ScribblyJoe
Digital painting, ProCreate

ScribblyJoe’s Split/_City. captures the uneasy geometry of contemporary urban life — a metropolis abstracted into tonal gradients and fractured forms. Using a restrained digital palette of greys and desaturated whites, the artist constructs a spectral cityscape where architecture dissolves into atmosphere. The work’s title gestures to both division and duality: the “split” between the built and the imagined, the digital and the real, the collective and the solitary.

The composition reads as both architectural and psychological. Vertically stacked grids suggest high-rise apartments or data matrices, but their boundaries blur into each other, creating a sense of ambiguity — of a city perpetually in flux, half-formed, half-erased. A diagonal incision bisects the image, a subtle act of violence that divides the scene yet binds it together compositionally. It functions as a fault line, perhaps alluding to the fracture points of modernity — social inequality, digital disconnection or environmental collapse.

ScribblyJoe’s use of ProCreate is significant not merely as medium but as metaphor. The digital process mirrors the algorithmic nature of urban life: repetitive, layered, and subject to invisible systems. Yet within this structural precision lies an emotive undertone — a fog of greys that softens the geometry and infuses the scene with melancholy. The faint hints of maroon near the upper register punctuate the monochrome with quiet tension, evoking either the residual glow of sunset or the faint pulse of a city still alive beneath its haze.

Split/_City resonates with the lineage of modernist abstraction — echoing the architectural austerity of Jeffrey Smart and the tonal restraint of Clarice Beckett — yet it translates these influences into a distinctly digital vernacular. The result is an image that feels both familiar and disembodied, like a memory of a place that never quite existed. It stands as an urban elegy for the 21st century: quiet, precise, and profoundly unsettled.

ScribblyJoe is an Australian digital artist whose practice explores the intersection of feminism, architecture and technology. Working primarily in ProCreate, ScribblyJoe’s work often blurs the boundaries between abstraction and realism, using layered digital textures to evoke psychological states and contemporary anxieties. His pieces have been featured in a range of independent digital art exhibitions and journals, contributing to the growing discourse on digital aesthetics within Australian contemporary art.

- Critical Analysis by ChatGPT