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Interview with Craig Mildrexler

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I have been working on an article for Craig Mildrexler. I find it inspiring to see in Craig a real-life example of someone turning around his career to follow his artistic calling. Please see the complete TBLM article below. The images in this post are not related to Craig or his work, other than that they are of Genoa, the city that he visited recently.

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This week, I had an opportunity to interview Craig Mildrexler, a Kansas City – based painter, who creates “artwork that changes when viewed in a different light…just like people!”

Craig specializes in abstracts. He enjoys the freedom that comes from having no boundaries on the artist’s imagination. Abstract paintings are open to individual interpretation, and in that sense, they directly involve viewers in the creative process. Craig views each painting as an experiment, sometimes making the images look like flowers or stars and nebulae.

Craig’s medium is neon (fluorescent) acrylic paint on masonite board. Sometimes, he mixes fluorescent paints with regular acrylic paints to achieve a 3D effect – the non-fluorescent paint turns dark when viewed under UV light, creating an impression of depth. Mixing the two types of pigments allows him to creates two compositions in one painting. For example, mixing blue neon colour with a regular (non-fluorescent) yellow acrylic produces a green colour when viewed under white light, but under the black light, the yellow hue disappears, and the colour becomes blue. Neon and regular acrylics mix perfectly, and mostly hold the colour of the regular acrylic under the white light, because the florescent component of the neon paint is not fully activated.

Craig applies the paint using a variety of tools, from different types of brushes to knives to toothpicks to his fingers. He often uses a hair dryer to spread the paint on the board or lets gravity do this work. Sometimes, he uses a back side of a masonite board, which has a rough texture, to smudge the paint around the working surface.

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I asked Craig about one practical advice that he could share with someone, who would want to try his technique. His tip was to add water to the paint – different amounts to each colour. As the paint dries, the colours separate and crack differently to create interesting 3D effects, especially in the neon colours.

Craig paints under regular white light, so he sees the “black light” effects for the first time only after the painting is finished. Relying on his extensive experience, Craig can create the desired fluorescent effects without immediately seeing them. Still, he admits, when the result is revealed under the black light, he often cannot help but chuckle in surprise. In fact, this element of surprise is what particularly attracts him to black light painting.

Craig grew up in an artistic family: both his parents were artists. Although he never formally studied painting and has never taken an art class, Craig often watched his father paint. Craig went to college for a business degree and subsequently worked as an accountant until approximately 2001. During that time, he painted recreationally, as a means of relief from his stressful job. In 1990, to take his mind off the work, Craig followed the example of his parents and painted his first and still personal favourite picture – a little square that is now hanging in his studio. As he was working on it, Craig noticed that he was so focussed on the process that all his stress seemed to disappear. He then painted another picture, and another one, an another one…. Since then, he created over 5,000 paintings. He still considers it an epiphany to finding in art something completely unique and different from his prior interests by just stumbling across this powerful experience and trying to replicate it.

Eventually, Craig decided to paint professionally. He really enjoyed it and was encouraged by good sales of his work. In 2010, he discovered for himself neon paints and received a very enthusiastic response of people, who saw his work at art shows. His approach to developing his craft has always been experimental – using trial and error and learning from his mistakes.

Craig’s main influence in art is his father, Bob Mildrexler, who was a prominent artist in Kansas City in 1940s and until he passed away in 1998. Bob created over 10,000 paintings in his career, and always enjoyed experimenting with the painting process.

Craig himself has had a significant influence on the art community in Kansas City, the United States and internationally. Over the past ten years, he has taken part in more than 100 juried art fairs and exhibited his work in many galleries, restaurants and private businesses across the US. In November 2015, Craig attended the First International Black Light Painting show in Genoa, Italy among leading black light artists from Italy, France, Russia, Poland and Brazil. Along with these high-profile international activities, Craig contributes to the art community in his home town by giving away an original painting each Friday. Currently, Craig is planning a Black Light Painting Show in Kansas City, which will take place in the summer of 2017. It will feature the works of artists from Europe, Indonesia, South America and the United States.

To see more of Craig’s work, please visit his Facebook page: Craig Mildrexler’s “Power and Black Light Art”.

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Travel photography gear: to be or not to be nimble

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It seems that every time I am about to travel somewhere, I debate whether to take a particular piece of photo gear, e.g. a tripod, a certain lens, a flash, etc. The reason I hesitate to take everything that I may potentially need is that lugging around a heavy backpack really detracts from the experience of travel, and can even be detrimental to the photography aspect of it (e.g. it can limit your access to certain cites, or it can make you tired, so you would be more likely to miss photo opportunities). It really makes a lot of sense to be nimble, to borrow a term from Derrick Story.

When considering whether to take a particular piece of equipment on a trip or not, if I really want to be systematic about making the decision, I find it useful to apply a principle that Cal Newport describes in his book “Deep Work”. The idea is that while any tool has some potential to be useful, it often has drawbacks. The logical thing to do is to use the tool only if the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

In the case of travel photography, for example, if I foresee an opportunity to shoot a sporting event, I take the 1Dx body because of its great autofocus speed, despite the relative bulk. However, if I will have only a few hours to explore the new location, my iPhone would allow me much greater mobility, while still giving an opportunity to capture some images.

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What to do when you become good enough

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I wrote a blog post for The Black Light Magazine on the topic of concentrating on perfecting one’s craft vs. broadening it’s scope (see below). This question of whether niching down in a particular area of specialization is beneficial or detrimental in the long run is not new, and it comes up again and again in discussions related to photography in particular.

This time, I find an interesting connection between perfecting one’s skill and a sense of dissatisfaction with it’s level. As Randy Paterson explains in “How to Be Miserable”, striving for continuing self-improvement can, in fact, be detrimental, as it is related to the sense of “I am not enough”. He suggests leapfrogging this potential trap by asking a question: “What would I do if, for the sake of argument, I was good enough?” In other words, would we still work on improving a particular skill, for example, if we were to deem it to be sufficiently high (whatever “sufficiently high” means)?

The answer is that probably we would not keep obsessing about improving the skill (and facing the law of diminishing returns), but instead apply the skill in a new area, or start developing a new skill.

Perhaps, one way to maintain the balance between the depth and the breadth is to do the deep work (to borrow the term from Cal Newport) as default mod of operation, but every now and then pretending that whatever depth has been achieved is “good enough” and switching to a new area (e.g. starting a new research topic, learning a new painting technique, photographing different subjects, etc.)

As a reference, here is the original post for TBLM:

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In most creative endeavors, we are faced with a dilemma of focusing on perfecting an existing skill vs. exploring new techniques. This is true dilemma in the sense that there is not correct answer. Instead, a certain balance between breadth and depth must be maintained.

This issue comes up particularly often when we work in a relatively new field. Black light photography, or fluorescent art in general is one such field. It is still relatively new and even considered to be a niche among artists. As a result, not many references exist for basic lighting techniques, gear, specifics of posing and makeup, etc. When we apply a new technique, the question that automatically comes up is whether to try a similar approach again in the next photo shoot in order to refine the approach or to try something different, because a vast area remains unexplored.

There is a certain satisfaction and a sense of safety in staying with a familiar methodology. First, the probability of success is higher than with something that has never been tried before. Second, if you diligently work on a something long enough (about 10,000 hours, in fact, according to Anders Ericsson), you will become one of the top experts in the world in that thing that you’ve been working on, and that level of expertise is usually quite valuable.

Still, true innovation (and artists are innovators, or at least would like to believe so themselves), requires stepping out of one’s comfort zone, stretching beyond one’s current abilities. In order to grow, we need to step down from the level we’ve achieved in our niche and become beginners again in a different field. Besides, doing something different from what you’ve been doing up to this point (even if it hasn’t been 10,000 hours yet) is just fun.

So regardless of what you are doing at the moment – concentrating of honing your craft or blazing the trail into the uncharted territory – you are doing the right thing, as long as you are not completely ignoring the other side of the creative process.

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On airbrushing and body painting: interview with an artist

Our last photoshoot for The Black Light Magazine involved some serious production effort, including the work of two models and two makeup artists. In addition to learning a lot about black light photography, I am discovering that some of the most interesting and educational work for me personally is the follow-up writing of the blog posts describing these photoshoots. In this case in particular, I had an opportunity to interview one of the artists. We talked over Skype and went into the details of the airbrushing technique, in which I have a personal interest through my fascination with the painting of model tanks and dioramas. Below is the post that I wrote for TBLM.

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Following a recent Tron-themed photoshoot featuring the spectacular makeup and body painting of Jennifer Walton (Jenny Jenn on Facebook), we had a chance to chat with her to find our more about her background, inspirations and current work. For me personally, it was an incredibly educational experience to see Jenny use her airbrush to apply fluorescent patterns that she created on the spot to the model’s body. I found that her technique was both versatile and restrained – combination that produced a strong visual impact while retaining a unique personal style.

When asked to describe her work in a couple of words, Jenny replied that most of her art was airbrushed, and that she created both canvasses and body paintings.

Jenny’s artistic education involve studying graphic design in college, but she began drawing when she was a child. Jenny loved art for as long as she can remember, and she had many opportunities to pursue it by going to art camps, shows, etc. At grade 10, her art teacher encourage Jenny to learn drawing in pen. The fact that one cannot easily erase pen drawings teaches the artist to work with any mistakes she might make along the way. Jenny found this skill crucial to building her confidence and ultimately to enjoying drawing and painting.

As far as her biggest achievement to-date, Jenny considers it to be her work with Evan Biddell, the winner of the first Project Runway Canada, at the Toronto Arts & Fashion Week last April (2015). Jenny introduced the black light-activated florescent paints to create reptile-skin patterns on the clothes and the models’ bodies. The effects have not been used in the industry until that point, and the collaboration of Jenny and Evan earned them considerable international acclaim.

Jenny has been perfecting her body painting techniques for the past seven years. She became involved in it by entering a body painting competition without any prior experience or knowledge in this genre. She did all her work by a paintbrush and ended up winning the competition. This win led to her getting a job that involved painting fifteen performers at a festival. The winning brushed body-painting took Jenny five-and-a-half hours of non-stop work, so she was naturally concerned about speeding up the painting process.

Someone suggested to Jenny to use an airbrush, so she proceeded to order one on the Internet. Using it turned out to be so addictive that it became Jenny’s main tool. From learning the basic techniques to perfecting advanced layering and making her own stencils, she gradually developed her unique style. Jenny particularly enjoys seeing her characters literally come to life, when she paints them on a live model. This aspect of human interaction is what draws Jenny to body painting.

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Last year, Jenny started to incorporate more free-hand (rather than stencilling) airbrushing into her work, which has become her main focus. Her most current work was a painting of a woman’s face that she created for the promotion campaign of The Conscious Goddess Festival, a creation of her friend Tamara Broughton. Jenny reflects on this work as being particularly challenging because it involved a new subject and also because of her personal connection with the project. Despite the challenges, or perhaps because of them, Jenny was pleased to see an improvement of her technique, compared to her earlier works.

Jenny’s artistic influences include Gustav Klimt and Alex Gray as well as the airbrush masters Terry Hill and Javier Soto. Last year, Jenny attended an intensive course on airbrushing techniques in Las vegas, where she met Jonathan Pantaleon, whose work has made a big impression on her.

In conclusion, I asked Jenny to share one piece of advice with someone, who might like to get involved in airbrushing. Her advice was: “Make sure your airbrush is always very clean.” This is, perhaps, not surprising, but Jenny emphasized that the very basic techniques, e. g. taking apart the airbrush for cleaning, which involves handling tiny, precision-manufactured details, is what many novice artists find most stressful. She also suggested developing a habit of always blowing air through the tip of airbrush periodically during painting in order to keep the tip clean during the work session. Blowing air through the tip is easily accomplished if one uses a dual-action airbrush, where pushing down on the trigger controls the flow of air, while pulling back on it controls the paint flow. Jenny also finds it helpful to use a compressor that can continuously sustain airflow, even when the brush is not in use. This helps her to avoid splatters at the beginning of the strokes.

In terms of the basic techniques, Jenny emphasized the importance of mastering the “dagger stroke” for freehand airbrushing. This stroke produces a line that starts thick and gradually tapers off. Learning how to execute it smoothly in every direction is challenging, but it makes a tremendous difference in the technical level of one’s painting.

In a typical painting session, Jenny uses two Iwata airbrushes (one for light and one for dark paints) attached to an Iwata Smart Jet compressor.

We have been incredibly lucky to have an opportunity to collaborate with Jenny on several projects, and we look forward to tapping into her creativity showcasing more of her work in the future. In the mean time, she can be found on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/jenny.jenn.923

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Why bother

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Achieving expertise, perhaps even mastery, in some area is rewarding in many ways, and the process of getting to the highest level is fascinating by itself. However, as Anders Ericsson, the author of “Peak”, points out, if our notion of what top-level expertise is becomes relative, i.e. we become competitive with other people, we quickly realize that becoming better than everyone else, or even better than, say, 90% of people, may not be possible to achieve in a lifetime under our specific circumstances.

The natural question is then, “Why bother trying to get to the top at all?” And this is an important question, because, as Ericsson argues, motivation is the grease that makes the mechanism of training working.

A possible answer that resonates with me personally is that we should continue to train in order to become better teachers for others, particularly, for our own children. Even if the student’s level of performance is objectively higher than that of the teacher (e.g. the student is a better golf player, because she is younger, stronger and more flexible), the teacher still plays a crucial role, because his/her experience in the field extends beyond the particular case of the given student. A good teacher has sufficient expertise in the subject and sufficient breadth of experience to be able to provide relevant feedback on the student’s training. And this feedback is what makes the difference between deliberate practice, in Ericsson’s terms, and mechanical repetition of already known patterns. Conversely, mindless repetition (not in the sense of the Japanese mushin, but opposite to deliberate practice) is what makes most people stagnate at a mediocre level.

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Monkey see, monkey scoot

Scooters are a big thing among my daughter’s preschool friends. Some time ago, we offered to buy her one, but she was not interested. Then one day, she saw a friend riding a Micro kickboard, and she could not wait to get one of her own. The next day, she rode it to school, and the following day, two more girls convinced their parents to buy the very same scooters (including the colour – it seems that pink and purple are the only two choices worth considering for four- and five-year old girls).

Naturally, a scooter had to be incorporated into the illustrated story that my daughter and I are making with a lot of help from my wife, who is the main actress in the re-enactment, playing the roles of nearly all characters (sometimes, simultaneously.

Here is the scooting episode.

“The Girl lent her scooter to the Baby Dinosaur, so that she could keep up with her friends. It was a purple scooter, with pink handlebars – Ella’s favourite colours! It turned out that Ella was a natural at scooting. It was handy to have four legs – when one of them got tired of pushing, she would witch to one of the other three.”

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Brush and spray

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This week, I have been working on a blog post for The Black Light Magazine to follow up on a recent photoshoot, where we had an opportunity to observe and compare the work of two makeup artists working side-by-side and using very distinct techniques. This is a replication of this blog post with some additional notes

Both of the artists applied full body makeup using fluorescent paints to female models, but one of them, Jenny, used airbrush and stencils, while the other one, Cory, applied a more conventional brushwork. Each painting technique had unique features, required different posing approaches from the models, and ultimately resulted in very distinct photographs.

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The main difference between the two techniques, besides the fact that airbrushing has a distinct advantage of covering large areas quickly, is that spraying thin layers of paint creates an illusion of mixing the colours. The spray actually creates a pattern of small dots of colour, which the “mixed” optically. In other words, the viewer perceives them as mixed. This effect is similar to what Georges Seurat and other pointillists explored during the golden years of post-impressionism.

Cory did not mix the florescent paints, which would reduce brightness of the colours and could potentially affect the fluorescent properties (a feature that would be interesting to investigate experimentally some time in the future). Instead, he applied the paint in discrete, thick brushstrokes, which created a van Gogh-like effect. He made use of the patterns of brushstrokes, creating the sense of motion by making them meander along the model’s body. In fact, the model recognized this feature of finished painting and skillfully utilized it in her posing by exaggerating the undulations of the painted patterns in her dance-like moves (which, incidentally, had to be performed very slowly to accommodate the slow shutter speeds that we used).

Looking at the finished body paintings, the inherent imperfections of the hand-painted pattern gave it a unique, one-of-a-kind look. On the other hand, I am intrigued by the possibilities of airbrushing, because it allows quick coverage of large areas and layering and optical mixing of otherwise immiscible pigments. In the case of body painting, the “mechanical” style of the airbrushed makeup creates an interesting contrast with the natural features of the model. In general, perhaps, a combination of stencilled and free-hand airbrush painting can give the artist the best of both worlds – the efficiency of the airbrush as the tool and the human touch of the painter who wields it.

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Bare essentials

Derek Sivers gave this advise on making a hit TED talk: cut out everything that is not surprising. The audience always wants to learn something. Even is their goal is pure entertainment, as it is often the case with cartoons or children’s books, there must be something novel in the storyline and/or in the artwork to keep the readers/viewers engaged.

My four-year-old daughter’s make-believe games, which are the basis for the picture book I have been making, are incredibly repetitive. Every day, and sometimes several time a day, the story of the hatching egg and its caretakers starts at almost the same point. There is no “Previously in the show..” type of summary. For children, this repetition is essential for training the memory. At the same time, as my daughter is re-playing the story over an over again, little details are being added, which eventually bring the characters to life, make them her own.

In the picture book, I am trying to maintain the balance between expressing my daughter’s childish, in the best sense of the word, approach to storytelling (keeping the characters and their appearance consistent) and maintaining the viewers’ interest by either introducing new characters or developing the main ones by showing their traits (clumsiness, resourcefulness, etc.)

Here is the latest episode:

“Ella was brave little Dinosaur for a one-day-old, so she left the eggshell and took the first step. Unfortunately, her legs were still not strong enough to hold her, so no matter how hard she tried, she ended up on the ground. But she wanted to play and run around with her friends so much!

The Girl had an idea: maybe Ella would run before she could walk after all!”

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Ups and downs

Any serious athlete would tell that motivation is easy to attain but difficult to sustain. This is true in creative activities too. For example, writers are famous for elaborate rituals they design to avoid procrastination and to ensure regular productivity. And quantity is indeed important if we hope to generate quality at some point. Adam Grant gives an example in his “Originals“, showing that most popular composers were also the most productive, with very rare exceptions.

Sustaining motivation in the audience is a slightly different matter. In order to keep the readers/viewers evaded, they should be exposed to a more-or-less continuous flow of material that is, at the same time, familiar and novel.

My four-year-old daughter and I are working through these issues in the picture book that we are making up (she creates the storyline through her make-believe games that she plays with her mom and I sketch it up). Sometimes, our motivation wavers, but we know that if we keep going, interesting things are bound to happen, just as in the book itself. Here is the latest episode about the newborn dinosaur discovering the world and her place in it.

“Baby Ella wanted to play with her new friends, but first, she had to learn how to walk. That was not easy, especially because she didn’t want to leave her cozy eggshell. The Girl gently nudged her to place one foot on the ground…”

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Social network

In the picture story that I have been drawing in collaboration with my daughter, based on her make-believe games, new characters are introduced almost on every page. Perhaps, this is not surprising, since the main character is a baby dinosaur, who, being a child like her creator, is being exposed to the world for the first time and is building her social network. Here is the latest episode, which I drew, very fittingly, as my daughter was playing at her friend’s birthday party.

“The Baby Bunny also came to visit the Baby Dinosaur. The Bunny and the Baby Squirrel waited patiently until Ella woke up and showed her the presents they brought: the carrot and the flower.

The friends wanted to play with Ella, but she had to remind them that she was only one-day-old and although she could was exceptionally smart and could speak perfectly well, she was still not sure if she could walk.”

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