SkiPaintings are works of art that strive to act as windows into the dance of the ephemeral and eternal. They reflect that duality in their portrayal of fleeting moments built to last as pleasing objects. The goal of the art is to inspire the viewer to take action in his/her life athletically and intellectually; to live fully with self awareness. SkiPaintings are composed of 21st century design and technology with a 16th century finish.
First I saw the mountains in the painting; then I saw the painting in the mountains. ~Chinese Proverb
SkiPaintings fuse two of my passions: skiing and painting. Skiing is physical, dynamic and in the moment. For Picasso there was bullfighting; the complex spectacle of brutality, grace and death in the afternoon. For me the issue is about man in nature and how we can understand without domination. The whole dominance over nature thing has always struck me as illusory - we do not 'conquer' mountains when we climb them, we elevate ourselves. The mountiain exists before us and after us.
I'm interested in what would normally be considered the worst aspects of commercial art. I think it's the tension between what seems to be so rigid and cliched and the fact that art really can't be this way. ~Roy Lichtenstein
Painting, by its nature, tends towards the contemplative. To maintain ones creativity in studio the artist must constantly stoke the inner fire and must be able to draw on the most intimate and personal of experience.
Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it. ~Robert Motherwell
Technically, SkiPaintings fuse digital photography, digital filmmaking techniques, digital printing and traditional oil painting. The SkiPaintings production pipeline is fully digital except where it presents itself for the tactile stroke of oil. All of the digital techniques are used to create the initial composition. The composition is then printed on canvas and sealed. This digital print then becomes the 'underpainting' for the final work. The difference between the canvas print and the final painting is analogous to the difference between a musical score and a live performance; a musical score is the underlying structure and the performance is the living work. With the SkiPaintings the ‘score’ is the underpainting which is composed from on-site digital photography, digital painting and digital printing to canvas. The oil painting is the live performance based on that score.
What counts most is finding new ways to get the world down in paint on my own terms. ~Georg Baselitz
The SkiPaintings process is also analogous to a High Dynamic Range Imaging display like that from Sunnybrook Technologies. Underpainting is simultaneously the high resolution detail of the finished work and the low bandwidth color. The oil ‘overpainting’ is both high bandwidth color and low bandwidth detail.
You have to systematically create confusion, it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life. ~Salvador Dali
Begin with experience, place yourself in it. Use the camera to record aspects of the experience. Use the camera in novel ways, don’t be precious with it, use the camera as a sketching tool, as a ‘light sampler’ as a ‘texture sampler’ and as an ‘event sampler.’ Bring the images into the computer and use the full suite of digital image tools to stitch together, color correct, cut, paste, recompose, etc. to create a composition.
Have no fear of perfection, you'll never reach it. ~Salvador Dali
Print that on canvas in the size and aspect ratio that makes sense for the technology of the day. Prepare the canvas. Paint on the canvas to bring the work to its full potential. Bring the full potential of traditional oil paintings mature tool suite to bear on the creation of the physical object. Make it sing. Frame it to enhance the intended effect.
I may seem to be passionately concerned with the 'hows' of representation, how you actually represent rather than 'what' or 'why'. But to me this is inevitable. The 'how' has a great effect on what we see. To say that 'what we see' is more important than 'how we see it' is to think that 'how' has been settled and fixed. When you realize this is not the case, you realize that 'how' often affects 'what' we see. ~ David Hockney
The intended effect of SkiPaintings is to create compelling works of timeless beauty that speak to the emotions. SkiPaintings are rugged and beautiful; they take us to the heart of winter’s dangerous beauty. SkiPaintings Yang energy is in the rugged landscapes that loom and dwarf the human scale (Yang = the active, male cosmic principle in Chinese dualistic philosophy). SkiPaintings Yin energy is in the rich color and sensual brushwork that create a beautifully seductive work of art (Yin = The passive, female cosmic principle in Chinese dualistic philosophy). For art to be meaningful over time it must also encapsulate something of its time and communicate that to others in the now and future; in that we see people skiing now, in the early 21st century. Not with early wooden skis, not (generally) in two seat chairlifts. SkiPaintings portray the world as I see and experience it. SkiPaintings portray fleeting moments using techniques that will last lifetimes. With standard appropriate care (no direct sunlight, solvents, etc), today’s creations will look the same in hundreds of years.
There are also intellectual ideas at play. An easily reproducible digital image is, by printing it on canvas, physicalized. The canvas print and over-paint create a distinctly different kind of artwork that relies on an object / viewer relationship. The viewers experience is presence dependant; in other words, the work relies on a person being physically present in front of the art work to have the full experience.
I'm always trying to create work that doesn't make viewers feel they're being spoken down to, so that they feel open participation. ~Jeff Koons
SkiPaintings are created through a series of choices; choices of what experience to record, what techniques to apply, composition and color. The issue of what techniques to employ is huge. We live in an age of vast artistic possibilities and I’ve been fortunate to have been educated in a vast array of techniques. For me to rely on only one narrow technique or to constrain myself to an artificial market restriction would be to ignore all I’ve learned and experienced of western art in the 19th and 20th centuries; in my world that’s blasphemy. My life is about seeking out and creating with the tools of my age.
Color is crucial in painting, but it is very hard to talk about. There is almost nothing you can say that holds up as a generalization, because it depends on too many factors: size, modulation, the rest of the field, a certain consistency that color has with forms, and the statement you're trying to make. ~Roy Lichtenstein
My friend Mark Wagner opened my mind to computer graphics in 1982 as we were finishing our undergraduate studies in fine arts at Pratt Institute in New York City. I was completly taken by the new technology. By 1985 I gave up traditional media and went completely digital at a time when this was a radical choice. This was when computers were text based; there were no ‘turnkey’ graphics systems on the market. My first computer graphics system was a Symbolics 3600 which was the size of a large refrigerator and, with software, cost $350,000. Mine has been a path of constant visual exploration and information dissemination. I rode various waves of computer graphics technical and aesthetic innovation from some of the earliest pioneering days all the way through computer graphics institutionalization in the largest of Hollywood studios. Now, with all of my experience intact and mature talent, its time to return to personal artistic exploration.
It’s for these reasons that SkiPaintings draw deeply on multiple processes for their creation. SkiPaintings are composed of 21st century design and technology with a 16th century finish. Digital photography, digital image processing, digital printing, sophisticated materials choices all fused with the wonderful sensuality of oil painting.
The oil paints are specifically chosen to exceed the boundaries of currently recordable and reproducible color space. This is interwoven with archival processes to create stable art works that will last for hundreds of years. This process path is specifically designed to contrast with the general ephemera of computer graphics and to join contemporary computer graphics to art history’s historical dialog.
Art cannot be modern.. Art is primordially eternal. ~Egon Schiele
SkiPaintings relationship of the camera
The camera is about the moment of experience; as such it records the transitory nature of the universe. The camera becomes the sketching tool when skiing. Standing around on a 1,000 foot high wall of snow in blowing snow and low-teen temperatures is no place for a pencil and paper. Not that paper and pencil wouldn’t be able to create something interesting but skiing is about fun and constant motion. It’s about moving fluidly across massive and often dangerous terrain. A camera in a pocket is fast, safe and accurate. I used a small Cannon Elf for the first few years and now use a slightly larger Cannon S70. These cameras are simple to use, technically sophisticated, tough and dependable. One or the other of those cameras has been with me on horseback, on rollerblades, hiking, on Hollywood nights, and of course, skiing. It’s not the tool so much as knowing the tool, understanding its limits and working with that.
You know the worst thing is freedom. Freedom of any kind is the worst for creativity. ~Salvador Dali
SkiPaintings relationship to film
SkiPaintings relationship to film is complex and works with and against many film conventions and technologies. SkiPaintings draw upon cinematic lighting techniques to create vibrant surfaces. One person at Alta said during the first SkiPaintings Exhibition, “I feel like I can just step through the frame and into the space.” Another said, “It’s so weird, they seem to be brighter than the room.” And yet another, “I swear I thought the tree moved when I was across the room.” In many ways these paintings are ‘anti-cinematic’ works in that they specifically violate several film conventions. The first is the aspect ratio. Many of the works are vertical. The use of cinematic lighting is essential in creating 'realities' that draw the viewer into these carefully composed visions. On a personal level these works explore lighting and surface treatment that I'll eventually bring back to digital and computer graphic filmmaking. Only by going back and reexamining – actually experiencing – physical painting again as an artist in the studio can a practical working understanding be attained of the effects of these color structures on human vision. The play and interplay of any and all techniques constantly stokes the engine of creativity and that fuels these works creation.
Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing. ~Salvador Dali
Color Structures and Theory of the SkiPaintings
The principle components of our vision are hue (color), saturation (color purity), value (light to dark), edge perception and motion.
Nassos Daphnos color theory.
SkiPaintings relationship to Warhol.
SkiPaintings, have a particular point of reference in relationship to the work of Andy Warhol ( http://www.warhol.org). More to come on this important point at a future date.
August 1, 2006
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