bcb: Tall women

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Tall women

Here are two pieces I'm working on:

They remind me of Klimt. I wasn't intentionally going for this though. I tried this taller format after I saw a few early paintings of Bonnard's that are very tall and skinny.

The tall format may be a little too cute. I feel they look a little too illustrative for what I'm attempting to get at.

What is it I am trying to get at? Good question. I was asked what influences my work by a potential client recently. This is what I wrote:

I'm most interested in the relationship between our energetic bodies and physical bodies. I explore where they intersect, where they are different, and where they are the same. I'm most influenced by Renaissance art. Da Vinci and Michelangelo are my biggest influences.

For me, art serves the same purpose as science and religion (or spirituality if you prefer); it has the potential uplift humankind and keep our eyes open to the wonder of the world. In the end, I would like my work to bring about an awareness of the viewers highest, deepest and truest self. All of my work is based on anatomically correct digital 3D models. I have been a scientific illustrator for 15 years and there has been a organic evolution from illustration to fine art in my work.

So far that's the clearest, most succinct summation of what inspires and what I am after me that I have come up with.

1 comments:

silvia da pian said...: Are you talking about "life" of the art ? Do you think that it is possible to give " life" and "energy" to an " not organical " object as an anatomically correct digital 3D model ? The possibility is the capacity to create some kind of arts durable in the time . The "life" and the " energy " of something cold as the white marble of the "Pieta'" di Michelangelo is warm as the joy to touch her today , thousand year after her creation .; January 25, 2012 12:25 PM

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Bio

Bryan Christie was born on May 5, 1973, in New York City, toward the end of the sexual revolution, in a city very different from today's. His family moved to Seattle to experience the suburban middle-class American dream; within a year his parents were separated. Bryan and his mother returned to New York, where he grew up surrounded by his mother’s oil paintings, the smell of turpentine, the constant presence of her artist friends, and a deep and abiding sense of the spiritual in the natural world and the chaos of our human sensibilities. He was a gifted musician, playing saxophone in LaGuardia High School of the Arts, gigging in Manhattan jazz clubs by the time he was 19 and then attending the Manhattan School of Music.

Realizing that music was not the medium through which to express his muse but desiring to eschew his mother's vocation and the volatile lifestyle he assumed it required, Bryan began working at his father's studio as a scientific/medical illustrator and then, in 1998, took a job as an assistant art director at Scientific American magazine. He fell in love with science, witnessing in the editors the same passion he had seen both in his mother's art and his own music. He started to join his artistic and scientific pursuits, coming to believe, as Einstein did, that “all religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree … directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence.” It was here that Bryan began to produce his first anatomical illustrations.

In 2000, Mr. Christie left Scientific American to pursue a freelance career. His first award-winning illustration was for Newsweek in 2001. He continued to define his aesthetic, focusing on the essential structures of the body, until he came to the look of his black-and-white anatomical work. In 2004, his piece for Marie Claire on breast cancer won an SPD award; that piece was the DNA for his first body of work, "Flesh and Blood."

All of Mr. Christie’s graphic work, a body of work that spans 14 years, was like a long apprenticeship for his 3-D fine art. He spent years perfecting bodies, understanding light as an emotional tool, experimenting with camera angle and perspective. An early formative experience came with his viewing of an exhibition of Mark Rothko's art at the Whitney museum 15 years ago, where he "felt like aliens had come from outer space to put art on the walls." Rothko's ability to infuse his fields of color with such emotional force has had a deep influence in Bryan's emerging fine art work. Recently he had an intensely spiritual experience when he saw Michelangelo's first Pieta for the first time, solidifying his belief that the body can be used to express spiritual truths and propelling him forward into his own art and the search for the visceral experience of the truth and beauty of the world.

bcb

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Tall women

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