These art movements were usually defined by cultural critics, not the artists themselves, and often after the fact where a reading of history can be made. Furthermore it's in my opinion a bit conceited to think of oneself as part of an art movement akin to expressionism or whatever-the-hell. But all this I could take if I could see any merit to this process, which I do not. If you guys and gals - any of you - want to do cultural critique, feel free, but this is very surface.
Often I've felt that cultural critics are less capable of such a thing than the artists themselves... either way, whose to say we can't play the role of the critic for a while? Whether you think it's conceited or not, we are all creating work in certain styles, some of which have their lineage and inspiration highly visible, and can be categorized because of it; for the benefit of organization and analyzing trends. I'm sure not every artist sat down at his easel thinking they were going to be an impressionist that day, but nevertheless they may have been categorized as such by the time they died. I think pixel art has had a tremendous amount of growth in such a relatively short time span because of advances in technology and evolution of the artist's mind ( as it pertains to pixel art); comparable to the difference between the Woman of Willendorf and contemporary photo realism. While it may not matter so much on the large scale of things, and won't land any of us in a text book most likely, I would think the history of pixel art should be important to us- and you're the last person I would have thought that wouldn't see any benefit in exploring such things!
Here is my go at some fancy art school writings on pixel art:
In this piece, Helm has infused flat planes of the background with the grungy, amiga reminiscent rendering and palettes of games such as Lionheart,( pixeled by the artist Henk Nieborg, a prominent figure in the art of the pixel whose work has adapted and grown through the pixel and game art generations). The dither patterns are also subtly reminiscent of those favored by the demoscene era, whose artists often employed stark, 45 degree angles in their dither clusters, and were not afraid to interlace their dithering, "skipping" over a value step to indicate more texture- or perhaps just flare.
With that in mind, the palette appears more limited than these inspirations, where it seems the artist has discarded some extra colors for the sake of clarity, economy, and perhaps even time constraints that may have been in effect- as the work was for a commercial title following a popular franchise. Within this self-imposed palette constraint one can find a connection to background work produced on the gameboy advance, which rarely made full use of the allotted 16 colors per tile in the extent it was more commonly used in great SNES titles such as chromo trigger, metal slug, or even the aforementioned Lionheart on the Amiga. It seems here, the division between console and portable device may have had some influence in the output of artists working with the different devices. In any case, this level of palette control found itself onto a very modern device: the Nintendo DS, which could have easily accounted for a couple more palette entries had the artist been so inclined.
While Helm's work in this image may not fall strictly into one pixel art movement, it is certainly stemming from a renaissance with classical pixel art, and imbued with a modernity that comes from the artist being a very knowledgeable, experienced, and almost innovative pixel artist- having meditated on the medium's identity and purpose for quite some time.
Of course some of it is a bit tongue in cheek because I never really liked to write this stuff anyway, but I sincerely believe in the connections I've made there, and while you may not agree with my interpretation of your work, which is completely fine and a little expected, I think it shows pixel art can be discussed historically and stylistically with a depth that is at least as useful to a pixel artist as this sort of thing's equivalent would be to a traditional artist.
