersection of everything paint and everything digital. A lot of the stuff on PE reminds me of your own work. Is that something you do on purpose, or is the Painted ETC vibe just a natural progression for art in the tumblr age?

PAINTED, ETC. was established as a crossover space, in whatever way you interpret that. Like a waiting room, a non-place, where something is about to happen but hasn't happened yet. So if you thesaurus "transition" and apply any term that comes up, that will suffice. Oxymoronic statements such as "It's not really anything in particular, but at the same time it is something very specific" describe it really well. PE is a moment in time, but it might takes ages to complete itself. There is a PE vibe in the world, in my own work and in the vast audience for PE, and that's when you know something is going on. When it's coming from everywhere. Someone jammed the elevator so we're all climbing around the stairwell and finding stuff that was overlooked.

2. It seems like the common theme across PE and your own work is that sort of painterly gestural mark... the squiggle. Where is that coming from?

If you look at PE yes there is a predilection to gestural painting. This style has a long and culturally divided history. You can go back to the subtlety of Chinese calligraphers, or to the jokes of French flaneurs. You can go to ancient Indonesian tribal body-painting, to Japanese raking, to Coca-Cola branding. Different things can be learned but generally the big divide is whether you go before or after the discovery of photography. In the late 19th century a gestural approach was something the machine couldn't do, like a defiant reaction against the camera. It's a human thing. I think this still exists today to some extent, pushed and pulled, rolled in the dust of conceptual art, and scattered online - potentially only to return to world in augmented formats. The funny thing is now you can do very unmechanical things with the machine so that whole 20th century stance is gone - the reactionary and what was once politically defiant are now impotent signs. In the end gestures are exactly what they say they are. They lay things bare rather than create a recognizable instance of something. In this way they bring into question things other than a particular subject, like their medium, structure, etc. The more closely you study gestural works, the more you notice what they are capable of encapsulating. And at the same time, they are like the discarded poster-child for art, an iconoclast. But really gestures don't just apply to a paint stroke. A gesture is just as much a process, and a process is a gesture, and that is much more of what PE mines. Gestures and acts that operate along the fault lines of the transition. If you simplify the world into Hardware and Wetware, "squiggles" as you call them are the core dynamics central to the wet. Liquid flows. Water kills your device. As far as painting goes the beginning of the Contemporary period was marked by both expressive acrylic paint handling and calculated masking and taping to create machine like hard edges and now none of that matters like it did, now they all exist side by side in vernacular web searches as a bunch of effects, presenting some kind of odd eternity.

3. Your site painted etc is powered by tumblr. Why tumblr over something else?

Tumblr allows a post to proliferate in a way unlike most (not all) other platforms, without imposing too much of it's own structural identity. It has a community attached to it like most things online, some of which are superb prosumers, avid readers, collectors. Despite a big following from the Tumblr community, the majority of the PE audience come from elsewhere and may not know what Tumblr is.

4. A lot of the stuff at PE is pretty "ironic". Are you critiquing something?

True believers were torn down along with pretty much everything else Post-Modernity sought to rip into. But picking around in the rubble, you can find a lot of things that have held together. PE is one of those things, hackneyed and failing, but making solid connections even in states of detachment. It's possible that the humor or removal often dismissed as irony is just a form of connection to something else that isn't quite clear yet. It'll all make sense later like it always does. I believe in being honest about where you are what your daily life is like, so PE is about shape tweening the 21st century.

5. Where do you see digital painting in 20 years?

All I know is it won't be called digital painting. Some people might be interested in telling the difference, but most either won't be able to or just won't care to. Historically everything falls under the image - so by then it'll play on. Miltos Manetas has been speaking about the neo-analogue, which is his retro way of saying PE. In 20 years medium differentiation won't be a very central issue, just like it isn't now. Some mediums are actually just mistaken ideas, and some ideas are obviously eternal no matter where they end up. The future meets it's parents on PE and after many arguments about how different they are, in a touching scene at the end of the movie they sit on an autumn rooftop as the sun rises and realize with enlightened horror the ways they were the same.

6. Describe "Drop Shadow" in 10 words:

A 2D image achieves temporary elevation to 3D object status.

- Aureliano Segundo