Digital art – not real art, right? Do you reckon you could do the same, if you had just enrolled in one of Adobe’s Photoshop courses? And maybe had a couple of thousand dollars to spend on cameras, and computers? We don’t mean to downplay your technical abilities, or your own special talents, but we do want to show you how digital artists create something unique, beautiful and touching, just as much as physical artists do.

It seems to be a generally held perception that digital art, whether it is photography of the real world, or manipulation of reality, can be made by anyone… and therefore, why should you pay for it! Digital art has its own special skills required – fusing technical expertise with craftsmanship is not easy! And you can see so much of the artist in the art, just like you can in a painting, or a sculpture.

You see fears, dreams, hopes, random thoughts, and the world as another person views it, just as much as Michelangelo or Picasso showed us these hallways in their own minds. If you can break down this barrier in your own mind, you will be opening yourself up to a whole new world of art, seeing beauty in the straight line and form in the cursor’s movement…

Unfortunately, not everyone has the facilities to be able to buy a great camera, an excellent computer, a copy of Photoshop and enrol themselves in a course to learn how to use it. If everybody did, nobody would have this concept, that art comes from money! We will have to look at several parallel arguments, and extrapolate the original ones, to see if the conclusions we come to are still true…

If you are a parent, do you think you are good at your job? Do you think you are raising well-balanced kids, and you have a good understanding of their needs and their psyche? I hope you do! Now, did you do a course in child psychology? Have you read many books on parenting and child psychology? Do you have the money to provide everything they need, and would be great for their future development?

You may not, but we would never suggest that makes you a ‘fake’ parent – that would be unfair. Parenting, like art, is not about money – it is about something a bit deeper within, that comes a little more from your soul than your hip pocket. In the same vein, technical skills cannot be substituted for by money (in the form of good equipment).

David White agrees: ‘I think that most of us ascribe attributes, mistakenly in a lot of cases, to people based upon their possessions, whether it is automobiles or cameras’ (White, 2006). If you do a bit of cooking, do you think that you could make your favourite dishes just as well in an oven without a digital timer and thermostat control? Would losing your electric whisk make you a bad cook? We certainly don’t think so – we appreciate that the art of cooking is more about an instinct for flavour and texture, than the means you use to get to the end.

So, if having the best equipment doesn’t make somebody better at something, it follows that having worse than usual equipment shouldn’t dampen someone’s creativity, either. Van Gogh, along with many other artists, was not well-recognized in his time, and therefore he was not rich! He could not necessarily buy the best quality paints, or even enough paint to always have unmixed colors.

He could not necessarily buy high-quality canvas to materialize his vision – although this may have changed the dimensions of it slightly. Yet, he is now one of the most recognized and appreciated artists of the last centuries. His equipment had no bearing on his art – the feelings we get looking at his paintings and prints come from something other than the fibre ratios of his canvas, and the chemical composition of his paints.

Digital art requires a whole different set of artistic skills – you don’t necessarily need a delicate touch to mix colors, but you need an excellent eye to judge how the colors you click on will affect your work. You don’t need an awe-inspiring setting, but your mind needs to be in that awe-inspiring place, nevertheless.

You do still need to be a great judge of a model, and you do still need what so many of us mere mortals lack, which is an eye for balance, and intimate knowledge of how our mind works. When you know how people will perceive something, you know how to challenge it. You must be able to define beauty to create it.

JD Jarvis agrees that digital art is unique as an artistic genre. He explains how digital art can seem a little mundane, since we only have the same old words that we have always used to describe it. We use these words to help it become accepted, to lessen people’s fear of new and different things, but- ‘Such shortcomings in our use of language to describe digital imaging processes demonstrate, if nothing else, how unique these tools and their results truly are’ (Jarvis, 2006).

Jeppe Hein’s sculpture and installations explore the relationship between viewer and artwork. Using the minimalist aesthetic of the archetypical cube, Hein’s Shaking Cube is both sculpture and mechanical object. Framed by an invisible field of motion sensors, the work is impelled by the movements of the viewer. Using sculpture as an expanded field of social interaction, Hein calls into question traditional perceptions and functions of art, creating a work that can only be experienced through the viewer’s participation.Born in Copenhagen, Denmark, where he attended the Royal Academy of Arts, Hein has exhibited extensively in Europe. In 2003 Hein exhibited his outdoor installation, Water Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In the same year, Raimar Stange produced a monograph of his work, called Jeppe Hein: Take a walk in the Forest at Sunlight. This year Hein has a solo exhibition at Miami Beach’s Moore Space and his work has been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in both Los Angeles and Chicago. Hein is represented by the Johann Konig Gallery, Berlin, where his solo exhibition, Minimal Overload, was on show in May this year. Hein is also represented internationally by Union Gallery, London.This exhibition is the fourth in a series of projects supported by Clayton Utz. The first project resulted in the commissioning and purchase for the permanent contemporary collection of a major work by Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto. The second project facilitated an exhibition and acquisition of a video installation by Susan Norrie, titled Undertow; and the third enabled Australian artist James Angus to create a work entitled Truck Corridor: a life size MACK truck installed in the Level 2 Contemporary Project Space. Jeppe Hein’s works address us individually; though, importantly, we might not have asked them to. Hein delights in apparently serendipitous events, suspending common sense laws of cause and effect and conjuring up scenarios in which, in direct response to our presence, seemingly sentient behaviour is coaxed from inanimate things.In some of his pieces he articulates a dialogue between the work itself, the person encountering it and the gallery space in which it is sited – though this is a conversation for which one is wholly unprepared. Works of this kind imply a wry relationship both to the Minimalist sculpture of the 1960s and to those forms of institutional critique that sought to question the authority of the museum or gallery space.

Find more about Jeppe Hein paintings, biography, solo exhibitions, group exhibitions and resource of Jeppe Hein artist. View Jeppe Hein artwork online at The Saatchi Gallery – London contemporary art gallery.