What does it take to make and what does it take to be in making in the 21st century? This paper examines digital embodiment in contemporary painting. It seeks to discover how the physical making of a painted object becomes an overlapping, reflexive activity that meets with the disembodied informational digital screen. Throughout this paper I would like you to consider how data, which is reflected through pixelated screens as physically depthless, inter-relates with paintings physical and expressive qualities.

I will argue, in the first instance, that painting is viewed as a conjoining or connecting with the flat surfaces of the screen; that the painter develops her/his material practice as a reflection of the augmented space of the screen either through digital production or as an idealised counterpart, sometimes both simultaneously. Secondly, that by exploring the paintings of Glenn Brown (b.1966), who I will claim, successfully negotiates the phenomenological divide between the embodied act of making and the disembodied digitally received image, we come to examine, as a contextual model, future student understandings of expanded painting. The third and final part of my text will explore how, in the wake of Brown, student painters negotiate painting as a personalized, expressive response to the saturation of the screens social reach regardless of whether their paintings are presented as figurative or abstract, gestural or flat, electronically produced or as an installation. The style or finish of a painting (or expanded medium of painting) I will conclude, will reflect Isabelle Graw’s (b.1962) indexical notion that the ‘‘authors quasi-presence as an effect’’,1 is read as a semiotic agency witnessed in paintings surfaces. This surface effect, as a comparative trace of the author, will then allow me to introduce images of student’s work. I will argue on the one hand that material making for students amplifies Paul Crowther’s (b.1953) phenomenological examination of paintings physical and optical particularities of autography, that ‘‘drawing and painting are the products of gesture. As such they can embody individual style’’.2 And on the other hand, I will suggest how paintings autographic activity can include electronic and screen production.

Although based on my own research this is not a prescriptive plan for teaching nor is it a manifesto. Since starting work on the painting course at the Glasgow School of Art in December 2015, I’ve witnessed an ever growing trend that wrestles with the relations between painting and the digital. Apart from regular tutorials and crits, it is my once yearly seminar for the 3rd and 4th years called ‘Imaged Painting/Imagined Painting’ that has prompted this enquiry. This seminar, which is loosely based on Craig Staff’s (b.????) ‘After Modernist Painting’, explores his distinction between imaging the digital and imagining the digital. Painters who image are those who utilise technology to generate imagery. And painters who imagine reflect upon ideas on the digital.