My thoughts on the craft, the process and the subjects
“Mommy and Daddy Dinosaurs were very grateful to the Girl for taking care of the Egg and protecting it from the Cat. They were delighted to see their Baby Dinosaur. After much thinking about different names, they named her Ella.”
My daughter is taking a progressively more active role in our collaborative making of the story of the Girl and the Egg. She specifies the colors of the characters and asks every day whether I have sketched the next panel.
Here is the long-awaited hatching episode of our story:
“When the shell finally cracked open, it was not a chick, who peered from it, but a curious, purple-coloured, Baby Dinosaur with blue spots. The Girl was delighted and danced her happiest dance, which she learned just the day before.”
Fluorescent painting is a relatively new medium that is rapidly gaining popularity. With it, artists no longer have to rely on reflected fight, but can augment the viewer’s experience by using UV-activated fluorescence of certain pigments. By itself, the effect is not new: after all, we are all familiar with electro-luminescence of computer screen. But as I found out after visiting an exhibit of a local artist a couple of weeks ago, seeing a fluorescent canvas up close is different from viewing picture on an LED screen. Below is a blog post that I wrote for The Black Light Magazine after the show.
It is not surprising that Jack’s rendering of computer-generated worlds involves substantial amount of calculations. After all, it is the pattern of computational precision that we, as viewers, recognize in his wireframe landscapes. What I found most interesting, though, is the subtle contrast between the “digital” nature of the subjects and the “analog” painting technique, which becomes apparent upon close examination of Jack’s canvases. Tiny imperfections of the canvas fibers affect how the paint glows under ultraviolet (UV) light, and this texture adds a unique and interesting dimension to the paintings.
At the exhibit that we attended a couple of weeks ago, the paintings were lit by relatively broad-band LED lights, which shed a significant amount of visible (blue) light on the paintings, in addition to UV light, which is essential for activating the fluorescent paint and creating the glow-in-the-dark effect. Having some visible light was helpful not only for navigating the otherwise dark gallery, but also for highlighting the texture and making the experience of the paintings more interactive and immediate than viewing a computer-generated image would. In other words, while the computer-like precision was the unifying theme, it is the strategic lack of perfection, both in the media and the lighting, that added the human touch to the paintings.
“One day, the Girl noticed that the Egg started shaking. Then, tiny cracks appeared on its surface. The Girl held her breath in anticipation.”
Here is today’s episode.
“The Girl was always there to protect the Egg. The Cat had to retreat, leaving the Egg alone.”
My daughter’s make-believe stories often involve a nemesis, in the form of a mischievous cat, from which the main character, played by herself, needs to be protected. So here is the continuation of the illustrated story of the Girl and the Egg.
“It was not an easy job – taking care of the Egg. It had to be kept warm. Not too hot and not too cool, but just right. Bit most importantly, the Girl had to watch out for the Cat, who was always looking to steal the Egg when the Girl was not watching.”
I thought that it would be a pity not to capture the development of my daughter’s make-believe games, so I decided to add a bit of focus to my short motorcycle rides by sketching some of the episodes as I drink my cappuccino. So today the story starts, as my bike is parked in view of Mt. Baker, on a fantastic sunny afternoon at the Oak Bay Marina cafe.
“Once there was a Girl, and on a particularly sunny day, she had a very important job: to take care of a great white Egg. The Egg was smooth and shiny, and the Girl didn’t know what was inside. She could hear tiny tweeting noises coming from the egg, and she hoped that it was a chick, who would become her friend.”
Making your work public is an integral part of a creative process. The concept is simple and hardly new, but actually making it a reality is not trivial. A work of art is inherently an expression of something that the artist closely associates with, but exhibiting or performing a piece of art is an equivalent of a public statement. In this sense, publishing your work, as any form of public communication is a skill that can be developed and that requires regular practice.
There are many well-known benefits of showing our creations to other people. Artists, who regularly exhibit, share, perform or otherwise publish their work develop a sense of connection with the audience that becomes activated even at the earliest stages of the process. Publishing our work also allows us to develop an ability to receive feedback, both positive and negative, and use it in a constructive way. And of course, if you create and share something new, there is an exciting possibility to build a community around you and your art (not that being in the centre of it actually matters – often, making a contribution to an existing area is most rewarding.)
My photography partners and I are starting a new publication in the area of fluorescent art called “The Black Light Magazine“. This project is exciting, because the area is new, both in general and for me personally. One experiment that I tried recently is digital re-creation of a fluorescent painting effect.
The photographed fluorescent paint or makeup has substantially higher brightness levels, compared to the areas of the image that are not painted. Also, the transitions from bright areas to the dark ones are abrupt. In other words, the tonal contrast is high, but only at the edges of the painted patterns. Inside the non-fluorescent, dark regions and within the the bright paint strokes, there is no significant variation of the brightness levels (i.e. the tonal contrast is low).
In terms of colour, popular fluorescent pigments are “neon” variations of yellow, red and green and their derivatives (shades of orange and yellow-green). The fluorescence effect is based on the pigment material absorbing the light energy at a certain wavelength (e.g. In the UV range, which is invisible to human eye) and releasing it at a different (visible) wavelength. The fluorescent light has a narrow band of frequencies, meaning that there is almost no variation in the color within an individual brush stroke.
Ability to digitally reproduce the glow-in-the-dark effect would be useful from creative perspective, because there are certain types of photographs, where UV lighting (or fluorescent painting, for that matter) would not be practical to implement. For my experiment, I used one of my favorite rugby shots as a reference and sketched over it, sampling the colors from a studio photo of a model in fluorescent makeup shot under UV light. I did the sketch in the ProCreate app on an iPad. For more refined painting in the future, I plan to work on tweaking the brush dynamics (which is better accomplished in Photoshop) to make the individual strokes more “alive”, i.e. varying in thickness and possibly transparency (although current fluorescent paint do not show a lot of transparency variation) along their length.
Presentation standards change. I have been doing research presentations for many years, but every now and then I find it useful to go back to basics in terms of learning the craft. Otherwise, there is a danger of falling behind times, coming off as archaic and not meeting the expectations of the audience.
Recently, I had a chance to revise my approach when giving a seminar talk at Politecnico di Milano on the use of flow visualization techniques in fluid mechanics. This is my core area of research, so presenting on this topic is almost automatic. That is why I wanted to change things up a bit.
Incidentally, this trip to Milan provided another illustration of the dynamic nature of presentation in the form of design of store windows and product packaging, for which the city is famous. I had been in Milan only about six months earlier, and during this time, there have been many changes. I had a refreshing feeling that applied art is truly alive, and people genuinely take interest in it, not only for the sake of consumerism, which the art undoubtedly serves, but also for the sake of pure aesthetics.
Perhaps, photographers and artists would do well by making a deliberate point in changing around the style of how they present their art – from a re-designing the look of their websites to actually pushing the boundaries of their creative process and exploring new subjects or techniques.
