iPhone Savior: iPhone Artist Makes Cover of The New Yorker

NEW YORK - Portuguese illustrator Jorge Colombo, has graced the June 1st cover of The New Yorker Magazine with art he produced entirely on his iPhone. The original finger painting Colombo created in about an hour standing outside Madame Tussuad's’s Wax Museum in Times Square, has helped the magazine make a quantum leap forward from it's first issue released on February 17, 1925. Colombo's work brings fresh cultural relevance to a tired relic desperately in need of reinventing itself.

Jorge uses the iPhone app Brushes to create works of art he calls iSketches, focused on the city of New York which he now sells online as limited edition prints. Though Colombo has worked for many years as a professional Illustrator, graphic designer and photographer, it's his ultra-modern iPhone paintings that have delivered him into a period of personal renaissance. Colombo's iPhone paintings carry a distinct impressionist style, passionately romanticizing New York City landscapes and architecture like a possessed lover.

"It was a natural thing to try a new tool, it's a continuation of what I've been doing for years," Colombo told the iPhone Savior in brief phone interview. "The first sketches I did on iPhone were done on the subway but they were not very good, because I had not mastered the technique. iPhone art works better with wider brush strokes. You shouldn't try to do detailed drawings."

I immediately realized that Jorge Colombo is an artist that distills great insight and passion for art though he takes a casual approach to the work he produces on iPhone. The powerful Brushes ($4.99) application he uses as his digital tool of choice allows for his finished iSketches to be exported as QuickTime movies, retracing every finger swipe stroke by detailed stroke. (watch below)

"When I'm doing those drawings I sometimes erase it and do it again until I get it right. The app makes it look like every single brushstroke hits the mark and that's not true." Colombo quickly admitted, as he detailed how the Brushes output only records the finished strokes that the artist chooses.

"It makes me really happy when somebody gets the app on their iPhone, especially when they're not artists. I like that people do art as a hobby," Colombo said, "I hope that this will influence more people to do art with their iPhone."

Once millions of people discover Jorges' iSketches from the cover of New Yorker Magazine, I would expect a flood of artists will find fresh expression through a new medium known as iPhone painting. Unleashing the start of an iPhonian era in modern art. So if you happen to see Jorge Colombo, planted on the corner of some New York City street, remember that he's not just texting friends at a frenzied pace, he's busy fingering another masterpiece.

Yep, there's app for just about anything. (video after the jump)

Jorge Colombo via New Yorker.com