With each of my Cinefield® pieces I try to one up myself or stretch forms in some manner. For this piece, I wanted to create a work where one can go back and even with repeated viewings find new little moments. I feel it succeeded, this being the most rhythmically complex piece I have ever done (so far!).
In the past, I have not gone into certain aspects common to the creation of all Cinefield® pieces as I was conscious of it sounding too close to boasting. All the images are from photos which I personally took. I always have a rough outline of what I am doing in pencil on the paper. However, when I look at the photos I use, often limiting myself to one or two which I just print in multiple copies, I do not know what will go where. I can have two copies of the same photo and cut them up completely differently. All the pieces are very tiny. I do not know what tiny piece goes where until I am laying it down.
I work with anywhere from one to three 11×17 sheets on tiny paper confetti sized pieces. I stand at table looking at the paper w/pencil outline for design and then see what I have cut up and where I feel it should go. What this means is that every Cinefield® which represents hundreds of hours per piece, each work session is an act of complete improvisation.
This piece is 11×17 . no digital magic, just my trusty scissors and adhesive applied with brush.
A.I & art. There is still a misconception about A.I generated artwork. A.I, if you ask it to create a city scene, does not spontaneously create a work from scratch. It pulls different aspects of pre existing work by others to create a sort of frankensteined version, more often than not without permission of the original artists. Copyright your works before doing anything with them, this includes posting on social media. If your work blatantly shows the artist’s hand i.e it looks done by hand, it’s not as much a worry as mediums such as photos et al.
I just finished a new Cinefield®. It was labor intensive. A few things made this one different. I was on the road off and one again over the past few months. Normally I work on a Cini until I am done. This time I worked on it, hit the road, came back to it several times.
There was a definite apprehension about working on such a complex piece in this manner but it ended up stronger for it. The mini breaks allowed me to maintain level on concentration and intensity consistently.
The entire work is comprised from one photo which I personally took, reprinted over and over. I used my trusty scissors to hand cut each tiny piece using a brush to apply adhesive. The picture is 11×17 inches and there was no digital magic utilized.
It occurred to me only while working on this piece the nature of my Cini’s. I always have in my head beforehand the design and the effects/properties i.e this part will glow, here will be darker section etc etc. However, even as I am cutting out the tiny pieces, I do not know where they will ultimately go. It is only as I am laying a piece down that I know where I will put it. I look at each Cini as akin to a piece of music, so that makes the denser ones a sort of improvised symphony. Every Cini possesses the dichotomy of being super controlled while also improvised. It’s Charlie Parker & Schoenberg.
Lotus 11×17
A word about copyright & A.I:
A lot of my peers copyright a work only after a magazine/gallery, whatnot accepts the work. This is a big mistake, as soon as you post your work or submit it, first step in this process should be to copyright it. Generation instagram feels it a victimless crime to take what they want from the web for content beyond pics of them giving heart hands in some sunny local. There’s now plenty of examples too of artists having their works monetized by others . A copyright is not a forcefield, these things are still going to happen, but to have a copyright gives recourse should someone be using what you created without permission. It also makes having things taken down from sites/webpages far quicker too.
A.I is very misunderstood right now by many. It is not creating content so much as reconstituting things already on the web created by others. Whether it is literature or visual work and even music, it’s basically a super system which creates chimera based upon instructions. Most artists regardless of medium have some works online.
Copyright helps protect when your work goes into creating something without permission using this method.
compulsively, I read biographies on artists of every medium & era. I will even delve into people who are not my usual thing which has more than once made me become a fan. There is a commonality which transcends both nation and decade, that of practicality initially dictating artistic direction/materials & methodology.
The Impressionists are mainly talked about in relation to how they used color and lighting effects. Their importance was not just their revolutionary portrayal of light as it effected perception though. Before them, some painters had started breaking away from the pervading “must” of people being heroically portrayed ala history/myth/allegory (Courbet & Millet had started towards more naturalized milieu) they were the first to fold it into their works wholesale.
People were portrayed having an eye opener in a cafe before work, dirty nails, bad skin. Objects were portrayed in natural positions, a wife’s hat left atop a shrub, detritus atop a studio table waiting to be swept with forearm into the trash.
Part of the reason for this all was practicalities sake. Models could not always be afforded and it was easier using friends and family to pose, especially as scheduling could prove to be more convenient and often all it cost was to eventually return the favor.
These things would be enfolded into the methodology of their work and then honed. After this point, it was became their lexicon.
The same thing happened with Picasso/Braque cubist still lives, it was just things they had laying around which were part of their every day lives. Money need not be spent on flowers or any other kind of specialty objects. The only downside to this was that by the time Picasso was moving on from cubism, cubist paintings by participators in the genre more often than not had “required” objects to be included which had initially made appearances in a natural manner due to pragmatism.
Practicality is often an important initial dictator of choices an artist makes, but once the path chosen is felt to be the right one, a philosophy sprouts up. Like the methodology, it is ready to be honed, its articulation, whether to the public or just in the artist’s head, fine tuned.
The Italian painter Giorgi Morandi rarely left his city of Bologna, Italy (only three times, much later in life and then only briefly). He did not portray life in his home city but was fueled by it. He mainly did still lives. Most of these were of bottle which had just been laying around. A cursory look at his work and they seem deceptively simple. There is no bursting forth virtuosic moments to be found in his work. What makes them remarkable is that they very much look like every day objects imbued with organically occurring poetry.
A generation later and half a world away, Henry Virgona worked along a similar philosophical line. He kept the same 300 square foot Union Square studio for fifty nine years (sadly, ending in 2019). He rarely traveled, preferring to stay within the confines of the city whose fabric he was very much part of. He did still lives which showed him to be the artistic son of Morandi. He was an accomplished draftsman and this urban Antaeus did amazing candid drawings of all the people that he encountered in his daily city life, their natural poses maintain the power of the pieces. Two men, one mainly using objects, the other, people encountered every day, both showing inherent natural beauty of regular life.
I had already hit upon my philosophy and modus operandi before discovering Henry’s work. We definitely have marked differences, some of which could be generational. It is inspiring though, to see that one’s idea of serving the process is not completely out of left field but rather an evolved link in a chain which goes way back.
Most of what I work in and how I work all started out from practical considerations. I mainly use people in my life in some manner as models for convenience’s sake. When no one is around, I will paint or draw whatever catches my eye which is right in front of me. I too go for the beauty which organically comes through in every day objects or scenes.
One of my greatest pleasures in life is to conjure up, even if only with a pencil nubbin and scrap paper, either something I am seeing or talking about.
I was at a concert and observed various moments where, as much as I was enjoying the music, got caught up in people watching. Doing a sort of raw-visual-reportage after the fact, I caught the moment in a bigger sized for me piece. Aside from the size of the piece, another departure for me was the fact that I did a few studies as I wanted the crowd scene to be accurate and maintain a certain degree of looseness which already having knowledge of positioning and compositional balance would help with.
Paper Life Painting 