From Cyberspace To The Canvas

By Liz Balmaseda
Herald Writer
--Published Saturday, April 10, 1999, in the Miami Herald

Artist's interactive Website mines chat rooms for muses In the beginning, there is a crisp, white canvas. It is stretched across an easel in an artist's cluttered studio, anticipating color.

Above the canvas, an eternal question is scratched upon a torn piece of cardboard:

``What is love?''

The question is neither rhetorical nor decorative. It is there to inspire a soul-searching discussion, and in turn, guide the painter's brush across the blank canvas.

Sounds fairly predictable, no? A color-smudged artist laboring amid paint cans and paintbrushes in a tiny Little Havana studio, seeking inspiration from the ancient implications of love -- what could be more organic?

Now, add the Webcam. Cue the keyboard guy, the simultaneous transcriber. Click on WebStudio. Summon the cybermuses.

Welcome to art in 1999. From where you sit, in your computer den, you can't smell the acrylic paint infusing Xavier Cortada's modest studio. You can't hear the Sting tune spilling from his radio, or get close enough to his work-in-progress to read the subtle words beneath the yellows and the blues. But you can tell him what to paint next.

$3,000 grant

Cortada, a painter and muralist, used a $3,000 New Forms grant from the Miami-Dade Cultural Affairs Council to set up an interactive art studio. He bought a Webcam, hired an assistant and expanded his Web page -- www.cortada.com

He turned his chat room into an art salon, where visitors typed in florid ruminations of the matters of the heart. As the artist translated the typed language onto the canvas, his movements and strokes of color flashed across the Internet, captured every 15 seconds by the camera's two lenses.

What is love?

Schmoop1 in Iowa gently tweaked Emily Dickinson. Love, she typed, is a thing with feathers. She borrowed from the poem that begins ``Hope is the thing with feathers/ That perches in the soul/ And sings the tune without the words/ And never stops at all . . .''

Cortada's computer assistant, Javier Lombillo, read Schmoop1's words to the artist, who transferred the thought to the canvas.

``How do you paint God?'' Cortada threw the question out to the WebStudio parlor, where a mix of friends from his cyberhood gathered for his inaugural art sessions this week. The sessions will run several times a week through the end of July, covering topics ranging from the environment to civil liberties. He hadn't planned to discuss our interaction with God until June. But on the first day, he learned such discussions cannot be too scripted -- the chat room wanted to talk about divine love from the start.

``A kernel of corn,'' typed Schmoop1.

And so it was. The painter framed the words in a yellow cube, an abstract kernel of corn that represents divine love.

By the third session Friday afternoon, his once-blank canvas brimmed with shapes and color -- forms depicting parental love, God's love, eternal love.

Had he set out to paint his own immediate vision of love, the 34-year-old Cortada might have used passionate shades of red and rendered forms more voluptuous than a kernel of corn. But those are the whims an artist reserves for his private canvases. His cyberspace collaborators described a love more sacred and blue than sensuous and red. So blue it was. The reds may flow today, when the artist begins the second part of the love series.


Prolific muralist

Cortada is a muralist. He has painted large, public murals with street children in Bolivia, AIDS patients in Geneva, high school students in Miami. For the past five years, the artist, whose glass murals grace the facade of the Nike store outside the Shops at Sunset in South Miami, has practiced such collaborations.

``I'm a child of the Internet. I met my lover on the Internet. People find me on the Internet -- that's how Nike found me. An active Web site is simply a mirror of society. It has its flow and you have to honor it,'' said Cortada during his Friday afternoon session.

``An artist is not some eccentric being -- an artist should be approachable. What is more public than the Internet?'' asked the artist, who plans to exhibit the collaborative works.

Does he think Michelangelo would have ventured into cyberspace?

``Michelangelo would have invented the Internet,'' said the artist, adding strokes of canary yellow to the feather that drifted in from Iowa.