Saturday, May 26, 2007 at 09:23PM Another Bifurcation on the Kauai Night Dream tree
I promised to inform you of any future evolution to this piece so here you go. Click on the image to take you to the Art Journey page on Kalalau Valley. An Update is at the end of the page but I've added more information about the solarization process as well. Enjoy.
Friday, May 25, 2007 at 08:32AM which is what this site is right now.
Don't step on any nails. This piece, which is reall called Construction Zone, started with a scan of a fuchsia that I made on a whim. I layered it over a page from one of my watercolor sketch books and was off and running.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007 at 07:53PM Using the camera of our minds
I've added another in depth discussion page sharing my process for a new work-in-progress entitled Kauai Night Dream
Click on the image to go to the page and see the entire piece as it stands now. Check back later to see how it turned out. Like many of my Digital Alchemy Pieces, this one incorporates painting, photography and computer graphics. But Somehow the style seems different to me. Maybe I've morphed into a new genre. Should I call it Bio-Alchemy? This piece excites me because it is starting to capture something I've seen in nature quite often, but have always found impossible to get with a camera. I'm talking about that luminous, almost hallucinogenic quality nightscapes have. Our eyes see remarkably well into the vagary of night, but it's our a vivid brains that do the magic. You see our eyes are getting very little color information at night and loosing most of the shadow detail. But despite this deficit our brains use our past experience and knowledge of what the landscape should look like to fill in the the detail, and sometimes, create a sublime moment. I find this eye/brain relationship truly remarkable. This example goes a long ways towards explaining how the eye/brain organ functions radically different than a modern camera.
How many times have I left the studio late at night, exhausted from working on a deadline project, only to feel instantly revived by the fresh cool air and the transcendent moon back lighting the giant maples and cedars around the house. Such moments are worth at least an hours sleep.
Once I was doing a film in Jamaica, and had a few days to explore the island. this would have been around 1986, and essentially in a pre-digital photographic age. I rented a motorcycle and headed into the Blue Mountains with my still camera. Just after sunset I found myself on a ridge road near the summit and looked westward across the jungle to the sea. My view was shrouded my massive trees and hanging creepers and fireflies glinted in the shadows as the last chromatic ribbon of light faded into the water. I pulled over and took it in with a bitter sweet chord ringing in my heart, for though I was looking at a scene of extreme aesthetic beauty, I knew that it would be pointless to get out my camera and try and shoot it. What I was seeing was beyond the technical limitations of the equipment, of any equipment.
It occurred to me sometime later how to capture this type of image. I was camping at Mono Lake on the desert side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains when scene of similar delicate beauty occured. The full moon rising over the desert lake became partially obscured by cloud; Lunar light turned the diaphanous mist into silver poetry. I realized then that while my camera might not see I could. So I decided to think and observe like a painter, studying the visual mechanics of light and tone blooming before me; Memorizing all that I could about what this moonrise looked like.
And now I find myself living in an age where digital tools allow me to recreate these moments. Combining the skills of photography and painting, I can pull on my magical observations and 'print' what I saw. I now realize that I was able to take that long lost picture in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica after all; I only had to be patient while the scene remained latent in my memory, awaiting the visual renaissance happening in visual art today.
Saturday, May 19, 2007 at 08:05AM
Another image from a large body of tree spirits that seem to show up in my work. I had a somewhat bland photograph of young cotton woods against a lazy sky. I played around with symmetries and got something close to this. The result was very anthropomorphic. So I then added some subtleties to bring out the human figure aspects even more. One technique I used for this was to use the liquefy brush in Photoshop to put figurative bends and curves into the tree trunks and branches. It was a rather painstaking process because you can't preview the symmetry until the liquefy mode is finished. Creating the symmetry involves flipping a copy of the image and then juxtaposing it along the edge of the original. This can be done with a hard or a soft edge. In this case I used a fairly hard edge. I remember making several attempts at the right curves and bends before I got it right.
For some reason, this image seems to suggest a member of the insect universe, something alien with veins and wings. Since Trees and insects have a such a complex relationship, that connection seems right to me. I found a geometric pattern left over from the creation of Desert Energy and used it to make the tile like tapestry on the edges. This print feels very balanced and complete to me, and I'm very happy with it. At least one other individual seems to agree, because it sold at my last show.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007 at 10:00PM A short blog today. I'm spending a lot of time volunteering at our middle school to help paint the sets for the school play. Maybe I'll blog some images from that later.
This image we see today is actually a detail from a larger scroll formatted piece called The Proof for Interstellar Aboriel Telepathy. ( don't forget you can click again on the image in the gallery to get the light table mode) This has to be on of my most long winded titles. Long titles put a strain on data management systems and this piece often gets shortened to Tree Telepathy or something like that. But its important to understand it as a proof in the mathematical sense. A proof written in a math so foreign to hour human minds that it ends up looking to us like Surreal Art.
Wednesday, May 9, 2007 at 11:14PM I've just updated the site with three new galleries, all focusing on a style of graphic work I call Digital Alchemy. In my mind I've divided the work between old and new, vertical and horizontal. The later because it makes a more pleasing viewing experience when you page through one image at a time. This has always been a challenge, especially with the tall vertical format I seem to like. I call them scrolls because they remind me of the long vertical scrolls you see in Asian art.
What is digital Alchemy? Well that's a big question. Essentially it's a name I came up with in 1998 to describe this new genre of work I had started to explore. I was taking traditional photography, graphic work from my commercial (and mostly digital) work, as well as pieces of drawings and paintings, and combining them all together in multi layered files and then printing them out with archival ink jet printers. At first I used the iris, then switched to Epson.
For an in depth description of Digital Alchemy, click here and you'll find a copy of the Artist Statement I wrote for my first Solo Gallery Show at the pearl gallery in Portland.
Monday, May 7, 2007 at 08:09AM I've been working on setting up a Digital Alchemy Gallery on this site. I was going to say that I no longer work in this idiom when I realized that I've actually got several new works that clearly fall into the category. Its strange how our minds can create false ideas about how we define ourselves and our work. As of this post, this piece is now called Diary of a Root Sprite. We'll see if that sticks. It is essentially done, perhaps a few minor tweaks, but nothing that could be noticed on the web will change. (The piece is 25" wide and 75" tall)
This particular piece results from several images acquired on the summer 2006 road trip. As I motored north on US 395 , making the return loop, I got close to the Oregon Border where I spotted this scruffy tree along side the road––a Pinyon pine I think. I always keep my eyes out for trees that have good separation from there environment.
In photography, separation of the subject matter from the background can be very important, especially with trees. Most trees stand near other trees and the fractal complexity of the branches blend the edges of one tree to another and make it very hard to 'see' a clear image of the subject. In everyday life our 3D binocular vision solves this problem for us and allows us to appreciate a single tree in a forest. But in the 2D world of photography this is not possible. This is why so many images taken in forests are disappointing. You usually need to be thinking about separation when photographing in nature. A lone tree on top of a hill is the best possible separation of all and this was the case here.
I combined this image with another image I made under a tight windblown spruce forest along the Oregon coast--an image so tangled with dead branches that it reminded me of roots in an underworld hollow. The final element is from a scan of a painting I did some years ago, Acrylic on Panel. I scanned it at various stages and this was from the halfway point. I then took half of the face on this painting and flipped it so that a new face appeared, a face strangely inhuman due to the symmetry (most human faces are somewhat unsymmetrical and nothing makes someone look a little odd like doing a mirror flip on their face and making them perfectly symmetrical. Try this out and compare a left side flip with a right side flip. One person can sometimes look like two siblings rather than a single individual. Click here to a get a page that further describes the process behind the Root Sprite. You see, it already has a different title. I'll have to blog on the subject of titles soon.
