Speed King

Nico Di Mattia is widely recognized as the artist who has single-handedly revolutionized the concept of “speed-painting” by posting on YouTube video playbacks of his creative process for all to observe. With his videos getting more than 35 million hits and hundreds and thousands of avid followers, the 27-year-old is garnering the kind of attention that is rare among contemporary artists. Maggie Tiojakin joins the fan-wagon.

Watching Nico Di Mattia at work is at once daunting and exhilarating, like riding next to the world’s fastest race-car driver or being strapped to the back of a circus performer while he jumps through burning hoops. You inevitably wonder how he does it, but then you realize you don’t really care how he does what he does: You just want him to do it again and again (and again) for your personal wonderment.

To say that Di Mattia has outdone his contemporaries is an understatement, because in his way he is giving the idea of contemporary art a new spin. Using a variety of new media technologies, he records his creative process on screen via a video accelerator device so that the hours spent on each painting can be cut and reconstructed to fit a certain time frame. The result is a mind-blowing display of photo-realistic painting drawn from scratch in less than 5 minutes, or throughout the duration of a single song. For this reason, his viewers call it “speed-painting”.

“I made my first video using a VHS camera back in 2001,” writes Di Mattia when contacted via email. “I was painting a mural on my bedroom wall using acrylics. When I finished with the mural, I edited the video and called [the finalized copy] Arte Fusion — because it involves a variety of artistic disciplines: from painting to filmmaking to editing.”

For the Argentinian illustrator, animation filmmaking has always been a driving passion. Born in the city of Córdoba, Di Mattia has had the good fortune of growing up in one of the most vibrant cultural centers in the country, where artistic endeavors flourish under the auspices of renowned figures such as Leopoldo Lugones and Marco Aguinis.

Educated at the prestigious Univercidad Nacional de Córdoba, the oldest institution of higher learning in Argentina, Di Mattia studied cinematic and television arts while trying on different professional hats as scriptwriter, director and producer of various short-film projects he undertook. It was during his college years that Di Mattia honed his directorial and story-telling skills, which — combined with his talent for drawing and painting — promised to launch a career in film animation.

“I’m an independent filmmaker and an illustrator,” Di Mattia says. “I love to tell stories, and the best way to do an audiovisual and independent project that is financially affordable is through animation.”

One of his animated short films, titled La liga de los Imperfectos, received moderate acclaim in national and international film festivals, spurring his lifelong dream to become a skillful animator. But it’s his YouTube fame that is coming close to establishing him as the artist of the decade.

Di Mattia’s playback videos of him aiming to generate life-like portraits of his subjects attract thousands of viewers per week. Some of these videos are more popular than others, depending on the complexity of the paintings and/or the subjects he has chosen to paint. His take on Steven Spielberg’s Transformer characters, for example, has drawn three-million-plus views and hundreds of responses regarding the superb detailing involved.

His most viewed video, garnering 10-million-plus viewers to date, is that of Sam Raimi’s pre-personality-split Spiderman, in a scene from the earlier film where he crouches under fire inside a dilapidated building. This popularity, one assumes, is largely thanks to the success of the Spiderman franchise and the fact that it was one of the first videos Di Mattia uploaded on YouTube two years ago, introducing the newly refurbished concept of “speed-painting”.

“This new method of showing other people the process of painting from scratch is nice and helpful,” says Di Mattia. “It also creates a new outlet for people in general and specifically young artists to entertain their imagination — I’m proud and honored to have been a part of it.”

Traditionally, speed-painting is an exercise whereby a painter sets an unusual time frame in which to complete his or her work. Though it is unclear how the concept was conceived, speed-painting is regarded as one of the most challenging crafts to master. In fact, there have only been two traditional speed-painters – Denny Dent and Brian Olsen – whose legendary performances earned them the titles of “Two-Fisted Art Attack” and “Art in Action”, respectively. For both the late Dent, whose famed performances include painting a portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. back in 1995 on a six-foot tall canvas over the course of two short songs, and his only student, Olsen, the crux of the work is not the painting itself, but the way of doing it.

What Di Mattia does is combine the essence of “speed-painting” with that of digital imaging and film editing: He paints from scratch (not manipulated) using a drawing pad and a stylus, although sometimes he refers to actual portraits or photos of his subjects. Often, the viewer may find his work a little too familiar, as though they have seen a picture of it somewhere — explained by the fact that he usually paints and illustrates public figures, using their pictures or screen shots as reference.

“If you do a realistic portrait,” says Di Mattia, “a reference picture is indispensable. I use reference pictures when painting human faces, because they help me with the textures, colors, proportions.”

You see them in his videos: the application of textures, brush strokes, shades, smudges; the undoing and redoing; the blinks and blurs of menu boxes offering dozens of options that may turn — on screen, at least — the stylus into a pencil, pen, crayon, coal, paint brush, marker, spray can, et cetera. Yet the striking thing about his art is not always in the finished products, but in the process, the progression of shapes erased and emphasized until they construct a face, a place, an object so realistic it leaves you breathless.

“I don’t know where you can study this type of painting. I learn it by way of practicing — nobody taught me how to draw or paint digitally.”

Later, Di Mattia matches the edited videos with a musical accompaniment (serenading Thom Yorke’s video, for instance, Di Mattia plays Radiohead’s “Karma Police” and “Street Spirit”). This type of information is included in his video descriptions, leaving out nothing but his personal techniques to complete the paintings. On his website, Di Mattia unabashedly shows a portfolio of his work, from portraits to caricatures to illustrations to traditional paintings. He flexes his artistic muscles and constantly reaches out to both his admirers and his critics.

One critic happens to find it inappropriate for Di Mattia to call his work “speed-painting” because it goes against the traditional approach of the actual exercise — although he has stated repeatedly that the “speed” relates to the time frame set for the video playback and is not to be confused with real time.

“I’ve been quoted as the person who changed the concept of ‘speed-painting’ and that has generated different points of view,” he says. “Technically, my work is a ‘fast-forwarded’ painting — but the attention surrounding it in the last two years, including a group of enthusiasts, associate it with ‘speed-painting’.”

In 2008, at the Taipei International Information Technology Show (Computex), Di Mattia was invited to perform his speed-painting techniques for three days in a row in front of a live audience. Using a graphics tablet, he drew a realistic portrait of “Alice”, the event’s host.

Di Mattia’s talent extends beyond what he is currently known for. Art speaks volumes about aesthetic values, and in so being it does not — and should not — confine itself to a singular medium. Every once in a while, Di Mattia goes back to traditional form because “it has a special aura of uniqueness that demands a huge process”. If he has a tendency to favor the digital form, it is because he is drawn to the “rapidity factor”.

“Digital art is not easier: it’s different,” he says. “You have to know how to mix the two mediums, the traditional with the modern, and learn to use new tools.”

Having said that, Di Mattia continues to stress his belief in the longevity of traditional arts. His observation on the ubiquitous production of computer-generated arts is both hopeful and conducive: “It’s cheaper, faster, and easier to produce something digitally —which is why it’s generally favored. But that doesn’t mean traditional arts are left behind, because one of our primary responsibilities — as artists — is to ensure a harmonious relationship between the two.”

An admirer of such traditional artists as Boris Vallejo and Norman Rockwell, Di Mattia strives to expand his horizon and perfect his craft in every possible way. Watching him work each crease, fold and line — zooming in and out of frame as his wrist moves fiercely across the digital pad — you will be reminded once more of the intoxicating effect a work of art commands. And, in this sense, Di Mattia raises the bar for contemporary art.

Nevertheless, to all his bewildered admirers who continue to prod him with unrelenting questions about how he does what he does, Di Mattia has only one answer: “Practice, practice, practice. There’s no magic to it.”


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Factoids about Nico Di Mattia

- While it takes 3–5 minutes to watch the video playback of Di Mattia at work, it takes him 3–7 hours to produce each individual painting.

- Di Mattia’s fan page on Facebook has more than 319,000 subscribers. There, he interacts periodically with admirers from around the world and opens up to suggestions about what they would like him to “speed-paint” next. One of their latest requests was a portrait of Michael Jackson, which is already uploaded on YouTube.

- Contrary to popular assumptions, Di Mattia works on a regular computer, albeit rigged with the following software: Photoshop 7, Camtasia and Premiere Pro. For the digital tablet he uses Genius MousePen 8 x 6.

- The mural Di Mattia painted over his bedroom wall — which he had recorded on VHS, known as his first “speed-painting” — used a poster from Planet of the Apes as a reference.

- The five most popular videos by Di Mattia on YouTube are: Spider-Man (10.5 million hits); John Locke from the TV Series, LOST (7.1 million hits); Scarlet Johansson (2.8 million hits); Ironman (1.5 million hits), and Thom Yorke of Radiohead (1.3 million hits).

- Two of the most common responses to all of Di Mattia’s YouTube video entries are: “Awesome” and “What program are you using?”

- Even though Di Mattia is open to suggestions on what to feature next in his speed-painting series, he does not accept personal requests.

- To avoid confusion over the term speed-painting, Di Mattia prefers to recognize his work as Arte Fusion.

For more information, see http://nicodimattia.com

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