Demon Face Warp


David Harrington Demon Face Warp

This effect was created in Adobe After Effects. I’ve been experimenting with video recently, partially because I’m the visual consultant and video producer for the upcoming theatrical production of “The Pleasure Dome”, directed by Andrew Starner and David Harrington.

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New images: the "Rachel's Knife" series

These images were produced through and from the installation project “Rachel’s Knife,” which I created with David Harrington. We created the installation by using chance operations to choose objects to get from the free stuff section on Craig’s List.

After acquiring a room full of stuff the next stage was to decide what to do with it, and then to compose the work, and create more work from that.

The chance operations component in a sense was a use of surrealist techniques where random actions are performed and then the artist produces work using that with the potential of creating “happy accidents,”
or “synchronicity,” or “resonance,” (or insert analogous word from the philosophy of your choice here.)

And by using chance operations the artist can incorporate elements into the work that s/he would have never consciously chosen or come up with–in the hopes of creating truly unique combinations.

See “cut-up technique,” and”aleatory.”

Click one of the images to see the gallery.

HadesBranches of Dream Logic

Psychedelic WinterDesert Echo

NightmareRequested Decay

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Blue Room Show

Two more pieces are going up in a show at the Blue Room at Brown University.

“Dark River” and “Dream Logic” are going to be in it.

Below: “Dream Logic”

Dream Logic

Below: “Dark River”

Dark River

Big thanks to Caroline Washington.

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Three New Images Added to the Portfolio

I completed these pictures over the summer (in 2007) while I was taking classes in New York City. The pictures are Dream World, River of Darkness, and Untitled Texture. All are a combination of photography and digital painting.

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Funamentals of Drawing

Drawing breaks down into only three fundamental strategies.

  1. Drawing what you see
  2. Drawing what you see in your mind
  3. Automatic drawing

1) Drawing from life

Drawing from life, or drawing what you’re looking at, can have smaller strategies contained within that strategy.

Drawing from life is about training your eye to see relationships. The relationships of the shapes, the relationships of the lights and darks and middle-tones, and color. While life drawing is a difficult skill for many to master, and I still have a long way to go, it is certainly a very learnable skill.

As a mentor once told me: “the more you learn, the more you realize how much more there is to learn.”

2) Drawing from your mind’s eye
Drawing from your mind could be into drawing from memory, or drawing from your imagination, or both. Training your visual memory is the quickest and easiest way to develop your ability to draw better what you see in your imagination, and to make that more vivid, and containing more details.

3) Automatic drawing
Automatic drawing is when you look at the pencil on the paper and just watch what comes out without thinking about it or thinking about it less and less, or not looking at the paper at all.

A note on flexibility and the integration of these techniques
Seasoned artist’s will probably end up using all these techniques together in various ways within the same image. The flexibility an artist can develop to call on any of these skills in any sequence and whenever the image requires it is key.

Credit to Richard Bandler for pointing out these three distinctions in strategies of drawing.

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On Symbolism

Symbolism
From Wikipedia

Symbolism was a late nineteenth century art movement of French and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts.

Precursors and origins

Symbolism was largely a reaction against Naturalism and Realism, movements which attempted to capture reality in its particularity. These movements invited a reaction in favor of spirituality, the imagination, and dreams; the path to Symbolism begins with that reaction.

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Distinct from the Symbolist movement in literature, Symbolism in art represents an outgrowth of the more gothic and darker sides of Romanticism; but where Romanticism was impetuous and rebellious, Symbolist art was static and hieratic.

Movement

The Symbolist Manifesto

Symbolists believed that art should aim to capture more absolute truths which could only be accessed by indirect methods. Thus, they wrote in a highly metaphorical and suggestive manner, endowing particular images or objects with symbolic meaning. The Symbolist manifesto (�Le Symbolisme�, Le Figaro, 18 Sept 1886) was published in 1886 by Jean Mor�as. Mor�as announced that Symbolism was hostile to “plain meanings, declamations, false sentimentality and matter-of-fact description,” and that its goal instead was to “clothe the Ideal in a perceptible form” whose “goal was not in itself, but whose sole purpose was to express the Ideal”:

In this art, scenes from nature, human activities, and all other real world phenomena will not be described for their own sake; here, they are perceptible surfaces created to represent their esoteric affinities with the primordial Ideals.

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In painting, Symbolism was a continuation of some mystical tendencies in the Romantic tradition, which included such artists as Caspar David Friedrich, Fernand Khnopff and John Henry Fuseli and it was even more closely aligned with the self-consciously dark and private movement of Decadence.

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The Symbolist painters mined mythology and dream imagery for a visual language of the soul, seeking evocative paintings that brought to mind a static world of silence. The symbols used in Symbolism are not the familiar emblems of mainstream iconography but intensely personal, private, obscure and ambiguous references. More a philosophy than an actual style of art, the Symbolist painters influenced the contemporary Art Nouveau movement and Les Nabis. In their exploration of dreamlike subjects, symbolist painters are found across centuries and cultures, as they are still today; Bernard Delvaille has described Rene Magritte’s surrealism as “Symbolism plus Freud”.

I love Symbolist art the most out of any genre, and though I’m not sure about the aims of those artists to “clothe the ideal in perceptible forms” which is “only accessible through indirect means,” (that sounds almost dogmatic) I am interested in some of the more esoteric topics, but simply put, I love art that depicts fantasy worlds.

It comes down to that. That whether it’s a few of Dali’s paintings, or Magritte’s, or Jacek Yerka, I love dream worlds, fantasy worlds, the inexplicable, painted in a way that looks as if you could almost walk into that reality.

To really get into that sort of work I have to feel like there’s something below the surface; a girl with fairy-wings in a forest may look nice, but I have to wonder about it. When you really get curious about a picture and want to know more about that world, you’ve hit the “hook point.”

It’s analogous to the hook in a good song, or a bad commercial. You get the melody in your mind and your brain starts to play it over and over. I’ve heard that referred to as “brain-itch.” But that sounds like someone needs some ointment or at least a different description for that.

In a good picture it’s that part where the artist gives you just enough that you want more but not too much that everything is explained.

And then the artist gets the question; “…but what does it mean?” I haven’t found a good answer to that.

Recently I’ve been alternating between:

  • If I could say it, I wouldn’t have to make the picture.
  • What do you think it means?

Often artists make pictures because we don’t have the words.

If you can think of any other good answers to “what does it mean?” let me know.

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Illusions: Janelle II in print

Paper & Pixel is a Brown University/RISD student magazine. “Illusions: Janelle II” will appear in the next issue.

Thanks to Drew Durbin and John Cockrell.

Photographs of Janelle Sing composited to elicit notions of Hindu religious iconography with multiple arms, masks, and the concept of many aspects of a single entity within reality

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