Jay Gidwitz » Visual Art

Demon Face Warp

Jay — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 04:09:07 +0000

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.

Can you be a Surrealist and NOT be in the Surrealist Movement?

Jay — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 05:09:30 +0000

My “Dada and Surrealism” professor made the distinction between Surrealists and surrealists. According to him, the people who were deemed to be in the surrealist movement at any given time (by Andre Breton) were surrealists, and the people who weren’t in the movement weren’t surrealists, even if their work was surreal.
I like the professor, but sometimes these academic arguments, are, well academic. (In the pedantic sense of the word.)

Take this for example:

sur-re-al-ism
n.
1. A 20th-century literary and artistic movement that attempts to express the workings of the subconscious and is characterized by fantastic imagery and incongruous juxtaposition of subject matter.
2. Literature or art produced in this style.

(http://www.thefreedictionary.com/surrealism)

sur-re-al
adj.
1. Having qualities attributed to or associated with surrealism: “Even with most facilities shut down … a few mavericks managed to slip into the park to sample the almost surreal emptiness before the shutdown ended.” Peter H. King.
2. Having an oddly dreamlike quality.

(http://www.thefreedictionary.com/surreal)

Well, those words seem to mean a style of art, second to the movement, and with good reason.

What else is there to call artwork that have the qualities of a dream?

According to Andre Breton you don’t have to be in the movement to be a surrealist:

Rimbaud is a surrealist in the way he lived, and elsewhere. // Jarry is a surrealist in absinthe.

Andre Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism” p 27.

Rimbaud died in 1891 and Jarry died in 1907.

They were both dead before the movement started.

Funamentals of Drawing

Jay — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 02:00:15 +0000

Drawing breaks down into only three fundamental strategies.

Drawing what you see
Drawing what you see in your mind
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.