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On our mission statement

2012-01-30T04:40:00.001-05:00

I thought I'd go into some more depth on the mission statement I posted the other day. The first sentence of the mission is, "To create the most clear, elegant, beautiful graphics and illustration."

Our successful graphics are clear. There's a intentionality of purpose. When we are commissioned to make something look "cool" I feel lost.

Apple's dictionaries definition of clarity is, "the quality of coherence and intelligibility." If our work isn't clear, if a coherent and intelligible message isn't apparent, it isn't successful. It's the clarity of the idea coming across that can make a piece beautiful or not.

Let's look at one of my favorite information graphics, the Johanes Itten color wheel:

It organizes the mystery of color into a linear, circular comprehensible whole. I have this wheel tacked up to the wall of my studio and I refer to it often.

Information and clarity don't necessarily go hand in hand. We're surrounded by so much information in our culture. As information graphic artists our job is to make sense of the information that is inundating us. I love what Nigel Holmes calls his studio, "Explanation Graphics." Explaining something is making sense out of information. In the end we are visual editors. We decide what to leave out in order to make a strong compelling point.

Let's look at elegance. The second definition in Apple's dictionary is, "(of a scientific theory or solution to a problem) pleasingly ingenious and simple." From one perspective, our studio solves problems. The problems we tackle are how to make sense of something visually. I respond to simplicity and minimalism. You've probably noticed that our color palate tends to be minimal. This has to do with the fact that in information graphics color is meaning. And my favorite information graphics are ones that make one or two points strongly. So this translates into the use of one or two colors.

I believe that clarity leads to beauty. What does this mean? I believe that there has to be a clear, intelligible message that is delivered in order for us to experience beauty. This holds true in art, illustration and information graphics. When something is beautiful, I want to look at it and make sense of it. Beauty is a core value for me. And I am not just talking about physical beauty. I believe almost anything can be beautiful. Thelonious Monk was getting at this point when he titled one of his songs "Ugly Beauty."

There's the "why," "how" and "what." What we do as a studio is clear- we make information graphics and illustrations. How we do this is what I addressed in this post. Why do we do this? This goes back to the vision statement I posted the other day:

Our work brings about a understanding and visceral experience of the beauty, wonder and majesty of the world in all of its connectedness. Through this experience we bring peace, understanding and compassion to the world.

In the end I would love for people who come in contact with our work to feel energized and elevated after looking at it.

Vision and mission statements

2012-01-28T06:39:00.000-05:00

I've been working on a vision and mission statement for the studio. The vision statement relates to my highest hopes for what we can do. The mission statement is more practical. It speaks to what we believe, and how and what we do.

Vision statement:

Our work brings about a understanding and visceral experience of the beauty, wonder and majesty of the world in all of its connectedness. Through this experience we bring peace, understanding and compassion to the world.

Mission statement:

To create the most clear, beautiful, elegant graphics and illustration.

To only work on jobs that benefit humankind.

To create a energetic, positive work place that fosters room for creative expression and positive change.

To interpret the clients needs. This means always digging deeper, asking as many questions as possible.

To respect each job.

To fight hard against boredom and a feeling of just reproducing. To not rest on what we have accomplished and done in the past. To always be building on what we have done. Not for the sake of change, but for the sake of beauty and clarity.

I shared these statements with the team on Thursday. It got a good response. Joe Lertola said that skepticism was a important thing for him. In skepticism there is a inherent rigor that I respond to. So I want to see how we can incorporate skepticism into our statements.

After working on these I feel a little intimidated by them. Being true to them will be difficult at times. Especially the one that states, "to only work on jobs that benefit humankind." What is and isn't beneficial to humankind is usually up for debate. For instance, we just finished a job for a energy company that fracks. I've heard mostly bad things about fracking. Scientific American published an article about it recently that was a little more balanced. With technical innovation that benefits our quality of life there usually comes a down side. Genetically modifies food has saved millions of lives from what I understand. I've been a proponent for nuclear energy. But after what happened in Japan I'm not so sure.

So how will these statements tangibly effect how and what we do here at the studio? I don't know yet. But I'm trusting that they will have an effect. At the least I believe they will help keep the studio energetic and vibrant.

On being overwhelmed

2012-01-27T09:20:00.000-05:00

I came into the studio this morning irritated. So I decided to clean up and organize the space. I took down everything I had tacked up and started going through the work, making a good and bad pile. Or rather a pile of work I want to pursue and work that I don't. Here's what the studio looks like so far. It aint pretty:

I'm feeling overwhelmed. To be honest with you, I have so much I'm working on that I don't know where to begin. Hopefully in writing about this I'll get some clarity on what it is I want to focus on.

Here are the series I'm engaged with

There are the paper prints mounted on panel with encaustic. Here are a couple of examples:

These pieces are, metaphorically speaking, fossilized records of our energy and spirit. They are documents in a way. I look at them as proof of our energy beyond the physical manifestation of this world.

Then there are the metal prints with varnish applied:

Honestly, I'm not sure what the hell the intent is behind these pieces other than trying to make the most beautiful object I can. Hold on. I do have a sense of what I want these to be. The varnish represents water. I look at these pieces as women submerged in some kind of liquid. They are trapped in my mind.

I have the transparent sculptures:

The inspiration behind these is cubism. They are also an outgrowth of my time series (see below.)

Then there are the pieces that I am printing on layers of organza and then binding together with encaustic:

I look at these as living things. The encaustic represents flesh and the image represents the movement of the spirit, soul and emotion.

I'm working on a couple of videos too. I don't want to post these yet.

There are the altarpieces:

These are influenced by early renaissance altars. Specifically the altars of Fra Angelico. I want these to be objects of worship directed at our physical and energetic makeup.

There's the time series:

These are about, well, time. Time and perception; how the two interrelate. I believe time is the bedrock of our existence. It can be measured mechanically yet our experience, or perception of it is so fluid.

I'm also working on digital drawings of water towers:

I wrote in a earlier post that I respond to the lack of industrial design they have. They are completely functional. Everything you see on the water tower serves a practical purpose and function.

And there are the architectural photos I am taking:

All that I listed is part of the fine art side of what I do. In addition to this I'm also working on commissions for magazines and pharmaceutical clients. Of these illustration projects, the one I'm most excited about is a project for National Geographic. I pitched the idea for a story to Bill Marr, the creative director, and they bit. I don't want to say more until it is on the newsstands. That should be May.

Phew. Now, for the fine art, I'll pick my favorites from these series and put them up on the wall. That is if my head doesn't explode first.

New time woman

2012-01-26T08:34:00.002-05:00

I started working on this piece yesterday:

It will be part of my time series. I'm happy with the color, especially in the middle panel. In fact, I may take the middle panel and blow it up and have it live in its own.

Here are two experiments I made yesterday:

Both of these are composed of four layers of images printed on organza with encaustic applied between each layer. I want these to have depth and glow. But I want the glow to be subtle, I don't want to hit you over the head with it. I'm finding it a tricky balance. The orange one unfortunately reminds me of a radioactive kidney bean.

On balance

2012-01-25T05:27:00.000-05:00

I finished this early this morning.

It's part of a series that I haven't named yet. Here's a photo of three of the pieces together:

I've been on a creative tear the last few months. I haven't experienced such a long burst of creative output in years. Here's a photo of what the studio looks like now:

As you can see I have many irons in the fire. I've been wondering why I'm experiencing this sustained period of creativity. Balance comes to mind.

I have been experiencing balance in my personal life. I have my bad days. But what has been different over the last few months is that I'm able to look at the mood that comes over me as not being a direct correlation with reality. There is a grain of truth in the feelings, but they tend to be amplified considerably.

I've always been afraid that contentment and happiness would lead to less creative output for me. I was nervous that my creativity grew out of a general restlessness and unhappiness I have always experienced. But this period of balance is proving this a invalid hypothesis. It's difficult because there is such a ingrained romantic vision of the artist in our culture. Just look at the personal lives of Beethoven, Jackson Pollock, Kurt Cobain, Van Gogh, Amy Winehouse, Charlie Parker. Chuck Close' quote is my perfect antidote for for when my mind strays in this direction, "Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us get up everyday and get to work."

NYC through a 85mm lens

2012-01-24T13:50:00.000-05:00

I took these photos today while taking my morning walk:

I've been using my 85mm lens as opposed to the 50mm I usually use. It's affecting the way I see things. With the 85mm I'm picking up on diagonals and playing with the relationship between foreground and background space more. The 50mm is close to how our eyes perceive the world. The 85 has a more zoomed, narrower view plane. So there is room for more abstraction when using it. That is if you define abstraction as being what's different than what the eyes perceive.

I'm also developing the pictures differently. I've been staying away from strong contrast and going for a more even tone. This is something that feels a little more like film. That said, I believe in being true to the medium. I am not interested in trying to fake the viewer out into thinking that these were taken with film. It's just that film looks so damn beautiful.

In April I'll be headed to Cuba for a weeklong photo workshop with Jay Seldin. Needless to say I'm very excited. I ordered a 50mm tilt shift lens that I can't wait to use. This lens should help capture the architecture in Cuba well. It will be hard shooting black and white surrounded by all that color.

Tall women

2012-01-24T07:18:00.000-05:00

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.

Overcast morning

2012-01-23T08:08:00.000-05:00

I took these three shots this morning on my walk to the coffee shop:

A new piece

2012-01-21T06:46:00.001-05:00

Here's a piece I may be finished with:

It measures 44" x 22". A digital print mounted on panel with encaustic. I may go into it and add some more encaustic; part of me feels like it looks too clean. But I'll live with it for a while.

Some more NYC buildings

2012-01-21T06:23:00.002-05:00

I took these yesterday. I'm using my 85 mm / 1.2 again. I love this lens. It's big and heavy and feels great in my hands.

More buildings

2012-01-20T03:14:00.001-05:00

I've been taking pictures of the sides of buildings. Here are four:

Organza and wood

2012-01-19T08:17:00.001-05:00

Over the last couple of days I've been working on this triptych:

I'm interested in the interplay of the woodgrain and the lines of the three images. I printed the digital drawings (that's what I'm calling the images for now) on organza and applied them to the wooden panels using encaustic. Each panel measures 30"x 15".

Three buildings in New York City

2012-01-18T02:23:00.001-05:00

I've started a new series of photographs. The subject is the sides of buildings. Here are three takes:

A corporate building in Northern New Jersey

2012-01-17T07:37:00.000-05:00

I took this shot last week:

This has got to be one of the ugliest buildings I have seen. I'm interested in how photography can make the ugliest things look engaging. I asked my teacher about this the other day. Why does the ugliest subject matter make a good photo sometimes? He said he thinks it has something to do with the fact that the image is being flattened out; a three dimensional scene is being being represented in two dimensions. A friend of mine said that photography removes all of the senses except vision. You obviously don't smell New Jersey in the photograph above. You don't feel the chill in the air. Because I'm using a wide-angle lens the eye could never see the building the way it is shown in the photo.

I tend to take a photo as a document of the real thing. But there is a lot going on that is removing the subject from reality.

At the Met on Saturday

2012-01-16T06:30:00.003-05:00

I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art this Saturday. This is a Egyptian temple in the museum. It's not the museum itself.

I'd like to show you some of the pieces that stood out to me. The first piece is a little medieval painting of the Last Judgment:

I didn't note the artist who painted this. What really caught my attention were the figures in hell:

If you can get past the subject matter, it's quite beautiful. (I'm particularly fond of the poor guy in the lower left being torn in half.) I'm interested in the way the figures are all floating in space. This is something I try to achieve in my art: an absence of gravity. I noticed that I would rather not be in either of the scenarios depicted in this piece. Heaven looks boring, and hell looks rather, well, hellish.

Another painting that jumped out at me was a El Greco. Here's a detail.

I adore the wavy lines that form the figures. The figures also have a floating quality that I am drawn to. The color is insane, of course. Look at the pink shawl. I've been drawing more men lately. I want to start building a new male model so I can create renderings of a man. I love the attitude of the man on the right.

This Velasquez killed me:

From a distance it almost looked like a photograph. But as I got closer the paint became more and more abstract. It looks like it was painted extremely quickly, with a pretty heavily loaded brush. There's something here; the fact that our eyes and consciousness can make out a portrait made up of such loose paint is interesting. Up close the reality falls apart. There's a interplay between abstraction and physical concrete subject matter that I find exhilarating. It's a beautiful balancing act that Velasquez has attained. This balancing act is what I'm interested in with my own art. I like finding the abstraction in our physical reality.

Speaking of a balancing act between representation and abstraction, here's Ingres:

The more I looked at these the more I fell in love with them. They look so real on first sight, but the more I sit with them the more the abstraction of the forms is apparent. I traced the forms of the above paintings:

The lines remind me some of de Kooning's earlier work. Here's Pink Angels, painted in 1945:

I've been looking at Rodin. I've never been a big fan of his. His famous pieces have struck me as sentimental. The Thinker is as ubiquitous as Dali's melting watches. But recently I've begun to get an appreciation of his work. It started with seeing some old photographs taken of his work that are in a Phaidon book I have. I'm getting past the subject matter, and the jaw-dropping strength and beauty of his work is becoming apparent. Here are some of his sculptures at the Met I looked at this weekend:

I love the fluidity and solidity of his figures. I've been drawing his sculptures. I don't quite get them intellectually yet. But I like them more and more. This may be sacrilege, but I like looking at photographs of his work more than seeing the work in person. I'm not completely sure why this is. I think it may be because the line of his work is more apparent to me in a photograph.

I'd like to end with a cave painting I've been looking at, the Altamira Bison. It was painted sixteen thousand years ago.

De Kooning said that there is no progress in art. The sophisticated abstraction of form of the bison speaks to this. Progress is something many of us are obsessed with. I believe it is part of our human makeup. I find it comforting to be working in a form that I believe can't progress.

Copying Picasso

2012-01-13T07:09:00.000-05:00

I've been copying Picasso:

The two at the top are reproductions of paintings of Picasso's that are at MoMA. I've never been a big fan of Picasso. I feel a cold wind in his work. But when I saw these two pieces the other day I was floored. The solidity and vibration of flesh that he has achieved kills me. He's reveling in the joy of these concrete women's bodies. I decided to try copying them. By drawing I learn. The intention isn't to make a "good" copy. The intention is to learn the paintings.

I love the way he has mixed the flesh tones with the grey-blue background on the middle top piece. That blue has been staying with me. So I decided to try one of my pieces with a blue background. Here's a photo of the pieces I'm currently working on. The bottom middle piece is the one I am writing of:

The top four black-and-whites are sketches for a piece that I've been commissioned to do for a new hair salon up on 25th Street. I'm agonizing over it. Her left arm is driving me crazy. I like it bent as it is in the middle two. But it looks a bit small to my eye. It reminds me a bit of a turd sticking out of her side. So I've tried bringing her arm down. Yet that doesn't work because it competes with the line of her back and ass. I'll live with them for a couple of days before I work on it more.

I'm happy to write that the black mood I mentioned the other day has lifted. It left the same way it arrived: completely unexpected and without a reason I consciously understand. Actually, that isn't completely true. I've been struggling with a big assignment for National Geographic. I wasn't really aware of this internal struggle. It's funny how the noise in my head becomes inaudible. Jack Kerouac wrote that our ability to get used to things isn't always a good thing; one could get used to living on the median of a highway. Anyway, I've been hitting my head against a wall with this assignment. The story was my idea. I really care about it. I am thrilled with what it's looking like. Three ingredients that lead to agonizing for me. So I asked the guys at the studio—Joe, Jeong and Victoria—for some help bringing the illustrations to the next level. I want to add detail to the pieces. I just don't seem able to access the patience to do this. Once I asked for some help from the guys I felt my mood brighten a bit. I believe the story will be in the May issue. Once it's on the stands I'll post some of the artwork and write about them specifically.

I've heard it said that feelings aren't facts. I pray this is true. In my case emotions are often amplified. They're on 11. Again, another one of those good and bad things. Like your mother-in-law going over a cliff in your new Cadillac. Occasionally it sucks being in my head. Yet I know that the sensitivity I have is directly related to my creativity and the work I make.

Four pieces in the works

2012-01-11T04:54:00.000-05:00

I started these four pieces yesterday:

Honestly, I'm in a black mood. I'm in a place where everything I work on looks dreadful to me. I hate these periods. But the one thing that keeps me going is the knowledge that these feelings won't last forever. So I feel like I can't write constructively on these four pieces given my state right now.

Ironically, these dark periods seem to happen shortly after I've been inspired. There might be some kind of letdown happening. This weekend I went to the de Kooning exhibition at MoMA. I was blown away; it brought tears to my eyes. The energy, the motion, the total harmony of a canvas made of disharmonious parts was beautiful. I wrote down a bunch of things he said. One is, "Being anti-traditional is just as corny as being traditional." God, I love that. Here's something he wrote: "It is clear that there is no progress in art." Beautiful. I look at the cave paintings in France and wonder why I continue to make images. It's all there in those caves. Look at really early photography. It's beautiful. Part of me feels that modern photography doesn't come close to the power those old photos have.

So, I got really inspired this weekend. I then woke up Monday morning in a black mood that has stayed with me. I'll just keep on keeping on. Eventually I'll feel different. One of the things that's disconcerting about these dark periods is that I can't trust my judgment. I have to literally ignore what my brain is telling me. Last week I felt in my bones that I was onto something with my art, that I had made a breakthrough. Today I feel like a completely talentless fraud. Fun stuff. When I'm in these moods I think about the response I get from people when I tell them I'm an artist. Some say, "Gee, I wish I was creative." The implication is that the art just happens. You just pick up a brush and out it comes without any work. I don't know, man. This is definitely not what I experience. As Chuck Close said, "Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us get up every day and get to work." Being close to my art is a blessing and a curse. The frustration I feel when it's not going the way I want it to go is immense. And then there seems to need to be periods of stewing, staring, mulling over. I rarely am comfortable during these periods. I way prefer the moments when I am creating. The energy feels so immense, like I am riding it.

Two new corporate park photos

2012-01-10T01:48:00.003-05:00

I took these two on Sunday. They're part of my series on corporate parks.

Out of focus nudes

2012-01-09T04:13:00.003-05:00

I worked with a model this weekend and took these photos:

Two new pieces

2012-01-06T05:31:00.000-05:00

I made this altarpiece yesterday:

I flip flop. Now I am feeling like these altarpieces are decorative. Something I am not going for. I'm happy with the individual prints. They have a delicacy I'm intrigued by. I'm not sure the presentation is helping. I'll have to live with it for a while.

I also made this print yesterday:

It's a composite of the same figure seen from the front and side. I want this to be large, somewhere around 60" x 30". I think there is enough going on with the image that it can hold up at this size. I don't plan on applying encaustic to this one; I think it's finished as is.

Not what I expected

2012-01-05T07:15:00.002-05:00

Here's the piece I poured Galkyd on last week:

A day after I poured it on I decided it might be good to read the label. I read, in all caps, "DO NOT POUR APPLY."

A skin developed on the galkyd. Underneath this skin it remained wet. My concern was that skin could be air tight so what was underneath might never dry. I decided to puncture the skin. I dragged my fingers across the surface. It looked like scabby, peeling skin. Decay. A beautiful decay is something I am going for. I don't think this surface works well with the print. With the right print I think it will be a effective look.

Digital mock-ups of altarpieces

2012-01-04T07:35:00.000-05:00

I made digital mock-ups of these altarpieces this morning:

I feel like I've made a breakthrough. I've spent the past year struggling with the presentation of my work. Framing them has never quite felt right. Mounting the prints on panels was a first step. And now mounting these panels to another panel takes it to the next level.

I sense a mythology in these.When I look at them I feel that a story is trying to reveal itself. These are the days I love what I do. I have a tendency to get overexcited, so we'll see how I feel about them over the next few days.

One thing is bothering me. They remind me a bit of flat-screen TVs. Anything black with these proportions is going to be reminiscent of a television. And maybe this isn't a bad thing. Given that I'm also working on video versions of these, this may be okay. I could see the altarpieces living next to the video art. I have had this gut feeling that I should concentrate on the pictures rather than the video for the past few months. My feeling is that the pictures are the heart of this new body of work. They will inform the videos. Ideally I'd like there to be so much movement in the pictures that videos will be redundant. This will be ridiculously difficult to execute, but it's what I'm going for.

Black altarpiece

2012-01-03T08:33:00.000-05:00

After building the white altarpiece, I decided to try a black one. I put this together this morning:

I knew the feeling would be totally different on black as opposed to white. I'm not sure what to make of it yet. I do know I like the way they are beginning to glow. I tried a less deep panel for the printed images. Seeing it now I prefer a deeper panel for them.

All the pictures I make are based on a square proportionally. Either 1 x 1, 1 x 2, or a golden rectangle, which is 1 x 1.618. Why is this? I need some limitations. Also, these proportion worked for Ancient Greek, Roman, and Renaissance architects. The piece above is 12" x 24", with the individual pictures 6" x 6" x 1.5." I sketched out a altarpiece that uses 2 x 1 images rather than squares:

The full proportions of this piece will be 24" x 36". I'll head over to SOHO Art Materials today and order the panels. I would like to eventually set up a wood shop here in the studio so I can make my own panels. I'm not sure I have the patience for woodworking though.

In other news, I've been playing piano and saxophone every day since the new year. I feel rusty, tentative, and nervous when I play. But for now how I feel isn't important, what's important is that I pick the instruments up every day. I'm a head case when it comes to music. Fortunately I don't have quite the same agony with the art. I think it may have to do with the fact that I started playing music when I was a kid; it's more ingrained in my psyche. This is a good and a bad thing. Mostly good.

Altarpiece

2012-01-02T07:36:00.000-05:00

I've been looking at altarpieces by Fra Angelico. Here's the Cortona Altarpiece, 1433-34:

This altarpiece was used in worship. It tells a story. The painting is built into a sculptural setting.

I want my work to tell a story and be something one can meditate on. I also want my work to feel sculptural, to feel like an object. With these things in mind I've been working on this piece:

Rather than tell a biblical story like Fra Angelico does, I want to tell a story about the intersection of physical reality, energy, and abstraction. The pictures are based on anatomically accurate models I have built of the female body. I use a technique to trace the contours of the the edges of the model, and what I get are these abstracted images.

New piece on New Year's Day

2012-01-01T06:35:00.001-05:00

I just mounted the following piece:

I'm deciding whether I will apply varnish or encaustic to it. Most likely varnish, but as I write this sentence I begin to think that encaustic is the way to go. This picture was the first piece to be rendered while I was consciously aware of wanting it to feel like a fossil. These pieces are fossils of our energy body. I'm happy with this piece; it feels mysterious, sensual and energetic to me.

I've been putting together a list of intentions for 2012. One of the things I come back to is music. I love playing music. I'm making a conscious decision to play piano and saxophone everyday. Even just for a few minutes. I may start posting songs again. Maybe I'll post one a week. As you may have noticed, when I sink my teeth into something, I can go pretty crazy in my productivity. So you may see more than one song a week. I intend to start gigging again by year's end.

Another intention is to have the studio create its own content. We're currently working on a map application for the iPad. I'm pretty excited about it. Its focus is on New York City. It should be ready by mid-year. We're also working on a map data base that we should be spinning off into its own website in a few months.

Over the last couple of months I have been feeling more plugged into my spirituality. I want to continue to strengthen this connection in 2012. What does this look like? For one, my family and I will become members of the Unitarian Universalist Church. It's a pretty hip religion. It's based on helping people without proselytizing. Blogging keeps me plugged in on a spiritual level. It's a forum for me to explore while being directed and clear (you are reading this after all.) I may start meditating again. To be honest with you I have some fears about meditation. My life gets intense when I meditate. Life flows more easily, yet I become more aware of myself, and the way I habitually approach things. This is a good thing, yet annoying. Part of me wants to just relax. But I'm not a good relaxer; my energy is usually restless.

Yes, I started smoking again. I want to stop smoking in 2012. I've kept it quiet on my blog out of embarrassment. I love smoking. I absolutely hate smoking.

Another intention is to begin exhibiting my fine art. With the new body of work I'm creating I want some more time before putting it too out there in a exhibition. But my gut feeling is that I should be ready to exhibit this new stuff by the end of the year. I am very excited with what I'm creating and it feels amazing to be working with these sensual materials.

Do you have any intentions for 2012? If so, would you care to share them with the readers of this blog and myself? I find that writing publicly makes things REAL. Please post a comment if you wish. I'd be very happy to read what you are thinking about for 2012.

Sculpture mock up and a metal piece with encaustic

2011-12-30T06:14:00.001-05:00

I mocked up a sculpture using four prints on transparencies:

I think I like it. But I can't tell yet. I find the black frame distracting. I also want to put some more space between the four prints. With the extra space each layer could possibly stand out on its own depending on the angle you are viewing it from.

I also painted encaustic on a 28.5" x 19" metal print I made:

It may look a little tomato soupy for my, er, taste. But I think I like the subtle drippy quality the encaustic has. Unfortunately the metal buckled from the MDF board its mounted to as I was applying heat to it. I'll learn from this mistake and next time I won't lay the whole piece on my heating element!

Speaking of learning from mistakes, I'd like to touch on my personal life. This has been quite a year for my family and I. We're in a good place now. Much of the good has grown out of bad things we've experienced the past year and a half. I think of the saying "A smart man learns from his mistakes, a wise man learns from the mistakes of others." According to this saying, unfortunately, I'd fall under the "smart" category. I'll take it over dumb any day though. I'm looking forward to experiencing what 2012 brings.

Pouring it on

2011-12-29T08:43:00.000-05:00

I've been experimenting with varnishes:

I keep coming back to this idea that I don't want my hand to be visible. So I've decided to pour a mixture of Galkyd and cold wax medium to this print. Rather than brushing it on, I'm letting gravity do the work. I like the rough, scaly, naturalistic surface that has appeared.

I'm trying this technique on another piece I'm working on. It will take a few days to dry. Here's what it looks like now. I've used tape to keep the varnish from flowing over the edges:

I've ordered two big 44"x22"x4" panels. These are the pieces I'm considering mounting to them:

I'll most likely first mount a dark piece, like the one second from the left. A few people have told me that this piece reminds them of galaxies and stars. I'm happy with the association. It's not what I'm going for, but I like the idea that one can see inner and outer space in one of my pieces.

I like the direction of the red-on-red one. But it's not where I want it to be yet. This piece grew out of a desire to make my work more subtle. I'd like the first impression of this piece to be that it's a red canvas. And then as one looks at it have have the subtle variations of color become more apparent. I'd love the viewer to be able to get lost in it. And my feeling is that subtlety will help make this happen. It will force the viewer to take time with the piece, and hopefully in taking this time one can get lost in it.

Hoboken water tower

2011-12-27T08:30:00.001-05:00

I just finished these two pieces:

They are both part of my water tower series. When I started this series I wasn't sure what I was doing; it felt like such a departure from most of my other work. But as I was modeling this tower I got a clearer understanding of how the two bodies of work relate. These towers are vessels. Like the body, everything you see is functional. There may be a little industrial design happening here, but I can barely see it. It's purely functional. This is how I believe the body is composed, for the most part. In its functionality the beauty comes through.

These will be printed 22" x 17", an edition of 5, plus one artist's proof.

Reworked piece

2011-12-24T07:57:00.000-05:00

I reapplied encaustic to this piece this morning:

Finding the balance between control and looseness is a challenge. Especially when it comes to painting on the encaustic. I want the shape and flow of the brush strokes to reference the printed image. But I want it to feel loose. Or felt, not seen. This is similar to how my favorite jazz bassists approach music making: they are felt, not heard.

It's Christmas Eve. A couple of thousand years ago a baby was born who was going to grow up to teach a beautiful, radical and, for the times, subversive philosophy. I wish all of you who are reading this a beautiful, love-filled holiday. May 2012 strengthen and reaffirm a sense of peace, understanding, direction, wonder, and hope in your life.

Two new works come out of sculpture idea

2011-12-22T16:09:00.000-05:00

I've started work on a new triptych:

This reminds me of whirling dervishes. The figures look like they are twisting in space. And the middle piece has a rorschach test feel to it. I need to stare at these for a while. I have a feeling this new work is primarily about spirituality. Something is there with a metaphor about seeing multiple perspectives at once. The triptych is another work that has grown out of a sculpture idea I've been playing with. Here's a digital mock-up of the sculpture:

Here's another piece I started working on this morning:

This is yet another work that has come out of the sculpture idea. I'm really not liking what the sculpture is looking like yet. But it is has led to the pieces above that I am excited about. This is one of the wonderful things about making art. Crappy ideas and directions usually evolve into clearer, better work.

Three works in process

2011-12-22T06:21:00.000-05:00

I've been varnishing this:

I first applied encaustic to it. But I was not at all happy with the effect. The encaustic trapped the image, killing it. So I melted most of the encaustic off, and then applied a layer of galkyd mixed with cold wax medium. It feels a bit too shiny to me now. I'll see if I want to dull down the varnish after a couple more coats. I'm not clear on what this piece is about. I'm responding to its lines. My eye moves around a lot over the panel, which I feel is a good thing. Technically it's four views of a woman's torso superimposed on top of one another.

This next work is the inverse of the above piece:

With this one I'm using encaustic. It feels too soft. I want the lines to pop more. From working on this piece I've learned that the prints need to have more contrast.

This last piece, which is part of my mother series, has about ten layers of varnish on it:

From my perspective this one is the strongest of the three. I have been working with this pose for the past year. It's always been horizontal, though. This is the first time I've tried it vertically.

I read something a couple of days ago that Frank Lloyd Wright wrote that I've been contemplating as I've been working on these pieces: "The truth is more important than the facts." What I take from this is that the message, the intent, of the artwork is more important than the detail in it. Don't get me wrong; details are extremely important. But there needs to be an overarching idea behind the work. By fussing over details without direction I'll get lost. The top two pieces don't have a firm direction in my mind yet. This is fine; this direction tends to develop organically over time. But because of this these two pieces lack the visceral punch I want them to have. To put it in Frank Lloyd Wright's terms, they don't speak to the truth yet. Then again maybe they do. There's a slight possibility I just don't see it or understand it yet.

New encaustic piece

2011-12-20T11:09:00.002-05:00

This morning I mounted a print I've been working on. I then covered it in encaustic.

I covered the sides of the panel with the print for the first time:

This piece grew out of a sculpture idea I've been sketching out. My first impression of the sides is that I don't like them. I'll live with it for a while before I make a judgement.

I'm happy with the concept behind the encaustic application. But I think I may have messed up when I actually painted the encaustic on. It feels fussy and too controlled. You can see my hand in it too readily. But I like the way the encaustic follows the lines of the print. It may be just a question keeping loose as I paint. Also, I'll use a smaller brush next time I work this size. This may give the strokes a more random feel. I want the encaustic to have a random order without looking like my hand was involved. Like the natural turns and bends of a river as gravity brings it to the ocean.

Transparent sculpture process

2011-12-19T04:02:00.000-05:00

I was staring at the mock-up I put together of the sculpture yesterday. I was bothered. It was looking like a box that aspirin would come in. It looked dead and inanimate. I then looked at these pieces I have on my window:

It occurred to me that I could make the sides transparent. So I've mocked up a new version:

This is closer to what I want. I like that from every angle you can see all the faces. I do not think the green is translating well on the piece though. I think a rich red background would work better. And I still think the proportions are wrong for what I want; it feels like packaging to me.

I found myself staring at the individual renders:

I realized I could superimpose the individual renders and get that transparent feel on a flat piece so you saw every angle at once. I put this together:

This one reminds me of cubism. In fact, it is cubist; there are four views of a torso being viewed simultaneously. I'm rendering a higher resolution version of this. I'll then print it on paper or metal and then mount it to a panel. I'll probably apply a thin coat of transparent encaustic to it.

Sculpture mock-up

2011-12-18T08:04:00.000-05:00

I made a digital mock-up of a idea for a sculpture I have. Here are four views of it:

The proportions are 2x2x1. I'm next going to try a version that has proportions of 2x1x1. It may work better horizontally too. Here are four of the images that would be mounted on the rectangular cube:

These four work nicely together on their own. But I'm not crazy about them when they are dimensionalized. I'll try black and white versions for the sculpture. The black and white work I do has more of a platonic, removed feel, whereas the color adds a dimension of emotion to the work. I think the sculpture isn't necessarily about a emotion. Not in my mind at least. Eventually it may go in a more emotional direction. Donald Judd's work is playing in the back of my mind as I work on these:

Large panel edges

2011-12-18T05:51:00.000-05:00

I started applying encaustic to the edges of the big piece:

I don't know if I like the way the edges look; my hand might be too apparent in the way the encaustic is painted on. Again, I want this piece to feel like it was unearthed. I want the edges to be like layers of sediment.

That said, I am happy with how the work is feeling. There's a delicacy to it. The piece reminds me a little of the lascaux cave paintings:

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying my work is even beginning to approach the jaw dropping beauty of the cave paintings. The feeling of my piece reminds me of them.

As I was painting the edges I started thinking about an idea I've had about these panel pieces. I want these to feel sculptural. So I thought I could do renderings of the model from the side and print this image and then mount it to the sides of the panel. This will make the work more like a sculpture in the round: something that can be viewed by multiple angles.

Large panel with encaustic progress

2011-12-17T06:32:00.002-05:00

I've been applying encaustic onto the large panel. It's about two thirds covered:

I'm trying yet a new technique with the encaustic. I'm applying it around the contours of the printed image. I would like it to feel like rippling water solidified (otherwise known as ice; but I don't want it to have the crystalline quality of ice). Here's a detail:

The other day I was walking on Bond Street. A whirlwind that had picked up leaves appeared on the street. I had a realization that I couldn't have seen the whirlwind if not for the leaves. Yet the leaves are not the whirlwind itself. The leaves are physical objects that are making the form of the whirlwind visible. This is similar to what I believe our flesh-and-blood bodies are: signs of an inner energy.

The interplay between the encaustic and printed image is a similar thing in my mind. It's not exactly a right-fitting metaphor, but there are seeds there that I want to nurture. I'm looking forward to seeing where this takes me.

Medical illustration

2011-12-16T04:07:00.000-05:00

Last night we had about 25 medical illustrators over for a little get-together. It looks like we'll be meeting once every two to three months. I'm looking forward to getting more plugged in to the community. There aren't many fields in which one can be dealing with both art and science at the same time. Medical illustration is one of these fields.

We've been seduced by the digital medium. It is easy in digital 3D to make things glow, be reflective and shiny. We use every color imaginable in our work. I would like to see more restraint in what we do. Here's an anatomical illustration of da Vinci's:

This was drawn in the early 16th century. Look at how much information da Vinci is getting across with one color. He uses different strengths of shading to emphasize elements. Today we would most likely use different color to emphasize an area. The result would be something that looks like a fruit salad. Ingres said, "Drawing is the probity of art." Most drawing utilizes many shades of one color. My printing teacher, Jay Seldin, once told me, "Color photography is about the clothes; black and white photography is about the soul." I believe that we who work in digital 3D can take a lesson from this.

Reorganized studio

2011-12-16T04:06:00.000-05:00

Yesterday we spent the day frantically cleaning and reorganizing the studio in preparation for a small get-together for medical illustrators we hosted. Here are some shots of what the studio looks like now. Here's my area:

Here's where the team works:

We now have a conference/library area:

And here's our chill area:

Next we'll frame some of the studio's information graphics and illustrations and hang them.

Reorganizing the studio

2011-12-15T06:01:00.002-05:00

I came into the studio this morning and was greeted by this:

Our business consultant, John Harvey, once told me that he believes that change happens in one of two ways: desperation or inspiration. In desperation we are reorganizing the studio.

We've been at this address for about a year and a half. And nothing much has changed in the layout since the day we moved in. We are fortunate that we're so busy that we don't have time to look at organizing the studio. But enough is enough.

I do not want to enter 2012 with the physical studio space still disorganized. In 2011 we did a lot of work organizing and codifying how we work. Erica guided us as my role shifted to a creative director. She has taken a firmer hold of the reigns. We are functioning as a group better than we ever have. There's a cognitive dissonance between how we work and how the studio looks.

After I get a couple of jobs done this morning I'll be working on this, well, disaster. Did I mention that we are having about 25 medical illustrators over this evening for a little party?

So the above photos are the before shots. I'll post the after shots either this evening or tomorrow morning. I hope that there will be a discernible difference.

Large panel progress

2011-12-13T05:18:00.000-05:00

Last night I made the print for the large panel:

I then mounted it:

Then I trimmed it. Here's what it looks like so far:

Knowing when to stop is tricky. You'll notice I have smaller panels with encaustic next to the big guy. I'm comparing them, seeing if the encaustic really adds to it in a meaningful way. The encaustic changes the nature of the work. It obscures some of the detail of the print. Is this detail important to me? The detail will still be there; it just wont be as apparent. Intellectually, I like the idea of hiding some of the print. I want this thing to be mysterious. Can something be mysterious and be in your face at the same time? I'll live with it for a bit before I make a decision.

Sir Francis Bacon wrote, "There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion."

This strangeness is something I'm interested in. Look at this painting by Ingres:

This is one strange painting. I find it absolutely beautiful. Look at the proportion of her hips to her ribs. Look at the length of her back. If I squint at the painting it starts to look like a Henry Moore sculpture.

I want this strangeness in my work. But I feel in my gut that it has to happen naturally and be a by-product. What I mean is that my intention isn't to make a strange piece. My intention is to make a beautiful piece. But I hope to have a "element of strangeness in the proportion."

Black line time

2011-12-12T06:17:00.000-05:00

I'm working on the following piece:

This is the first time I've mounted one of my black line time pieces on panel. I first mounted the print on the naked wooden board. The whiteness of the print didn't jibe well with the wood so I decided to paint the sides white. When I stood back to look at what I had done I was initially disappointed. But the piece is growing on me more each day. I haven't named it yet. It's 6" x 12".

Meanwhile, I'm prepping the beast. I've begun to gesso the sides:

I'm agonizing. I'm wondering if I should have left the wood naked and just put a coat of translucent encaustic medium over it. Let the wood do the work. It's too late now: I already gessoed it. Now I have to decide what kind of encaustic I use on the sides. Either a translucent encaustic or a white opaque encaustic. All of my work, from my information graphics to my fine art, in some way deals with transparency. I love the way light is distorted as it passes through glass, water, varnish etc. So maybe I'll use a translucent encaustic after all.

Preparation

2011-12-11T06:00:00.001-05:00

I just had a panel made for me:

The dimensions are 44" x 22" x 4". This will be the largest I've worked with encaustics and panel. I'm a little nervous. When I picked up the panel, the guy at the store, SOHO Art Materials, said, "It's a beast, isn't it?" It is.

I'm planning on mounting a print of this piece to it:

I knew the panel would be deep when I made the order. But seeing it in person, I am surprised by how deep it feels. I want this piece to look like it was excavated. Like it's a block of earth. The printed image represents energy and emotion. And the encaustic represents physical reality, like flesh, blood, and earth. I want these two elements to work seamlessly together. So I will be applying a white encaustic to the sides of the piece. Hopefully this will integrate the depth of the panel with the encaustic-covered image that is mounted to it. I want the encaustics and the print to be having a conversation in front of the viewer.

I'm fascinated by the physicality of emotion. And I want this piece to allude to this. I'm reading a wonderful book by Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain. In it he discusses how the experience of emotion is influenced, and at times created by, our physical bodies (as opposed to cognition and the conscious mind). He writes that there have been studies that show that amputees experience emotion slightly less strongly than people with all of their limbs. What I get from this is that we, meaning our consciousness, are our bodies. There isn't a clear division between our consciousness or soul and our bodies. The two need each other in order to function.

I am going to get to work and see what happens. The intention of a piece and the actual piece once it's finished don't always align. I do a lot of thinking and writing regarding what it is I want to communicate. But once I get to work I find myself being more influenced by beauty and what feels right. I'll be posting the progress.

Two new shots

2011-12-09T06:18:00.001-05:00

I took these shots last night:

Two figures

2011-12-09T05:07:00.001-05:00

Here's my first attempt at two figures in a picture. This piece is in the works; I'll be adding many more coats of varnish to it:

This is also the first time I'm going darker and lighter with the figure compared to the background.

The pose is based on a classical Greek sculpture, the Crouching Venus in the Louvre:

By adding a second figure, there's potential for more emotional depth. These are both women. I'd like to try adding a man next. I've stayed away from creating men in my fine art. In fact, I've only done one. I made this two years ago:

Adam
66" x 44," digital print

Just so we are clear, the guy above is not based on me. But I've been feeling an urge to make a self portrait. I'm a little scared to to be honest with you. I'm afraid of what it will look like. Talk about letting people in to your internal world.

Varnish and Da Vinci

2011-12-08T04:58:00.001-05:00

Here's a new piece I'm beginning to varnish:

This is the first time I'm applying varnish to paper. My previous experiments with varnish have all been on my metal prints:

I'm curious to see how luminous the varnish on the paper piece will get. I will also be applying a matte coat. I want this new piece to be quiet and meditive. I want the viewer to have to work a little bit with this one. So a gloss finish isn't in line with this intention.

I just came across a drawing of Da Vinci's that completely floored me. I'm getting inspiration from it for this new work:

I love that rosy pink color. Looking at this drawing I came to a realization. It's obvious. But sometimes the most obvious things are the hardest to comprehend and fully understand for me. Da Vinci is both going darker and lighter than the background color. Look at the pink highlights on her right knee. They come close to white. Now look at the top half of her. The line work is close to black. This creates so much depth. I want to take a page from this with the pieces I am doing on colored backgrounds. Up until this point the background color has always been the darkest tone in my work. Going both darker and lighter will I hope allow me to use lighter background colors without losing depth.

Reworked photo

2011-12-07T04:27:00.001-05:00

I just redeveloped a photo I took last month:

And here's the previous version:

It was recently pointed out to me by my photography and printing teacher, Jay Seldin, that I was making my prints too heavy, with too much contrast. I'm very happy he pointed this out to me. Jay showed me a couple of techniques to bring out detail in the shadows. The photos I'm printing are getting closer to what I have in my mind's eye.

A new corporate park photo

2011-12-06T06:44:00.001-05:00

Here's a shot I took a couple of weeks ago that I just printed. It's part of the corporate park series I'm working on.

Echoing nature

2011-12-06T06:12:00.001-05:00

Yesterday I had lunch with Andrew Vomhof. Like my work, his art is rooted in nature, science, and technology. Here's one of his pieces that I will be hanging in my home soon:

I was telling him about my new foray into encaustics. I told him how I've been taking inspiration from photos of fossil remains; that I want the encaustic to be like solidified sediment around my figures. I don't want my hand to be visible. I want to emulate nature with the encaustic.

So we had a discussion about nature. For Andrew, nature is about repetition; countless inhalations and exhalations, the earth rotating 360º every 24 hours. After talking with him I got inspired and tried a new way of applying the encaustic to my work. Rather than smearing it on with a wide brush, I'm tapping the encaustic on with a much smaller brush repeatedly, applying very thin coats that overlap. It feels a bit like stippling.

Here's what I did:

Conceptually, I'm happy with the process and I'm looking forward to seeing where she takes me. Another friend of mine compared my involvement with encaustics as being in a new love affair. She can't do any wrong in my eyes. I want to spend all my time with her.

A new take on a photo

2011-12-05T03:03:00.001-05:00

I have redeveloped a shot I took last week. I decided to lighten it overall and bring out the detail in the lower frame of the photo:

Here's the previous version:

Mother's Chaos progress, part 2

2011-12-05T02:42:00.001-05:00

I decided that the encaustic I was using on Mother's Chaos was too magenta. I've applied a layer of red:

It now feels closer to the intention I have for this piece.

I had a wonderful experience this morning as I was deciding what kind of red to use. I had a bar of cadmium deep red and a bar of mars red. I held the two up to this picture to see what red was closer to what I wanted. I felt my whole body respond to the two reds I was holding in my hands. At first I decided to go with the mars red, but I could feel my body in disagreement. It was visceral. So I started melting down the cadmium deep red and I felt my body relax in agreement.

These kinds of experiences are what keep me going. My belief is that emotion and intuition is held within the entire body, not just the brain. And experiences like this that I had this morning confirm this belief.

Crumbling room

2011-12-04T06:18:00.001-05:00

I took this photo about a month ago. It's one of the back rooms of the church that Jeremy Mage and I performed at in October:

I'm fascinated with the way things decay. The quality with which it happens is beautiful and is something I attempt to get at in my art. In decay the inner qualities of a thing are revealed. Think of fossil remains. The process of decay has happened in these fossils, yet their inner structure, their skeletal systems, are revealed. Decay could be considered similar to lifting of the veil. When our bodies decompose we are left with what we are physically made up of. It's in your face and it isn't pretty. There is no avoiding the truth of our flesh and blood nature in decomposition.

Mother's Chaos progress

2011-12-04T05:39:00.001-05:00

I've decided to work some more on Mother's Chaos:

Once again I'm surprised by how I'm using the encaustic. It's becoming more and more an integral part of the work, rather than just a coating or finish. I'm thinking that this piece will be part of a triptych. Here's the first piece of the triptych:

Mother's Love

36" x 24"

digital print on panel with encaustic

Submerged Mother

2011-12-03T08:28:00.001-05:00

Here's a piece that is almost finished; it just needs to be mounted to a strainer. I've included two photos to illustrate how differing light affects it.

Submerged Mother
28.5" x 19"
digital print on metal with varnish

I applied about 30 coats of varnish to this piece and I like how the light is shimmering on it. There's also an inner luminosity that I am really happy to see happen.

A new time piece and a black line piece

2011-12-03T06:19:00.001-05:00

Yesterday I finished a piece that's part of the time series I'm working on:

Falling Mother
30" x 12"
digital print mounted
on panel

I printed the art on matte paper and after I mounted it to the panel I was going to apply encaustic to it. This is the first time I'm using matte paper on panel, and I'm happy with the delicate, fragile quality the paper gives the art. Applying encaustic to it would ruin this effect.

This next piece is is my first attempt at working with encaustic on one of my black line pieces:

Molly II, 36"x24,"
digital print mounted on panel with encaustic

When I stepped back after applying the first layer of encaustic the eroticism of the thing surprised me. I wasn't going for a erotic feel, but it happened nonetheless.

Early morning in NYC

2011-12-02T04:16:00.001-05:00

Early this morning I grabbed my camera, went out, and took some photos. There is a building I had shot with my 85mm a few months before that I've been wanting to revisit with the 17mm tilt/shift lens. The top two are this building:

Emerging Heart

2011-12-01T07:26:00.001-05:00

Here's a piece I just finished:

I've titled it Emerging Heart. 8" x 8," digital print mounted on panel with encaustic.

In my work I'm almost always controlled and precise. I'm anal retentive in terms of process. So I'm surprised by how I'm using the encaustic in an uncontrolled way. There's an intent, but I'm letting loose with how I apply the medium to the print.

Here's a piece titled Mother's Chaos that's in the works:

The interplay between the tight controlled printed piece and the loose application of encaustic is adding depth to my work I believe. The encaustic metaphorically represents flesh, and the printed image represents energy.

Some of our architectural information graphics of 2011

2011-11-30T16:15:00.001-05:00

Here at the studio we've been reviewing the information graphics we created in 2011. I have noticed that we have done many architectural-related graphics this year. Here are a few pieces that I am particularly happy with.

This first piece was for Time magazine. The subject was transportation of the future:

This next piece was commissioned by Ivan Schwartz. It was for a proposal for a exhibition on innovators in America:

This was commissioned by The New York Times. It was for a special section on the ten year anniversary of 9/11. It shows the different kinds of developments in the downtown area since 9/11:

Scientific American asked us to contribute to their special issue on the future of the city. The following two graphics were parts of what we did for them. The first graphic portrays a city of the near future. And the second is showing the tallest buildings in existence and on the drawing boards:

And this last piece was for the cover of Remodeling Magazine:

Springfield Avenue revisited

2011-11-30T05:21:00.001-05:00

This morning I was looking through the shots I took on Springfield Avenue two weeks ago. I decided to make prints of these four:

My dear friend Silvia sent me a quote of Da Vinci's the other day:

Details make perfection and perfection is not a detail.

As I take more pictures I realize that my photography and illustration, while sharing many similar qualities, are dissimilar. The intents behind them are different. As an illustrator I am commissioned to get a point across quickly and viscerally. I feel that details come second, especially if they distract from the point that the illustration is trying to convey. Yet the pictures I take that are successful are mostly about subtlety and detail. In fact, part of my intention in taking photographs is to learn about detail and hopefully translate this into my illustration and fine art.

The illustration, information graphics, photography and fine art I do are related. Their connection is not crystalized in my mind yet, but I feel it in my heart.

On fragility

2011-11-29T08:42:00.000-05:00

When I approach my favorite art I usually sense two things: that they contain such power, and yet they are so vulnerable. How easy would it be to take a blade to them, to spray paint on them, to destroy them.

The art I respond to deals with balance. And balance is a fragile thing. Move one black line or color square in a Mondrian composition and the whole feeling changes. Andy Goldsworthy's work is partly about the interplay between the fragility and strength of nature. To truly experience what Rothko intended you need to view the work in a dim room and be inches away from the picture.

As a species we value strength and stoicism. Fragility has a negative connotation in our society. Maybe we need to examine this. Our lives are fragile. If our heart stops beating for seconds we are gone. If we get a clot in one of our major arteries we are in serious trouble. A fall of more than four feet and there's a chance we are going to break bones.

Molly sent me a quote by Jay Smooth the other day:

... If I could have one wish it would be that we would reconsider how we conceptualize being a good person, and keep in mind that we are not good despite our imperfections. It is the connection we maintain with our imperfections that allows us to be good. Our connection with our personal and common imperfections, being mindful of those personal and common imperfections, is what allows us to be good to each other and be good to ourselves.

When I read imperfections, fragility comes to mind. Not that I feel fragility in and of itself is a imperfection. It's more that we judge it as a imperfection.

What is the most fragile thing? A newborn baby comes to mind. Maybe it is its fragility that makes our hearts melt and want to give it as much love and nurturing as we possibly can. Out of our perception of fragility a strength is born within us.

Here's a piece I am currently working on that deals with this theme. I haven't titled it yet. It's 30" x 15," a digital print and encaustic mounted on board:

I want my work to feel fragile. I want the viewer to feel like my art is a baby that needs holding. There is a terrifying aspect to acknowledging our fragility. So I also want to terrify people with the unknown with my art.

Mother in Time

2011-11-28T03:45:00.001-05:00

Here's a piece I finished on Sunday. It's titled Mother in Time. Two digital prints mounted on two gesso boards with encaustic. Complete size: 12" x 48":

This is the first time I'm happy with the encaustic on one of my time pieces. It's also the first color version of a time piece that I have applied encaustic to. The encaustic is conceptually tied to emotion in my mind. And color is the home of emotion for me. So this piece is about emotion over time. The black and white time pieces aren't necessarily about emotion. They are more about the science of time and perception.

An abandoned house in Union, N.J.

2011-11-28T03:34:00.001-05:00

I pass an abandoned house on my drive home from the studio every day. Sunday morning I decided to photograph it. I grabbed my camera and tripod and walked to this house. It was good to walk, rather than drive to the location. It got me more in the zone. Here are three takes:

Sunday afternoon Molly, Lola, Lucius and I went for our weekly dim sum. I took this shot in the parking lot of the restaurant:

I'd like to mention that comments are more than welcome. I get decent traffic on this blog, and I'd love to hear what you think about what I'm posting. Posting a comment is a little screwy on this blog; I'm looking into redesigning it. In the meantime, if you click "0 comments" you can post a comment.

A new piece from my Mother series

2011-11-26T14:30:00.000-05:00

Here's a piece that may or may not be finished:

I'm not settled on a name yet. I'm considering calling it Wounded Mother. The dimensions are 33" x 22." It's a digital print mounted on board with encaustic and varnish applied to it. The mixture of encaustic and varnish has given it a scabby texture that was not necessarily my intention. But I am happy with this feeling it brings up.

I've been making images of women for years. and just now it is becoming apparent to me that all these pieces are either representations of my mother or of her herself. It feels good to have the conscious awareness of this now.

My mother and I have a complicated relationship at best. She changed for the better when I was in my twenties, and almost fully transformed herself by the time Molly and I adopted Lola, seven years ago. She lived with us for the first couple of years we had Lola and Lucius and took care of them wonderfully.

That said, we're not speaking now. We have disagreements on what exactly happened in the past. A dear friend of mine once attached a sticker to one of my sketch books that reads, "We are all imperfect." And this certainly applies to the relationship I have with my mother.

Springfield Avenue

2011-11-26T05:32:00.001-05:00

The morning after Thanksgiving I took a walk along Springfield Avenue by our house and took some pictures. Needless to say I felt bloated and needed to get outside and move my limbs.

These first two may become part of the building series I'm working on:

And the following possibly will be included in the tree and house series:

After taking these photos Molly, Lola and I headed to Jerry's Art-O-Rama and I got some 36" x 24" gesso boards. I'm looking forward to mounting my new work. I'll be posting photos of them within the next couple of days.

Gratitude

2011-11-24T05:50:00.001-05:00

The meal the Pilgrims and Indians had that we were taught about in school most likely never happened. So it's myth. Yet I feel this fact shouldn't invalidate what we celebrate today.

Isn't much of our lives based on mythology anyway? There's Greek and Roman mythology. And there's the mythology of the Old Testament for those of us who choose to look at it this way.

I think about what I am grateful for:

I am grateful I wake up in my home with my wife and two children.

I am grateful for my studio, specifically Erica, Joe, Jeong, Maryanna, Priska and Victoria.

I am grateful that we have so many clients. That the studio is busy, that we are making enough money to put food in our bellies.

I am grateful that I have art.

I am grateful that I am getting the help I need.

I am grateful for the wonderful teachers and mentors I have had.

I am grateful for the friends I have.

Here's a piece I just finished that is hanging in our home. It's a digital print on silver gelatin paper mounted on a gesso board with encaustic, 36" x 24":

At first this piece was called Fractured Mother, but as it developed the name felt wrong. There's a tenderness to this piece that the name Fractured Mother doesn't do justice to. So I am calling it Mother's Love.

Molly

2011-11-21T18:00:00.000-05:00

I struggle with deciding when a piece is finished. Here's one that I feel done with. The piece is titled Molly; it's a digital print mounted on gesso board with encaustic, 36" x 24":

Having finished a piece is a very good feeling. Honestly, it's been a long time coming. The mounting on the gesso board and application of encaustic has brought my work to another level. Up until experimenting with these I was struck with this feeling that my images were never done; I couldn't escape this feeling that they were just digital prints in the end. Something mass-producible.

Here's a piece that we just shipped to Cincinnati for a group show:

I thought this piece was done. But I am having second thoughts. This piece is about time. I was planning on covering it with encaustic, but the tests I did just didn't feel right. This piece has to have more of a platonic-ideal feeling to it. Something reflective of the human perception of the ceaseless march of time. I'm starting to feel that the box the prints are mounted on should be a nearly perfect metal. Like the monolith in 2001, a Space Odyssey. I would like to print these on metal and then mount them to a metal box. I want the prints and the box to be as perfectly seamless as possible.

In the end, this piece will be very different than Molly. Molly is about emotion, specifically love and tenderness. Therefore it needs warmth, and the evidence of how the hands have worked on it should be apparent. The latter piece, in contrast, is not about emotion. It is about the logic of science and the perception of time.

A corporate park in Roseland, N.J.

2011-11-20T17:48:00.001-05:00

I pass by a corporate park on my way to my doctor's on Saturdays. The complex is empty; there are no cars parked or visible signs of human life. I find the architecture ominous and impersonal. Yet the buildings are surrounded by an idyllic park and greenery. A river runs through it. People work here. There are human stories behind these impenetrable, impersonal walls.

This Sunday I brought my camera and took some photos of the complex. It was a quiet, brisk, overcast day. At times I heard the sound of birds chirping.

The process was meditative, yet exhausting. This exhaustion happens when I work with a tripod and a tilt/shift lens. There are many choices and adjustments to make: composition, distance from subject, aperture, shutter speed, tilt, exposure. In other words, not much is left to chance.

As I was shooting I became aware of the relationship between the buildings and nature surrounding them.

I then decided to focus on the buildings themselves.

My favorite films and TV revolve around work: the original The Office, The Larry Sanders Show, The Wire, The Sopranos, The French Connection. When work is the central theme of a story, the human condition comes through in a more realized, visceral way. In work we play out the drama of our lives. All of our strengths and insecurities are made apparent when we work.

This series is a conversation about this. I make these buildings look cold and impersonal to contrast that there are flesh-and-blood humans within them, playing out their fates.

My experience with Michelangelo's Pieta

2011-11-17T04:00:00.000-05:00

Once when I was going through a hard time my piano teacher, John Kamitsuka, told me to play and listen to a lot of music. He said, "Music is medicine for the soul." I believe this is true for all of the arts.

Eight years ago Molly and I took a trip to Italy. We spent a few days in Florence, a week and a half in Tuscany, and then finished the trip in Rome.

While we were in Tuscany we got the referral for Lola via email. Sitting in a five hundred year old villa in Tuscany and looking at a photo on a laptop of our soon to be daughter was surreal and beautiful:

In Rome we went to the Vatican. It's a big marvel. The damn thing was designed to scare the shit out of people. Yet in this architectural behemoth there's a subversive heart of sorrow, joy, compassion, and love. I'm writing of Michelangelo's first Pieta:

I was floored when I saw it. I was looking at the corporeal truth of Christianity: A mother's sorrow for her executed son. I witnessed marble transmuted into flesh, and then this flesh transmuted into emotion. In comparison, the posturing of the Vatican looked like the rantings of a spoiled bully. This sculpture speaks to what's behind the veil of Christian doctrine: a murdered son and a mother's sorrow.

This experience has profoundly affected my development as a illustrator, information graphics artist, and fine artist.

Shortly after we got back from Italy I was commissioned by Scientific American to do an illustration/information graphic on how emotional pain and stress affect the human body. In the past I would have drawn a man standing ramrod straight. But I thought about the commission more deeply. This piece was about stress and pain. I asked myself, "What does stress and pain look like?" I would not have been thinking this way if I had not seen the Pieta.

This is what I made:

As a fine artist, my work deals with emotion. Here's a piece I'm currently working on titled Blood Mother. It's a digital print on metal covered in encaustic, 14" x 28":

As I said in a earlier post, my artwork explores my relationship with my mother. Personal rage, sorrow, fear, and love are emotions that I can't fully understand logically and intellectually. For this reason I choose to make art.

I'll end with a photo I took of Molly and Lola a few months ago:

The similarities between photography, sculpture and information graphics

2011-11-16T05:25:00.000-05:00

As I was taking pictures over the weekend it occurred to me that the act of taking a photograph is reductive. The same is true for sculpting with marble.

Look at these two images:

Michelangelo used chisels and hammers to chip into the block of marble in front of him. He chose what to take away. Mark Seliger was in front of a nude woman. He had to choose what length lens to use, what kind of crop, how far he would be from the subject. In short he had to make decisions on what to leave out or what not to do. From infinite possibilities he made this photo.

I respond to information graphics that are reductive. Take one of my favorite graphics by my friend and mentor, John Grimwade:

Because color is meaning in a information graphic John has kept the pallette minimal. He has excluded extraneous detail. One is able to immediately see the relationship between the yellow underground train and its placement on the map above. By keeping things streamlined I'm struck viscerally by the dynamism of the composition. John understands that white is a color. Look at how he uses it for the architectural details of the airport. These are some of the reasons why John is my favorite information graphics artist working today.

(That diagonal map has always reminded me of this Kazimir Malevich painting:

Talk about reductive.)

Light chips away at darkness. I view darkness as inert mass. When light falls it gives volume to a object by defining its form and edges. We say we are engulfed in darkness, like it is a substance. So the act of lighting something can be considered reductive too.

Imagine safety

2011-11-15T13:30:00.000-05:00

I walked into Starbucks this morning. John Lennon's "Imagine" was playing on the sound system. Everyone in the store was smiling.

We've heard the song a million times. Read the lyrics for content:

Imagine there's no Heaven

It's easy if you try

No hell below us

Above us only sky

Imagine all the people

Living for today

Imagine there's no countries

It isn't hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for

And no religion too

Imagine all the people

Living life in peace

You may say that I'm a dreamer

But I'm not the only one

I hope someday you'll join us

And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions

I wonder if you can

No need for greed or hunger

A brotherhood of man

Imagine all the people

Sharing all the world

You may say that I'm a dreamer

But I'm not the only one

I hope someday you'll join us

And the world will live as one

Notice how radical the song is? Ironic it was played incessantly in the 80's.

I can only make change in myself before I can bring about change in the world. When I write world I mean anything outside of myself, including family, our studio, our country, our earth. Gandhi said, "Be the change you want to see in the world."

I started thinking about what is it we want on the most deep fundamental level. I believe that there must be something that unites us all as a species from a emotional perspective. Maybe this is a pipe dream like Einstein's quest for a unified theory. Happiness. Peace. A feeling of safety. Yes, safety is the thing that resonates with me.

I feel safety when I create art. I feel safety trying to be the best possible father and partner I can be. I've had moments of feeling safety when drunk. When I have slipped into bad behavior the root of it is always a need to quell pain. Maybe the absense of pain is a sense of safety. Pain is a warning sign for our biological systems that something is wrong. In other words, that we are not safe.

Is it possible to look at what unites us: a absolute drive for safety? If we used this as a starting point I feel we would be much better off as a species.

In the end my art work is about safety. I only draw women; in my work I recreate a mother I didn't have until my 30's and revisit my past experiences with her. Here's a piece of mine entitled Fractured Mother:

Back at Starbucks I ordered a coffee and noticed a bracelet for sale at the point of purchase. It was for creating jobs in the United States. Five bucks. When you buy one, $35 are given to a organization that helps in job creation. I bought one and put it on. I'm interested in making change through positive actions. Buying this stupid bracelet in a mega corporate café is in line with what I believe. One of the things I am proudest of is that I have created jobs for people here in the studio. That I am involved in their wellbeing makes me feel safe.

A tree in our backyard

2011-11-15T13:21:00.001-05:00

With all the writing I've been doing on this blog I have an urge to just post a pretty picture. Here it is:

Springfield avenue

2011-11-14T03:34:00.003-05:00

Molly and I took a walk along Springfield Avenue in Union, N.J. yesterday. I brought along my 17mm tilt/shift lens and tripod and took some photos.

This first photo is of a building that catches my eye every time I drive past it on my way back from the studio. It has a brick facade on it's front with vinyl siding on it's flank with these randomly placed mismatched size windows. I've grown very fond of this building and have been wanting to take a photo of it for a while. This was shot in the afternoon and the light isn't quite right. I'll shoot it in the morning eventually.

The next photo reminds me of a triptych I shot of a radiator with the 17mm earlier this year. I have been meaning to start a series based on this radiator. I'm interested in finding the monumental and romantic in the mundane and humble. With the shot below I wish I had placed the camera closer to the ground, but I'm still happy with it:

The final photo is of a house connected to a liquor store. I'm considering reshooting this one too. The lawn getting cut off on the lower left is bugging me:

"They" say you're not supposed to criticize your own work when presenting it. But fuck it; authenticity is something I strive for. In the end I want to make the most beautiful images I can possibly make.

Encaustic progress

2011-11-13T13:16:00.001-05:00

This past week, I've been getting to the studio every morning around four a.m. Working with encaustics has me inspired, energized and excited with my work. Here's what the new stuff is looking like:

Here's one of my pieces up close, followed by a photo of the Maxberg specimen, an archaeopteryx cast:

I've been thinking about paleontology lately. There's a connection between the dinosaur bones I see at the American Museum of Natural History and my new encaustic body work. They are glimmers of what was. But there is a purity and essence to the fossils. The skeletal system is what gives us structure and mobile rigidity. That these fossilized remnants are for the most part the only remains of prehistoric life is poetic.

The way Giotto's work weathers reminds me of the dinosaur fossils. Frescoes weather and age beautifully, in the same way that the dinosaur fossils are beautiful.

I've made a distinction between my digital art that is printed and the wax and varnishes I am using. One has been the Platonic ideal, whereas the other has been the messy physical reality of flesh and blood life. But I just had a thought that they may be more related. The varnish is like nature chipping away geologically at dinosaur bones. It is a part of nature. Yet there still is a difference. From a poetic perspective I look at the skeleton as the matrix upon which we are physically built.

The other day the light caught one of my pieces wonderfully. I quickly grabbed my camera and took this snap:

My work is beginning to glow the way I've wanted it to.

Saturday's photos

2011-11-13T06:20:00.001-05:00

Yesterday Molly, Lucius, Lola, and I had dim sum in West Orange and then did some errands. The light was beautiful. I brought my camera with me and took these shots throughout the day.

The first four here may be incorporated in the tree and house series I'm working on:

I'm using a longer lens than the one I used for the others I posted last week. So these have a different feeling. More removed and distanced, literally and figuratively.

After dim sum we bit the bullet and bought a new dishwasher. Our old one cleans about 70% of the dirt off the dishes. Being clean is a bit like being pregnant, you either are or aren't. I took this shot in Karl's, the appliance store we went too. Lola and Loosh are in the lower right hand corner:

I'm also working on a out of focus building series. I took this one outside of Karl's:

I feel ridiculous quoting myself. I feel like I can't add yet to what I've already written. Here's what I wrote about the out of focus work in an earlier post:

I'm interested in the connection these have to my body work. There is a connection I feel intuitively. But I've been having a hard time verbalizing it. Both my body work and my architectural work deal with objects that contain something. For the architectural work the thing that is contained is us; people, and our possessions. For the body work it's our emotions, our spirit and consciousness. I'm feeling that the two bodies of work have to do with memories on some levels. Both our bodies and the structures we live in contain us, whether it's our physical body or our emotional body. There's something here about the connection between the tangible and intangible too.

An Atlantic Monthly diagram revisited

2011-11-08T08:59:00.000-05:00

A couple of weeks ago I posted a graphic about the Lytro camera we did for The Atlantic Monthly. I only posted the final art. I began to wonder if people thought that that was it; we were called for a job and we just went ahead and drew this:

That wasn't the process. As I mentioned in a earlier post, we work collaboratively. So I'll go a little into the process that went into drawing this.

First, Luke Hayman and his associate Shigeto Akiyama sent us two layouts so we new what kind of shapes we were working with.

They also sent us a rough digital sketch to show us what they were thinking. Luke assured me we could come up with something better.

From there I did a little research on the lytro camera. The camera is amazing. With one photo, the user can choose a focal distance after taking the photo. Figuring out the science behind this and attempting to explain it was going to be difficult. The more looked into it the more I realized that it was just too complicated to explain for a non technical magazine audience. So I felt that what Luke had sketched worked really well. So from there I put together the first sketch in 3D:

The editor at the Atlantic took a look and gave some feedback:

I like it; it's not what I imagined -- I thought the slices would be emerging from within the cube, at different points within its depths, rather than bookending it and being set apart this way -- but I think it looks cool and clean; may argue for a different headline that emphasizes 'focus' rather than 'cube' after all.

I tried what the editor was initially thinking and it just wasn't working. I told Shigeto and Luke this in a email. They got back to me with this:

We are wondering what if the cube held 3D rendered objects and possibly the cube itself was in perspective. The idea is the cube shows the real space with sense of depth. (as opposed to many layers of 2D pictures).

Then, 2 sections of the cube are pulled out/highlighted and show different focus points. These pictures/planes can be clearly, visually explained that they are the sections of the cube -- possibly connected with dotted line or something?! This will solve the issue of 'bookending'?!

This made sense to me, so I sketched it out:

Luke and Shigeto were happy with this. They asked me to make it more horizontal:

I sent this and they asked me to unskew the two pictures and remove the shadows because they were distracting. From there I went directly to final:

I'll be doing some more process related posts soon.

A new photo, and a tree and house series

2011-11-07T09:45:00.000-05:00

The light was absolutely beautiful this morning. I got inspired and took my camera with me for my morning walk:

I haven't taken pictures over the last couple of months; I've been concentrating on my body and anatomical art. I've stayed away from photography because I was afraid I was spreading myself too thin. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with my photography in the end. I do know it is informing my digital work. And I do have one gallerist who has shown interest in showing some of my photos.

I am working on a series of houses surrounded, rather, overtaken by trees. Here are the selects I have so far:

I hadn't scene these in a while. I like what I'm seeing. They're romantic, yet taking place in a suburban setting. A setting that tends to annihilate romanticism. Well, I mean romanticism in the 18th century european sense of the word.

What I want to say with the new site

2011-11-06T08:00:00.002-05:00

In the spirit of iterative development I'm posting my initial thoughts for the reworking of the illustration and information graphics website.

I want to clarify what we are about as a studio before actually redesigning the website. Here are the first stabs at our mission statement/beliefs:

MISSION STATEMENT:

Our mission is to give people a emotional, visceral experience of the beauty of the world.

or

Our mission is to give people a visceral understanding of the world they live in.

WHAT WE BELIEVE:

There is an inherent beauty within the structure of all tangible and intangible things.

From truth comes beauty.

WHAT WE DO:

We combine strong aesthetics with accuracy.

We transform complex ideas into compelling images.

We work with you to discover the best way to convey a concept.

HOW WE DO IT:

The client is the coauthor of the work, so the process is iterative and collaborative.

When I think about what motivates me, this feels pretty on. The guys have mentioned that it feels too corporate to actually call this a "mission statement." Reminds them of those hideous posters that say "teamwork" with a photograph of mountain climbers.

For those of you who know me, the following won't surprise you at all. I'm having ambivalent feelings about naming our studio Bryan Christie Design. I'm having trouble with the word design. Apple's dictionary defines design as

a plan or drawing produced to show the look and function or workings of a building, garment, or other object before it is built or made. (emphasis mine)

For what we do, the definition is perfect until you get to that last part, "...before it is built or made."

Shit.

Apple's dictionary app definition of studio is:

a room where an artist, photographer, sculptor, etc., works.

Studio is such an elegant word, isn't it? Hmmm ... for today I want to call us Bryan Christie Studio.

In the meantime, I'm considering hiring my son, Lucius. He's quite the medical illustrator. And he's about as comfortable showing his artwork as I am:

Happiness is a warm heat gun

2011-11-04T07:08:00.002-04:00

This last week I've been getting my hands dirty with my art. I've been "smelling the dirt" as Priska would say.

This has happened because I want my work to glow, have depth, and be seductive. I was speaking to Jay Seldin, my photography and printing mentor about this and he suggested I try encaustics. So last week during a session we painted with it on a few of my metal pieces.

It was a revelation. The pieces were actually starting to do what I've been imagining. After working for a couple of hours we headed to Jerry's Art-arama in West Orange, N.J. In spite of its name, it's a wonderful art supply store. I set myself up.

The smell of encaustics is out of this world. It is made from bee's wax and dammar resin. My mother is a painter; the wonderful reek of turpentine saturated our home. Now, any smell that is related to image making puts me in a good mood. In our digital age, smell is becoming less meaningful. Ipads don't smell like anything. Ink, newspapers, books, magazines smell. Maybe it all makes sense; scientists believe smell is our least developed sense. Our nasal passages have literally atrophied in order to make up for our increased brain cavities size.

Saturday I woke up early, headed to the studio and began working. If you follow this blog you're probably aware of how fastidiously neat I am when I work. Here's what my space looked like after cleaning up from a hard days work:

And here are the pieces I worked on:

I like the tension between the the precise digitally rendered image I print and and the goopy wax that's applied by hand. At times I feel like my work is too clean, precise, and even sterile. Yet the last thing I want to do is paint on top of my work in order to make it "arty" or "expressive." I'm tired of expression. (I'm having a hard time getting myself to the DeKooning exhibition at MoMA.) I'm not a fan of trying to be creative. For my work, the expression is a consequence of the process and precision of the anatomy I work with. So I'm using the encaustic in two ways: as a finish, and as a medium to create layers between printed images.

Name ambivalence

2011-11-03T08:54:00.000-04:00

Recently a friend of mine told me about agile development. It's a concept that means things are developed and rolled out iteratively and organically. It's similar to a soft launch. I really like this term. So in the service of this I'm writing this post.

We've had the same website for our illustration and information graphics studio for eight years: bryanchristiedesign.com. Given that eight years ago I was working out of a bedroom by myself and now we are a staff of seven in a loft in Soho I'm feeling like the site is due for an overhaul.

Our current site is for all intents and purposes a catalogue. I want it to tell a story now. I want to make it clear what we do and how we do it. I want to talk about what we believe and what we stand for, what informs our work. You may notice that the words "information graphic" aren't even on the site! Something needs addressing.

This blog has been a wonderful tool in allowing me to get my ideas out into the world. Now it's time to concretize these thoughts and incorporate them into the workshop's site.

Let me back up a little. There are some deeper issues going on here. The illustration and information graphics website's url is bryanchristiedesign.com. We refer to it as the "workshop." We also refer to it as the "studio." When the workshop's art is published, the credit reads, "Bryan Christie." Notice some inconsistencies here? It's time to settle on a damn name.

So I had an impromptu meeting with my team yesterday. I explained the name fugue-state issue and asked each member what they'd wish the name was. The choices were:

Bryan Christie

Bryan Christie Design

Bryan Christie Studio

Bryan Christie Workshop (or "The Workshop" for short)

Bryan Fucking Christie

Erica, the studio manager, and I were in favor of "Bryan Christie Workshop." I like calling what we do "work." As I've posted before, one of my favorite quotes is:

Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us get up every day and get to work.

Chuck Close

The rest of the team strongly favored "Bryan Christie Design." Joe Lertola, our information graphics director, said, "So when I answer the phone, I'm going to say, 'Workshop?' I'm going to feel like an elf." That got a big laugh. I hear him.

So, drum roll please. We're going with Bryan Christie Design. Now we just need to settle on a logo and typeface:

Sacred art

2011-10-29T21:04:00.002-04:00

Leonardo da Vinci wrote:

Two weaknesses leaning together create a strength. Therefore the half of the world leaning against the other half becomes firm.

Leonardo's Notebooks, edited by H. Anna Suh, pg 166

My artwork revolves around my conviction that religion and science are means to the same end. I use the word "religion" instead of "spirituality" intentionally. We are social beings; religions serve our spiritual needs from a social perspective. In my art, I look for what the highest purpose of science and religion is. I look at the two as parts of a whole.

God knows that both science and religion have led to untold tragedy upon us and the earth. Like their creators, they both have deep flaws. Yet, just like their creators, they contain unfathomable beauty, warmth and compassion.

I look at my body. What if my musculature and my skeletal system each had their own consciousness? They would see the world from polar extremes; the musculature would say that one has to be flexible, with the ability to tighten and loosen, change shape. The skeletal system would scoff and say that one has to be rigid, unyielding. What we know is that without either of these two systems locomotion would be impossible for us. We need these two elements. From a very narrow perspective these two elements are at odds with each other, but when you look at the human as a whole they serve their purposes and work together in concert beautifully.

I believe that religion (or in this case, spirituality, if you prefer) and art are closely related. Bill Viola said that museums are the modern world's houses of worship. I'm becoming less and less interested in art for art's sake. I like this idea of artwork serving a function. Just about all my favorite art is related to religion, from Michelangelo's first Pieta to Buddhist thangkas, to Bach's sacred music.

Last weekend my friend Jeremy Mage asked me if I wanted to present some of my video projection art at a church he's the choir master of. It's a beautiful old church on 86th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. It was a perfect fit; I've been thinking that my work does in fact belong in a church-type setting. As I wrote, there's a spiritual side in my work, and I see my work as an aid to meditation. So Jeremy, Priska and I went up to the church on Friday to play around with the projections to see what could work. Jeremy wrote a song that we played duo during the projection. It's called "Vessels." He's playing piano and I'm playing tenor saxophone.

I videotaped the presentation:

One of my goals as an artist is to give people a deep sense of peace when experiencing my art. So I was very happy to be a part of the service on Sunday.

New work on display

2011-10-28T11:44:00.002-04:00

Four of my pieces are on display at the William Bennett Gallery, 65 Greene St., between Spring and Broome:

The pieces are a bit of a departure from what I have been concentrating on recently. They are images of water towers, removed from their environment, drained of all color so the functional architecture and design of the towers is most apparent. In the real world these structures are visual afterthoughts. They are completely built out of necessity. Yet there is a grace and warmth to them. They strike me as loyal servants to us, supplying us with water, not demanding much in return. They have an anthropomorphic quality: the spindly legs holding up a torso-like vessel of water.

I've been interested in urban decay and cast-off architecture for a while now. The interest began to develop in my childhood when I would take the bus from upstate N.Y. to Manhattan to visit my father on the weekends. The bus would go through rundown areas of Paramus and Hell's Kitchen. All these industrial structures along the road just looked so lonely to me; I wouldn't know what purpose they served. This strange sense would fall over me: a feeling of sadness and empathy for these cast-off structures, these rusted, dirty, decaying heaps of metal. I would picture what they might have looked like when they were first built, and imagine their slow journey into neglect and disrepair. The fact that people weren't taking care of these objects would make me sad.

These images are lovingly rendered meditations of the cast-offs of our culture. They are an attempt to embrace and love the neglected, ignored structures of our daily lives.

New works

2011-10-24T22:31:00.002-04:00

I want to share a couple of pieces I just finished.

The first one, "standing_aphrodite_v034 triptych":

Here's the other piece, "standing_aphrodite_v034":

I finished these images about a month ago. I was unhappy with them so I didn't print them and they sat on the server. My associate Priska Wenger was looking through my files a couple of weeks ago and these caught her eye. She asked me to print them and she mounted them on board. She presented them to me and I fell out of my chair. I find it odd that these may have just disappeared on the server if Priska hadn't noticed them. We've created a work flow in the studio in which we don't listen to my opinion once the imagery has been created. It's a interesting process; I go through tears where I make literally hundreds of pieces. When the dust begins to settle Priska sorts them out. As Molly told me, "You need an editor." And I have a great editor in Priska.

I do this overthinking, giving myself a headache, taking myself waaaay too seriously, coming up with grand schemes for what my work is about. And then when I actually do the work I forget everything and just try to make things that are beautiful. What I find interesting is that the pieces above speak to transformation, metamorphosis and evolution—the very things I've been reading about lately in science books. Yet I created these pieces before I started reading these books. It's as if the artwork I was creating was informing my thinking, rather than the other way around.

In the end Beauty is my main motivation in creating art. I believe Beauty heals. I believe Beauty is Truth. Beauty is a much maligned word. I'm reading The Story of Art by E. H. Gombrich. As I read his introduction, a paragraph jumped out at me:

It is infinitely better not to know anything about art than to have the kind of half-knowledge which makes for snobbishness. The danger is very real. There are people, for instance, who have picked up the simple points I have tried to make in this chapter, and who understand that there are great works of art which have none of the obvious qualities of beauty of expression or correct draughtsmanship, but who become so proud of their knowledge that they pretend to like only those works works which are neither beautiful nor correctly drawn. They are always haunted by the fear that they might be considered uneducated if they confess to liking a work which seems too obviously pleasant or moving. They end by being snobs who lose their true enjoyment of art and who call everything 'very interesting' which they really find somewhat repulsive.

He also states:

I should hope to help open eyes, not loosen tongues.

The essence of these quotes is on my mind whenever I walk through Chelsea galleries.

99.9%

2011-10-11T20:21:00.002-04:00

The evolutionary biologist and paleontologist G. G. Simpson has estimated that 99.9% of all species ever to have evolved have gone extinct. To put this visually:

Okay, let's look at this; from a Moneyball/sabermetrics perspective, we have a 0.1% shot at survival as a species.

I was discussing this 99.9% extinction number with Joe Lertola, our information graphics director here at the workshop. He feels that that number is rosy. He thinks it should be more like one in a billion (0.0000001%.) Joe and I have charted it out in case you have a hard time visualizing this:

I got this 0.1% number from a wonderful textbook I'm reading on vertebrate anatomy by Kenneth V. Kardong. Peering into our past from an evolutionary standpoint brings up many feelings. Feelings of mystery, feelings of wholeness, of completeness. It also brings up fear, feelings of the unknown, existential unease. That every bone, every muscle, and every organ has a lineage of millions of years blows my mind. There's such a story in evolution. It's so poetic. The story is ripe for artistic interpretation.

I've known for a while that feelings of a similar nature rise up in me when I go to an art museum, when I read a good science book, or when I meditate. This fact has been coming to my awareness more since I've been working hard at my art and spending so much time thinking about what it is I want to achieve and accomplish with it. Einstein said that the main purpose of art and science is to awaken and nurture a sense of wonder and amazement of the world. For him this sense of wonder is a true religious feeling.

When the Rothko exhibition was at the Whitney about 12 years ago I went often. That beauty of this magnitude could plainly and simply exist on canvas gave me such hope and belief in the purpose of humanity. Everything made sense in the world as I looked into those canvases.

As I read this vertebrate textbook the evolutionary and morphological diagrams bring forth the same sense in me. They aren't quite as operatically grand as the feelings I had at the Whitney, but the seeds are there. That there is visual evidence of our interconnectedness from one species to another gets to me. There's also something to having a logical understanding elicit these deep, religious feelings of connectedness. Here's a diagram from Vertebrates: Comparative Anatomy, Function, Evolution by Kardong.

A few weeks ago I mentioned the arm I'm building with Joe. Here are a couple of versions of what it is looking like:

To the best of my ability, everything is anatomically correct and true in this piece. It is a anatomical visual document of our arm's circulatory and skeletal system.

I'm coming to an appreciation of how science informs my art. In fact, "inform" isn't the right word. My art is a form of science. Is there artistic expression in this piece? Depends on what your definition is. I'm not sure if you can even call it very creative. All I've done is draw out the circulatory system of the right arm. I'm not really interested in telling any kind of story other than attempting to show the incomprehensible order and beauty of the body.

Here's a video I created. In it I shot the arm model we built. I wasn't exactly sure what the animation was going to look like when I set it up to render. I had an idea, a sense. I had a sense of pacing. But it's not like I painted or animated every line you see in this video:

What's becoming more evident is that my art owes its existence to anatomical truths. My art is a conversation with our bodies, about what we are made of. I'm interested in directing this conversation into a discussion of our origins now.

Workshop notes

2011-10-10T23:22:00.001-04:00

Two weeks ago we got a call from Chris Dixon, the creative director at New York Magazine. He asked us to illustrate a cover on Twitter. The story was about how Twitter is at a cross roads; it's gotten large internally, and is poised to take the next step, or potentially sink. This is the first New York Mag cover we've done. It was a challenge. The brief was to make the twitter bird look like it's overstuffed, crammed in the magazine. Jeong, our lead artist started the project. He dimensionalized the bird. Here's the logo we were working from:

Here's the start of the model Jeong created:

From here we had to cram that sucker in the cover. This was a lot more difficult than we expected. I was acting the pissy creative director for a couple of days. I got Jeong to go out and get a couple of plastic toys and smash them in a box we had at the studio to get a sense of how the folds would work. The problem we kept on coming upon was that the bird looked like a deflating beach ball: It didn't look like it was expanding, it looked more like it was shrinking. Here's a work in progress:

A day before the issue shipped Jeong had to take off for Korea. I took over the project from him. I realized that the more wrinkled the bird looked, the more it looked like it was deflating. So I smoothed out the bird a bit. Here's what the final cover looks like:

I've mentioned before that I have a two month rule. It takes me two months (at least) to see a job clearly. I wish I could say that I love the way the cover looks. But I can't. Right now all I see are things I would have done differently. I am really happy with the composition, especially the upturned head.

In other Luke Hayman related news, I just finished a small illustration for Atlantic Monthly. Luke at Pentagram has taken over for a bit till they find a new AD. He asked us to do a diagram on a new camera that takes pictures using multiple focal lengths at once. Here's the final art:

Luke and his associate Shigeto were happy with the art and picked up on the Bauhaus reference immediately; the primary colored sphere, cube and pyramid.

I read Johannes Itten's "Art of Color" in the late 90's when I was an assistant AD (art director) at Scientific American. Check out of this picture of him when he taught at Bauhaus:

Touch my monkey?

Anyway, according to Itten, these three primary shapes (sphere, cube, and pyramid) have inherent primary colors associated with them. The sphere, blue, the cube, red, and the pyramid yellow. Yellow is the most vibrant color, and the triangle has this same quality geometrically. Blue is the least vibrant, coolest color, and the sphere has these same qualities geometrically. The cube is in between the two and so is red. As I have mentioned, I am pretty lost in the realm of color. So learning, or at least getting exposed to his color system was enlightening.

Speaking of monkeys, I'm currently reading this:

(Why are textbook covers the ugliest god awful looking things in the world? This book is beautifully and elegantly written. It is, well, sophisticated. And the cover does not in any way what so ever live up to the contents.)

I'm reading this for a National Geographic story we are working on. I'm learning about postanal tails. Postanal tails. Needles to say, I am beyond excited about this project. We're working on about ten illustrations. And the kicker is that I pitched the story idea. My self love knows no bounds. I think of the Larry Sanders episode in which Hank Kingsley guest hosts when Larry gets food poisoning:

Hank Kingsley makes me very happy. I relate to him on a fundamental level. This scares me. I think I'll save this train of thought for another post. Or not.

Where I'm at, part 2

2011-10-06T11:56:00.000-04:00

This post's subject is of a personal nature. I've decided to publish it because it speaks to how I wish to look at the world and live in the world as a person and artist.

A month ago I took a trip down to Bethany Beach, Delaware to visit my family who were on vacation. After four days I continued south to Florida to visit my recovering Grandmother, Sofie.

I did a lot of thinking on this trip. Let's start with Delaware. Molly and the kids had already been there for a day or two and were hanging out with some friends at the beach when I arrived.

After about an hour I felt the urge for a cigarette and began to roll one. My friend looked at me and said, "What are you doing? You're still smoking that shit?!?" He had recovered from throat cancer this last year. He had had a really close call. What I was thinking rolling a cigarette in front of him I honestly don't know. At times I'm sure I have a stupid gene. How I can be so plainly obliviously stupidly ignorant at times scares me. Anyway, he tore into me; telling me stories of some of the people he saw on the ward dying from smoking related cancers. There wasn't much for me to say or do, other than wait a few minutes after the barrage, then slink about 100 yards away from him and light up.

So mortality was on my mind when I headed south on I95 to visit my grandmother in Florida. The place people go to die. That said, she is a walking tank; an unstoppable force. My happiest memories of my childhood involve her. She taught me how to cook. She has informed how I use and make money significantly. I have never, ever heard the timbre of her voice in someone else. Molly described it as Elmo (yes, the red Elmo) speaking through some kind of voice synthesizer or distorter. Actually, she doesn't talk; she shrieks.

She was in rehab, recovering from heart surgery. She has nine stents in her heart. Miraculously, she should be heading home soon. Getting face to face with our eventual fate, of dying, of spending our last days in a hospital, if we are lucky, was sobering. I would spend a few wonderful hours with her in the mornings, then go out and take a walk around Boynton Beach and do some thinking.

I thought about my drive down I95. The same signs for the same franchises over and over again. From the perspective of I95, every town I passed seemed composed of the same collection of chain stores, hotels, and gas stations. I thought about my friend who had tore into me. He had come close to death. My Grandmother has been close to death about twelve times over the last ten years. In the rehab I'm walking past people in wheel chairs that look like hollowed out husks of themselves.

"What's it all about?" Yup, that question entered my consciousness. In those hackneyed words. Really. I imagined myself on my death bed. How would I feel about the life I have led so far? Would I be proud? Happy? Disgusted? Disappointed?

I thought about my age: 38. I decided to assume that I'm at the half way point of my life. I reflected on what my life has been about. What themes have there been? What successes, what failures? Oddly, the biggest feelings that came up for me were pride and sadness. I am proud with what I have made of myself in the world. Yet I am sad when I reflect on how I have felt internally these 38 years. I have spent most of my 38 years clawing my way through life, honestly in a pretty sad, anxious state. I have gotten sober, I have gotten married, had two kids. I run a vibrant studio. I'm currently working on my passion; my fine art. I'm separated from my wife, but see the kids and her almost everyday.

What I noticed is that I've really been just focused on what I want, what I desire these last 38 years. I've been caught up in my internal world. Maybe this is appropriate from a developmental sense. I thought that this isn't great place to come from as a father or partner though.

I thought about what I want my life to be about for this next half. I came up with a list:

I want to be the most positive source of energy for my kids as possible. I want to be fully present for them.

I want to be the most supportive source of energy for Molly.

I want to create the most beautiful, moving art possible. (Then get that damn art in front of people.)

I want to be the best, most energizing, leader of my studio as possible.

I want to continue to strengthen the friendships I have developed over the last year and a half.

I want to stop smoking.

I want to somehow reconnect with god, with spirituality.

So, all these things were on my mind when I drove back up to NY. I did the drive in one day. Twenty hours of driving. It was a vision quest. On I95 in North Carolina nature put on a show. Rain, clouds, pinks, purples, light blues, lightning, thunder. After this a rainbow appeared dead ahead of me for what felt like a half hour.

I had never scene a rainbow for so long so clearly. Something clicked in my consciousness. Something about color being ordered, that the hues we are familiar with actually belong on a scale of sorts, similar to how tones of sound can be arranged on a distinct scale. Color has always been something I've felt a bit lost in. When it works it is astounding. But getting color to sing is the hardest thing in the world for me. Seeing the colors arranged in this scale, and seeing how damn beautiful it was was eye opening. I'd look at the rainbow and then look at the trees. And then I'd see that the greens of the leaves on the trees belonged to a part of the rainbow. I'd look at the blues of the sky and see that that blue was contained in the rainbow. Each color I saw was part of a harmonious whole.

There have been a few times when nature has kicked my ass in it's awesome, incomprehensible order and beauty. After these experiences I tend to feel a depression fall over me. "What's the point?" I think. Why do art? All you got to do is look at the damn clouds, at the human form, at nature and all the beauty and poetry in the world is right in front of you, unadulterated. I want to hold on to this experience I had on I95 though. And I think by creating art I can remember this experience, it's a form of remembrance of nature's grandeur, perfection and beauty.

When I got into Pennsylvania I reached for my smokes. I thought about the beauty I had just witnessed. I thought about all the elderly I saw in the rehab. I thought about my cancer surviving friend. I thought about the list I had made. I looked at the smokes in my hand. I decided I was done. I left the cigarettes in the glove box of my car. A month later I'm maybe five-ten pounds heavier. I'm not saying I quit. There's a finality to using the word "quit" that I'm not comfortable with. I'm saying I haven't smoked in 30 days.

Where I'm at

2011-10-04T21:15:00.003-04:00

I've been thinking about the connection between what we call the workshop and the fine art I have been working on the last year.

Let me back up a little: the workshop is the information graphic and illustration part of my studio. I am the creative director of it. We have about 6 employees. About 90% of the work we do is science or technology related. Along with being the head of the studio, over the last year and a half I have focused on creating fine art. This fine art is what I have been blogging about recently.

Let me back up a little more. I have been a illustrator for fifteen years. Most of the work I do as an illustrator deals with science. I started at my father's illustration and animation studio, Slim Films, in 1996. In 1997 I took a job as an assistant art director at the magazine Scientific American. At Scientific American I fell in love with, well, science. After a year I left to try to finish my college degree in music. I was freelancing as an illustrator at this time. After half a semester I dropped out of school (again) and kept up with the illustration. I grew more and more successful as a illustrator. Over the last five years I've been hiring people and growing the studio. There are now seven of us.

Growing the studio has been a painful, exhilarating, exciting and rewarding process. I feel I have made every mistake imaginable.

In 2007, before I started hiring people, I did a couple of illustrations that ignited my career. I was commissioned to do the cover for WIRED:

After the issue hit the newsstands my phone would not stop ringing. I was getting phone calls from producers in Hollywood. Ad agencies called. Guys with pony tails driving convertibles were calling.

Shortly thereafter I was commissioned to do the opener for the New York Times Science section. The subject was on diabetes. They gave me a huge canvas to work with and said, "run." Here's what it came out like:

Now the phone wouldn't stop ringing for reals. Up until this point I was working on one job at a time. I would have complete focus on one piece. But as the phone calls and emails increased I felt like I couldn't follow Nancy Reagan's advice and just say no. I started working 16-20 hour days, six through seven days a week, on many jobs simultaneously. One thing that I struggled with (for better or for worse) was this notion that I was now known as the guy who does transparent bodies. I started to feel like my work was commoditized. I began to feel like I was flipping burgers.

When an art director would say, "Just make it look cool," I would die a little inside. It was my love of science, and my love of Classical and Renaissance art that had brought about these pieces I had created. I wasn't looking to create something "cool" to show off with. There was a reason for every line in my work. Unbeknownst to me I was a fine artist.

As you might expect, one year ago I was hospitalized for depression. After the week-long hospitalization I was in a intensive outpatient program for two months. Over the last year I have examined every aspect of my life I could summon the strength to look at. I have questioned everything.

Personally I have learned that my past has shaped me more than I would care to admit. I have learned that up until this point, my life has been shaped by running away from the demons of my past. I have come to accept that for most of my life I've been a miserable guy. I have learned that being a good father and good partner is the most important thing for me to do.

I have thought a lot about what drives me artistically too. Two key words come up: Truth and beauty. The most successful work we do as illustrators in the workshop is truthful. The anatomical work we do is all based on truth. There isn't anything made up in it. I believe that truth communicates itself to us through beauty. The fine art I create is based in truth too. There is nothing made up in any of the imagery. I pose anatomically correct figures in virtual 3D space and render out images of these poses. The abstraction is all based in real-world objects and things. That is crucial to what I do. The super-abstract video installations are all based in internal systematic truths.

So I've learned that what the workshop does and the fine art I create are much more related than I thought. Out of the truth of the anatomy I create close to abstract images that are responded that I respond to as art. In the workshop we create images that are truthful in what is communicated. The beauty happens when the truth of the communication is made evident.

I have also come to realize that from the end of 2007 to 2010 I have not been growing creatively within the workshop. Now, during this time there was indeed a lot of growth--the growth of the studio and the staff I was hiring. There was financial growth, both in revenue and expenditures. There has been tremendous growth within the employees and artists I've hired. But on a base level I feel like we have been recycling pieces that I did in 2006-2008 over and over again. I used to approach jobs with the attitude of trying to find what was best going to convey the information. Now my impression is most clients are looking for that "glass guy" look or the "white on white" architectural stuff. And unfortunately I have let that feeling direct my attitude when starting a job. It's a sad state of affairs.

For all intents and purposes I have taken a sabbatical from the workshop these last twelve months.* I am feeling a strong urge and desire to reconnect in a visceral way to the workshop's commissions. I am encouraged by this desire.

I've expended a lot of time and energy trying to prove to myself that I am in fact an artist. And after doing this for a year what I'm left with is just a feeling of not giving a fuck. Let me explain. This sounds apathetic, but this is not the place I am coming from at all. What I'm letting go of this self-imposed dichotomy I have created between my illustration and fine art. My goddamn work moves people. My work is visual. My work tells a story. You want to call it illustration, fine. You want to call it art, that's better. Moving forward my intention is to let my work speak for itself. That said, I will continue to write about it, I will continue to think about it a lot. But I have come to the conclusion that the most import thing for me to do right now as an illustrator and as a fine artist is to make the damn work without thinking at all about what stylistic/aesthetic box it can be put in.

* After posting this I've thought about this choice of word, "sabbatical." It's not accurate. I have been involved in what the workshop has created these last twelve months. My actual hands haven't been involved much, but my eye has been on all the jobs that have left the studio. This year has been about transitioning me to a true creative director of the workshop. Of turning me into a disembodied eye. What I have learned after this year is that it is necessary for me to smell the dirt. My hands need to be involved in order for me to grow within the workshop.

Short documentary profile

2011-09-30T07:12:00.000-04:00

A great video artist, Sofia Oggioni, has made a short documentary profile about me. It's part of a series of shorts about artists she is shooting.

The week in review

2011-09-24T12:48:00.002-04:00

Here's a blow by blow of last week:

I'm working with Linda Rolon. She's an artist/framer. She dropped off a few of the pieces she framed for me on Tuesday:

I feel these are a good first step. I'm working small for a while. There's a lot I need to learn, refine, explore and develop. Working at the monumental scale I was working at just doesn't make any sense from a budget and ease perspective.

Priska Wenger, my associate, framed these three pieces:

These feel sculptural. One of the things I've come to realize is that I don't want my work to feel like framed prints. I want them to be installations, objects, sculptures. I think this triptych is approaching this feel.

I also worked on a larger version of the "stained glass" piece:

It's composed of four layers of plastic printed on. We may have to break my "no electricity" mandate on this one. I'm just not sure how we can light these pieces other than using electricity or putting them against windows. Linda took a small mock up of one and is mulling over different ways of framing them with and without electricity.

I'm also working on refining the circulatory system for the digital 3D woman model I work with. I'm working with Joe Lertola on this. Here's a picture of the base template I created for the smaller arteries:

This template will eventually be made three dimensional, the arteries will have tapered lengths. But as a image on its own it's rather pretty, no? I did a rough test of making these veins three dimensional along the arm. Here's what it looks like so far:

I'm excited with the progress. I've been looking over old anatomy and surgery books. Mostly from the 19th century. There is such a beauty to these old illustrations that modern medical illustration doesn't come close to in my opinion. Here's a page from Atlas of Human Anatomy and Surgery, published in the 19th century.

These drawings are beautiful. So alive, and well, fleshy. This is the feeling I want in my work. How to make things feel alive without looking like something from a butcher's shop is a challenge. One thing I have learned is that I must respect the media I am working in. What works with watercolors doesn't necessarily work with digital 3D. So we're trying to capture the essence of the illustrations above. Not the look. I'm interested in the feeling.

One thing I believe is that life is messy. Here's a photo of my workspace taken this morning:

The body is messy. The process of getting to where I am in my life has been pretty messy. That said, I do believe that there is an inherent order and perfection in the blueprint of how we are put together. But as far as the flesh and blood realities of our bodies are concerned it's a mess. This balance between the inherent platonic order, and the disorder in which this order is physically manifested is one the thing I am interested in as far as my work is concerned.

Priska gives me a hard time about my tendency to believe that there is one truth. Or that there is one perfect solution to something. I yearn for some magic key or puzzle piece that will make all of life just suddenly make sense. I've always loved geometry. There are solutions that are perfect.

I have been working in fits and starts on a few video installations. None of them feel done. There are aspects that I find beautiful in them. There are things that I feel are strong conceptually. But as completely finished, finalized pieces there is a lot of work to be done. I'll tear into this next week. I need to give the prints I've been working on some time to breath and develop on their own.

I haven't smoked in 19 days. Last night I ate a pound of pasta. With Vodka sauce. Well, the kids had a bit of it too. I'm feeling surges of energy that are a bit intense. I feel anxious. But I do feel clearer. In fact, I've only gotten a couple of nicotine cravings today. I guess they are right; it does get easier.

Last weeks work

2011-09-19T10:52:00.001-04:00

After having been lost in the land of color for a while I decided to focus on line, form and composition last week. Looking at my work on the wall this morning after having been away for the weekend I'm feeling inspired:

It's becoming clear to me that my work deals with the line between representation and abstraction. Finding unexpected beauty in what we are intimately familiar with is one of my themes.

From a process point of view I'm looking at the black and white work as drawing and the color work as painting. I want the final work to be one of a kinds. I'm still not sure what my final art will actually be as far as material, but I feel like I am getting clearer to understanding what it could be. The process of getting to a final piece involves lots of printing, making plenty of studies. Using multiple layers or printing multiple passes on one sheet may be part of the final work.

I'm growing aware of an interesting tension in my work. I am working with these tools, the computer and printer, that are designed to mass produce things exactly with no variation. Their goals are the opposite of my goal. My goal is in part to create something unique. I am using these tools that are geared towards mass production and replication to create a one of a kind, unique, living piece of art. I am dedicated to the process of working with the computer. So by focusing my energy through this digitally mechanized world I hope to create something that breathes and lives and has energy. It is extremely important for me that I respect the tools I am using. This means not trying to replicate another medium using the digital medium I'm working in. (I've never been a fan of using a raster application to make an image that looks like it was drawn with pastels or painted with oils.)

I have faith that there is an intrinsic beauty in all media; it's just a question of excavating and coming to find that beauty.

I'm still here

2011-09-15T17:28:00.000-04:00

I promised myself I'd never start a post with, "It's been a while since I last posted." But this statement is in fact true. There are a few reasons why I haven't been posting.

One is that the creative explosion I experienced a couple of months ago has tapered off. I've been left staring at the work I created. None of it feels finished. They all feel like sketches. Here's a photo of what my wall of current work looks like-

So I've decided to focus on a a couple of the ideas that I had sketched out and try to take them to completion. This has been a challenge. One of the things that terrifies me is that after all the work I will put into trying to finish something the sketch will remain the strongest piece. This is a cruel reality that I have to come to grips with. The fact is that I prefer looking at Michelangelo's sketches over his finished paintings and frescoes. There's a living breathing quality that the sketches have that I'm afraid will get lost when I try to finalize something. I'm going on faith that it is worth it.

As a result of this process I've gotten clearer on what I like in my work, in what I want to show and communicate with my work. Here's one of the pieces I created a couple of months ago that I decided to try to bring to completion:

I took the piece above and tried a few different things. I looked at the figure from the side as opposed to the front. I elongated the picture plane. This piece reminds me a bit of Campbell's tomato soup, so I played with the colors a bit and darkened up the background. I want to incorporate a more chromatic color scheme. I reposed the figure and did a bunch of test renders from different distances:

I choose a line and color scheme I liked the most and this is what the piece looks like so far:

I'm undecided whether it's finished. I'm not sure what scale I want the final piece to be. And I haven't decided what kind of paper the art should be printed on.

I have learned a few things during this process. As I was working I was finding myself struggling trying to make the work appear to glow and to have transparent depth. I wanted there to be layers that interact with the light differently. I want the work to shimmer, to almost look three dimensional on the page. I started to think about the qualities that I like in my work. They are transparency, light, refraction. These qualities are things that are within the virtual 3D world I created, these qualities are eventually represented as a flat print on paper. I began to wonder if I could incorporate these things into the finished piece of art itself.

As I was working on this piece I was looking at Turner and Rembrandt. The glow they create is amazing. The energy and the illuminated atmosphere blows me away. I know Turner applied layer after layer in his paintings. I started to wonder if I could approach my work in a similar way, using layers. So I decided to print on multiple layers of transparent plastic and lay these on top of each other. Here are a couple of photos of a few tests I have done:

I'm excited with what I am seeing. They very reactive to the light and look different at different times of day. A few people have commented that these remind them of stained glass. I love the association. I've thought that my work has a spiritual/religious connection for a bit now. I think there are a lot of possibilities with this direction.

Did I mention I haven't smoked in 9 days? Mark Twain said, "Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I've done it thousands of times." I'm not a big fan of lung cancer. Not a big fan of feeling like a social outcast. Not a huge fan of how I feel when I smoke in front of the kids. So I haven't smoked in a bit and it really really blows.

One of my favorite pieces

2011-07-20T09:43:00.003-04:00

In 1998 I was working as an assistant art director at Scientific American. It was a special time for me. It was there that I began to fall in love with science. I began to see the connection between art and science; the editors, in their passion for what they wrote and edited, resembled artists to me.

While there, one of my assignments was to design a physics article entitled "Glueballs." I was usually given the obscure physics articles. When Ed Bell, the art director, assigned the story to me he gave me the scrap, a collection of Feynman diagrams, and said sarcastically, "Good luck." This was an article that was considered hard to "art" because what the subject dealt with was at the subatomic level. There's no real-world representation or reference for us as flesh-and-blood humans. The processes that are described are only understandable by the lines and squiggles that compose a Feynman diagram.

I looked at the scrap. I was struck by how anthropomorphic the diagrams looked. They also reminded me of Miro paintings. The diagrams were completely incomprehensible to me, but I could sense an inner logic the same way one can see a logic in a written language that one doesn't understand. So I redrew the Feynman diagrams and blew them up large.

Here's the piece:

I'm posting this because as I rework my artist statement what keeps coming up is the connection to science my work has.

I'm rereading a book of Einstein essays entitled "Ideas and Opinions." It's a wonderful collection of essays. One of the themes he writes about a lot is the connection between art, science, and religion. He puts religion into three categories: a religion that is based in fear, one that is based in morality, and one that he calls cosmic religious feeling. It's this third type Einstein is interested in as a scientist and human being.

I'll quote one paragraph that stood out for me:

How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a god and no theology? In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive of it.

He concludes his essay with:

A contemporary has said, not unjustly, that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people.

Amen.