Learning Turning
I've turned many a block the old fashioned way....well, not really but, I have turned many a block of foam with hot wire technology. First you need a drawing which needs to be transfurred to masonite. The masonite is then cut by hand into a template that gets clamped into a machine. The machine, blah blah blah. It's a huge process. I could right a small book about it.
Learning how to lathe in the computer is an amazingly gratifying thing. One I figured it out I was blown away. It makes me dream of giant Louis Nevelson fragments set into the huge molding profiles that I explain a few entries down. FIgures peek from between the framed, turned shapes. It'll soon be visualize.
The video is a fly through assorted lathing exercises that I'd set for myself. All of the models in it are my own.
Music: Bella Fleck, Flight of the Cosmic Hippo
Ron English's "X-Ray Guernica" pop out
Ron English is easily the most inventive and skilled painter with whom I am proud to be acquainted. His new Guernica amazes on so many levels that Piccaso could crap himself. Smart is good fun and this thing is as brilliant as it's colossal. I recently saw it for myself at Ron's last "Pop Up" show, it was in my opinion, it's crowned jewel , in my mind, the one that most popped out. Hens the vid.
Music: Frank Zappa's "Jazz From Hell", Massaggio Gallore.
Framed Fragment exhibit
I've had this idea for as long as I've worked with foam fabrication and life casting figures. The scale of molding that can be created through this process is incredible. The mitering that would be maddeningly complex and prohibitively expensive in other materials is easily achievable by this method. This is just the first presentation. A test flight so to speak.
The photos in this are all taken from the internet just to give me reference to build around. What I really want to see are figures climbing in and out of the frames, achieving a dynamic parallax, a play on the ancient tradition of trompe l'oeil, as well as offering a means of getting sculpture off of the floor. I'd like to miter and bend these great profiles around groups of figures held to the wall, painted and textured and dancing within in their architectural context. Life size figures achieve monumentality when these massive moldings bend to their will rather that the other way around. Even in the enlarged figure, a figure nearly sixteen feet tall if whole, is in her frame only eight feet and is still able to share the wall with two other large pieces.
In order to achieve the figure groups of which I speak, I will next turn to poser. It's a digital figure posing program that will help me weave figures around one another while existing both inside and outside of the frame. Once assembled they will be moved in to Zbrush so that they may be re-sculpted, textured and painted. It is my guess that by the time I figure out all of this, I'll be ready to learn a program with more sophisticated rendering abilities than Sketchup. It is my hope to achieve beautifully lit and richly textured animations. For pieces that demand as much wall space as fairly large paintings do, the ability to plan pieces in their virtual exhibit spaces is a huge advantage and quick insight as to what does and doesn't work before production ever begins.
The first pieces in this cycle will involve life castings of figures staged with in frames that are designed and constructed specifically for a predetermined pose. No two should ever be the same. There should be a gentle intimacy that molding of this weight has never known before. As figures span the inner holds of their yielding frames, a parallel is drawn between them and how the Hellenistic order of columns seem to bulge under the weight of their entablatures.
Ultimately, it is my goal to learn how to sculpt and design objects entirely in the computer. This will afford me limitless availability of models, posing scenarios and mixed scales. Mixing scales and letting figures move through one another is going to be pretty interesting and well beyond anything that life casting could afford.
The above described designs would then be uploaded to a carving robot and milled out of a low density, clay coated foam then, detailed and finished by hand prior to molding.
521 West Saddle River Rd.
A picture of a beautiful old home, cropped, ballanced, punched up and retouched but. The biggest change is the sky. Matching sky's can be surprisingly difficult. If the light on the clouds isn't falling in the same direction as the subject recieving it, it will fail to look convincing. In this example I found a sky online, flipped it, copied it 4 times and then cobbled it all together. The greatest challenge in cobbling is a matter of hiding duplicate shapes. Like everything in nature, no 2 clouds are alike. The most laborious part of this project involved cleaning up the selections around the foliage. Many an edge left by the old light blue sky had to be manually eradicated but in the end if you weren't told, you wouldn't be looking for it. With the drama of that sky, the dark foliated vignette and insistent autumnal light blasting through the center, it seems very much like an oil painting, a portrait of a house, a rather stately one at that.
Diva is my sister!
My daughter has spent the majority of her child hood with a variety of pets. Diva was her first. I remember when we first brought Diva home, she rode on the dash board of my Pop's old Pontiac. That tiny puppy would grow to 90 lbs. and was generally at her happiest when she was killing something (a natural born hunter). Despite the dog's questionable demeanor (a bit of a loaded gun with a less than reliable safety), She stood as one of Sonia's faithful guardians for more than a dozen years.Animals can be very difficult to photograph. Of all the shots that I had taken over the years, none of Diva's would I call good. This digital painting was done from a rather unflattering shot of the family featuring, a tiny Sonia and Diva in the lower right corner. Thanks to the magic of Photoshop and Wacom, turning crappy photos into expressive paintings is fun and easy once you know how. Any way, as soon as Sonia was old enough to form complete sentences she would exclaim that; Diva is my sister! Hence the title.
Benjamin Franklin Tricentenial
This was a very interesting object that I designed for StudioEIS. I was assigned to create these illustrations to represent the sculptural likeness and inventions of Benjamin Franklin. It was a splendid opportunity to explore design dynamics that work with in a variety of scales. This piece, under the direction of Ivan Schwartz, was designed to work as well at 6 inches as it would at 6 feet.
Shrek vs. Sonia
This was a fun thing to revisit. When Sonia was 10 or so, the first Shrek movie came out. She was nuts for all things Shrek. Around the same time I got my first computer and was just learning Photo shop. I did a rough assembly that seriously amused her but, wasn't quite up to snuff for showing off. Now Sonia is 16 and the third Shrek movie has just hit the theatres and I figured I'd spruce the page up with some stuff I've learned since.
Alisa as Madame X
This was an interesting project that I'd always wanted to do. We see it in the movies sometimes, an old portrait over the fire place that bares an uncanny resemblance to the star. I've been a fan of John Singer Sargent since I first began painting and, of course, one of his most famous and immediately recognizable works was the notorious "Madame X". I felt that my sister Alisa would work beautifully with in the context of the painting as she has a strikingly aristocratic profile. In this piece, her head is entirely painted in, her bangles, bracelets and rings have been added to further personalize the work. In fact, if you look closely, between the bangles on her left wrist, you'll notice the face of her watch.
Alien helium balloon
Inflatable design requires a surprising amount of attention and consideration. Their outer silliness belies the serious nature of their specifications.
Duck ala Breugel (with a pinch of Heronimous Bosh)
I was dining with a friend one evening and had duck. It was delicious. I asked the waiter about the sauce and he explained the pressing process. The next day I got on line to satisfy my curiosity and realized that the press is a diabolical sort of juicing contraption fit for a medevil torture chamber. With that in mind, it is little wonder why such a contraption blends so easily with a scary Bruegel painting.
Crif Girl
When my buddy Eric was in the hospital, I felt that his room needed a pin up girl. I wanted to do something "Saint Marks". Crif dogs is a hot dog joint that has kind of become an institution in our neck of the woods. Their mascot is a blond in a bikini riding a hot dog. The idea is one of the greatest no brainers of all time but, their art work was a little flat. I wanted to give Eric something juicier so, I went home and started building him a better babe in photoshop.
Crif Dogs, menu front
It was the first time That I took on such a slick illustration in Photoshop. As I got deeper and deeper in, I became obsessed and ended up redesigning their entire menu with out them knowing. It helped me get through the Eric thing and it taught me allot in terms of digital image building.
Crif Dogs, double portrait
Of all the bits that I had to illustrate for this menu, the sweetest in my opinion was this. Wholesome enough to not offend the right, naughty enough to keep the left grinning. The Wacom tablet really helped me out on this one.
Kiddopottomus
Kiddo was a character that I designed for a children's product. I had kind of wonky, would be partners who basically disappeared and this poor little fella never ended up going anywhere.
Cervez Ole Logo
This design actually did get produced though in a less interesting vector form. If I'm not mistaken, 50,000 cases of the stuff was produced, and yes, I know, Bud probably spills that much a day.
Cerveza Ole, caps and medalions
Budget and criteria for this project changed often. For example; the client needed to see 9 variations of the logo in order to decide on the cap design. In the end the client chose the top center design, a wise choice as well as my favorite.
Fresco
This was an out of the ordinary sort of job for me. An independent film maker came to me and said that he needed this product for a shoot. He had an idea of what it should look like. He was very particular about the blue and yellow thing. The trouble was that in all of my searching I could find no cans of soda this color. I ended up buying a six pack of Coke. I rinsed it with paint remover, scrubbed it with steel wool and sprayed it with model car paint. I then designed the label, matched the color, printed and pasted it up. In the end the client liked the design even more than the product he was spoofing.
Sesame Street Float
This was one of my all time favorites. Another artist and I built the 1" scale model and the carpenters built the float from it as if it were the bible. It was a giant rolling puppet stage that would be absolutely packed with puppeteers. Big Bird up on top with little characters popping out of the nest, Snuffuluffugus taking up most of the TV side outrigger and Oscar, dead center of the forward staging deck. It was wonderful. We used to refer to such units as "Golden age of float building floats".
Macy's Parade characters
Most character design for the parade was all about fat and happy and above all else, entertaining a child's sensibility. It was like working in a giant toy factory geared toward building giant toys. I can't remember ever drawing something there just for the sake of drawing. Every drawing there was for the sake of building.
Acne before and after
I was interested in creating a retouching example to illustrate my ability of cleaning up less than perfect skin. I searched the Internet and found this young girl. Initially, I thought that a bit of clone tool or history brush was all that would be needed but, in the end it was more about air brush and repainting the majority of her surfaces around unaffected areas (lips, nostrils, eyes).
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