Icons used to be black and white, then came the wonder of 16 colour icons. Little pieces of artwork in such a small space, I used to make a lot of these icons on Windows 3.1 and then 95. Then came 128 colour icons and at last Microsoft reached true colour with Windows XP. Years before OS X had true colour icons, glossy and sleek – and inspiring?

Valéry Grancher certainly finds OS X icons inspiring:

Since 1998 I started a new kind of fashion regarding paintings by mixing internet topics and paintings, I painted internet screen by calling them “webpaintings”. My original inspiration was DADA with the work of Francis Picabia when he was painting virtual mechanics like “la machine tourne vite” (National gallery of art Wasington DC) or “la parade amoureuse” (private collection). The way that Picabia has dealt with that kind of matters gave to me great inspirations regarding my practice of what we called ten years ago with Vuk Cosik ‘net art’. I started to paint internet logos, internet screen, famous software screens and internet pages sources and codes…

Valéry Grancher

Link

How about web pages? Less sleek and glossy but they can also be art. Gautam Rao is selling paintings of web pages on eBay.

Some say technology is rendering traditional painting obsolete. But Artist Gautam Rao still paints the old-fashioned way: with paint and brush on canvas. However, his subject matter is a little less traditional: He PAINTS THE COMPUTER AND GADGETS on his desk, such as his iPod, his Mac screen and closeups of icons. He even did a self-portrait (his image as it appears on his web cam). And then he BLOGS the lot and sells them on eBay. Text

Link

Via

Related Posts: