So here’s something I’ve been pondering: when is art handmade? Used to be, that was the assumption for art, but in a world that’s more and more digital, we all take machine assists from time to time. These days, what does “made by hand” really mean?

I think we can all agree what completely made by hand is, and looks like. And some artists I know can follow this to the bitter end: making their own paper, hand-pulling prints, binding their own books. But everyone leans on the manufacturing process a little: pens and ink, paint and brushes, machines to create the prints that you’re hand-pulling from.

Conversely, what does a machine or assembly-line art process look like? What if you’ve got a great idea for a clothing line? At first, maybe you’re screen-printing onto t-shirts by hand, but what about when you want to produce more? The machine-printed shirts are still your design, you approved the colors, and chose the quality of the fabric.

Where is photography on this spectrum? Does it only count if you’re still in the darkroom yourself, and wrangling your own printer to get the right colors? What if you got an assist from software for some digital development first? Or, on the other end, what about a hand-tooled leather notebook cover, embossed with a machine-made, mass-produced design? There were certainly hands and craft involved, but what is that process missing?

For me, being under the “digital” label for art puts me more toward the machine-made end of a wide spectrum of crafting. Here’s a look at my own process for context. I make collages and monoprints by hand, use paints and inks to create textures, and take my camera for walks to capture the world. Then I scan the results, to join the photography on my computer, layer them together, during months of compositional agony, and finally, release them onto my site, documented and ready for printing.

So does my art lose its handmade quality at some point in this process? Is it when I:

• Scan the handmade prints?
• Use a machine to make the print, or the photograph?
• Load the photos or scans onto my computer?
• Start to layer my images with help from software?
• Produce the final output?

When I dig into it, and ask people why handmade is important, I get the impression that it’s more about the reproduction process, the chance that many thousands of prints could exist, as opposed to the one-of-a-kind item we think of as “real” art. Limiting editions helps here. When I create a digital collage, but happen to glue it to a wood panel and cover it with encaustic, that works better for some folks — my hands touched the piece. Yet another take is the locale: was this printed locally, nearby, or overseas? And we haven’t even touched on reproduction prints, factory painting, or master prints of original works.

How about we start over? It’s not about the hands at all, but the creative process, the thought process, from a particular person. Can you find the artist in the work? Did they make something that speaks to them first? Can they tell you about their process and decisions?  Let’s not quibble about how many machines might have helped. If the artist puts themselves into the work, with their hands, eyes, or thoughts, it’s human-made.