Anatomy and Art

I finished the new painting today.

Introducing Grace…

As always, any of my work on canvas can be viewed at http://snapshotgenius.com/paint

So EAST had a lovely first weekend.  The event really is huge, and even though I’ve only seen a fraction of it, I feel like I’ve been able to see a lot of really cool art.  The Wherehouse, where I am showing, has been really great too.  I kept expecting things to be more difficult, but it just hasn’t been.  And not having been in Austin for so long, everyone’s work is so new to me, and I love seeing it and being able to share mine with my new community.  I think we have about 10 artists showing inside The Wherehouse, and a handful of others displaying (or performing or running classes) outside.

Do come out if you have the opportunity, 1023 Springdale Rd, Austin, TX 78721.

Buy a Wonderlounge pint glass and sample some tasty cider.  Stand on our soapbox and tell the world what you have to say.  Take in the paintings, and prints, and digital culture jamming art, and photographs.  Fire a crossbow out back, and get something embroidered on a shirt.  Maybe take a dance class.  We seriously have all of that and more!

Been playing around a little with a new piece lately…

Here’s hoping something good comes of it.

So, a cool thing happened last week. A woman from the Museum of Science in Boston contacted me about using a few seconds from my sliding filament animation in a presentation at the museum.  Basically, she wanted the part where the filaments are seen sliding past one another en masse.

It’s really a small contribution, but I can’t help but feel happy to think of my work being used in what sounds like a really awesome museum and further shaping how visiting students think about this process.  I suppose that’s a lot of what I like about working at Sapling Learning too.

Those of you who have been reading here for a long time now, may remember more exasperated posts about the making of that very shot.  There was a time when I really thought that I might have mucked up my whole grad school potential by getting myself stuck with this one.  Halfway through the semester in my first 3D animation class at UIC I realized that I’d come up with a plan that 3DsMax didn’t want to let me do.  I thought that if I didn’t get it, my animation wouldn’t be any good, if I could even find a way to finish it at all, and I might fail the class, and never get anywhere with this whole 3D animation thing.  Well, I did get it, and as of tonight that animation has had 227,517 views on YouTube, and in the very near future, that one little shot will be worked into a Museum of Science stage presentation and I currently work as a 3D animator, and well, that just all feels pretty damn cool.

Oh, and if you watch any of the stage presentations in that link, the woman you see presenting there is Karine Thate.  She’s the one who contacted me.  Apparently she not only performs these presentations, but also puts them together herself.  That sounds like a pretty awesome job too.

http://youtu.be/yxEhmD6cNyg

Last week I got permission at Sapling to post the new animation. I went with the narrated version for now. I may post the silent one at a later date.

I learned a lot putting this together. I learned a good bit about working with cloners in Cinema 4D, and got to practice with C4D’s shaders, and even touched on coding a bit with trying to get that mRNA strand to move the way I wanted it to.

All in all, I think it came out really well, both versions actually. I’m proud of it. And I’m really enjoying working with such amazing and knowledgeable folks over at Sapling. I learn the coolest stuff from them, all the time.

Please allow me to present the new painting…

I’m calling it, “Bursting.”

Still going with this one…

I started working on something new recently.  I’m not sure exactly what I’m doing yet, but it’s the first time I’ve really felt like I’m getting somewhere with a piece since the move, so that’s exciting.

I often start with a photograph when I do these, and this time I’ve started with one of Keith Allen Phillips’ (aka Lucky’s) shots of Sylva.  I mentioned them before when I wrote about ayearwithoutclothes.com. Having seen so much work from those two this year, it only seemed fitting to play with something there, even if I don’t intend the final piece to actually be a likeness.  Fingers crossed that I can keep the momentum going throughout the work week now, and on however long it takes me finish it.

I’m soon to be out of town for a bit, and not a lot of time for writing, so I thought that I would post some old paintings again.  Hopefully when I get back, I can get back to such endeavors.  Been missing the act of painting lately.

These are some of the figures that I’ve done over the years, and sort of the development of a particular style.

I think that maybe the starting point was when I did “Frantic” in early 2002.

Then years later it came together stronger with “Scream” in 2007.

Then I made a teeny tiny painting later in 2007 playing with the same style of line movements.

The following year I painted “The Fall” (this one was pretty big, especially after the tininess of my last effort).  You can tell that I was getting into anatomy here, because it’s less chaotic and features actual muscles where they lie.  I think this was the first piece of this style I did after starting to learn to sculpt, and it was done shortly before starting school at UIC.

Then in an effort to create a gift for my friend Scott before leaving California, I diverged from things a touch into a swirlier style while trying to paint something that was neither quite a warm tone or a cool tone (Scott really likes purple.)

And lastly, before leaving for school, I attempted to combine themes and use my more chaotic line style on a tree.  I often paint trees.  I’ll probably do another post like this of them sometime.  But I can’t say that the combination of styles quite worked.  I still keep it on my wall, and sometimes I kind of like it, but I don’t consider this one much of a success.

When I got into school, it took me a while to find time to paint again.  I got sick around the end of my 2nd semester and held up in my apartment, probably longer than was exactly reasonable, and fell right back into paint again.  The first thing I made was “Pour.”

And goodness I honestly didn’t realize that there were going to be so many of these when I started this post!  But I’m in it now, and up next is one of my, and seemingly many’s favorites, “Tom Tips His Hat.”  I can’t tell you how satisfying it was to get this one out between semesters.  Someone had told me that all the men I painted were creepy.  That combined with having studied likenesses for sculpture shortly before coming back to school, I thought I’d try painting a man who I happen to be quite fond of.  Tom Waits, being his beautiful awesome self, fit the bill perfectly.

Then, the likeness bandwagon went on, when a couple friends of mine got married.  I couldn’t go to the wedding, but I could play with their faces!  It took me forever to get this right, but I finally got Ellen and Joe down in paint.  Take that you crazy lovestruck fools!

I did a couple things in other styles, and then went to Dallas for my anaplastology internship.  When I got to the end of that time, I couldn’t wait to put paint to canvas again and painted what may be one of my favorites in really a just a period of a couple of days.  I love it when that happens.  It really doesn’t happen enough.  But that’s when I made “Illumine.”

Then back in Chicago I picked up another tiny one that I had started some time before.  It had started in a more realistic style, but I painted over all of that, moving it into more of this style and changing the colors.  Thanks to Scott, I can paint in purple now.  And I made “Feel.”

It’s not my last painting finished, but it is the last in this style.  And goodness, if you’ve made it through all of that, thank you.  That was more pieces than I’d originally thought I was getting myself into showing!

And I hope to have some new ones for you all over the next year.  It takes me so long to adapt to a move, but I can feel it coming.

It occurs to me, that I should really highlight a few of my older works from time to time here, specifically the ones that are still available for purchase.  So, here are just such a few…

This is “Phoenix Rising.”  It was completed in the beginning of 2002.  I did this one after first moving to Los Angeles.  I had these nifty gold and copper metalic paints to try, and a nice new fan brush.   I was watching the coverage of the 9-11 attacks on my little tv, in my little new apartment.  I started out playing with flames on this one, but somewhere got swept up in the hopefulness a lot of us were feeling at that moment, plus I’ve always enjoyed the idea of the phoenix.  So I wound up making this.

It’s about 24 inches tall and 20 across.

In 2004, I painted this.

Something about this image just felt right in the making.  It’s one of those that people seem to see a lot of different things in, and that’s part of what works about it for me, so it has always been labeled “Untitled.”  It’s about one foot by one foot.

This one is from 2007.  It’s called “Swirl.”  And in some ways I have it to thank for getting me where I am today.

I struggled and struggled with this one, specifically with his hand in the foreground.  This painting, and specifically that struggle, is why Ian Coulter started teaching me to sculpt, starting with hands, and that door opening put me in a position to be ready to jump when I would later learn about the field of anaplastology, which is how I got into medical art.

And lastly I’d like to show “The Fall” from 2008, shortly before leaving Los Angeles for Chicago.

This one remains the largest piece that I have done to date.  Measuring 40 inches across by 30 down, this one felt like it took up my whole studio apartment back in LA.  I haven’t quite worked back up to that size again, but I would like to someday.

I’ve been working at getting back in to the swing of painting here in the new space, but so far that’s been slow going.  It’s been strange doing all of this art for work, but so little on my own.  It’ll come though.