Category Archives: illustrations and painting

Russ Mills aka Byroglyphics :: dynamic layered illustrations

www.byroglyphics.com

Russ Mills is the British artists whose work is a hybrid of traditional hand-made illustration and digital processing. His illustrations are showing dynamically layered portraits focused on human physical and emotional idiosyncrasies, resulting in fascinating distorted forms that have both subtle and extreme character.

“My illustrations begin life as sketches in ink, the tool of choice is the Bic ‘fine’ because it gives me a lot more mileage than more expensive, snootier fine liners that break if you give them too much stick. The sketch is then transported into my MAC and ‘abused’ in photoshop. I use this because of the joy of multiple undo’s, plus it’s the closest I can get to painting without painting. The next stage is to turn these illustrations into big canvases. It’s taken me many attempts to get to a stage where I’m confident enough to attack canvas and leave the relative safety of the computer. As with everything else, it’s a constant learning curve.”

Felice Varini :: perspective-localized paintings

Felice Varini is the master of anamorphosis style of painting. He applies geometric shapes to architectural spaces in perspective-localized manner, an image appears in its true shape only when viewed from a very specific spot. These are extracts from Gil Dekel’s interview with Felice Varini, where he explains his artistic point of view.

G.D.: You do not paint on canvas but rather on architectural and urban landscapes such as buildings, walls, streets. Your works have only one view-point, or a vantage-point, from which the viewer can see the complete painting, which is usually a simple geometric form (a circle, square, triangle). From other view points the viewer will see ‘broken’ fragmented shapes. Why do you use this simple geometric shapes, as well as basic colors?
F.V.: If you draw a circle on a flat canvas it will always look the same. The drawn circle will retain the flatness of the canvas. This kind of working is very limiting to me, so I project a circle onto spaces, onto walls or mountain sides, and then the circle’s shape is altered naturally because the ‘canvas’ is not flat. A mountain side has curves that affect the circle, and change the circle’s geometry. So, I do not need to portray complicated forms in my paintings. I can just use the simplicity of forms, because the reality out there distorts forms in any case, and creates variations on its own accord. The same goes for colors. Usually I use one color only, and the space takes care of altering the color’s hue. For example, if I use one type of red color on a mountain side, the result is many kinds of red, depending on the mountain’s surface and the light conditions. Sunlight will affect the different areas on the surface and the same red color may become stronger or darker or clearer in certain areas, depending on how the sun rays hit the surface. The sky can be bright or dark. And if the surface has its own color or a few colours then that will affect the red that I apply on it. So, I do not need to use sophisticated colors. The reality exists with its own qualities, shapes, colours and light conditions. What I do is simply add another shape and color in response to that.

G.D. : Are your paintings meant to be permanent in the space where they were created?
F.V. : Once I make a work it can be removed and remade in a different place, as long as certain guidance is followed. I do not make an object and move it, but I move the concept, and can remake it in the new space, in the same way that there is a written play and a theatre company can stage it in a few different ‘environmental theatres’.

G.D. : Did you ever consider to construct or create the space itself?
F.V. : No, because I am not an architect. I am a painter, and painting is my main concern. I do not intend to create the reality or manipulate it. The reality is complex enough. Every day you can discover something new around you. It is an ongoing surprise looking at old churches, sub-stations, houses. There are many types of architecture around the world, with new relations and new perspectives created all the time, and once I choose a space I start a new thinking process with it.

G.D. : You work directly on space but you do not define yourself as an installation artist.
F.V. : I am a painter. I consider the reality itself to be the installation and I work on that installation with paint. The reality is an installation work which belongs to all of us and I am working with it or sometimes against it, in order to reach for new forms, new lights and new colors.

G.D. : How would you describe your relation with the space that you paint?
F.V. : With my paintings I am trying to discover more things that we cannot normally see. The vantage point of the works is really very fragile. It is a mechanical point of view in a way, it does not encompass reality. In reality our eyes move all the time, and we cannot see with our eyes like the camera does, taking snapshots. We cannot retain a freeze frame with our eyes, so it is difficult for anyone to stand at the exact vantage point of my paintings. For me, the work is outside the vantage point, where reality allows for all shapes to live. I find it very limiting to paint on a canvas which is closed within a frame of four sides. There is no relation to reality there. When I experience reality outside I do not know where it starts and where it ends. It is open, just like my work.

For more info: felicevarini.org

Tony Orrico :: Penwald 4 : unison symmetry standing

Tony Orrico‘s work is breaking down the barriers between choreography and visual art. He is using movement as an instrument to create two-dimensional work and live performed installation. Movement, measurement, gravity, energy, chaos, efficiency, duration, limitation, repetition and isolation are recurring themes in his work. Sometimes the spectator is merely an observer of the artist’s slightly introverted exploit, at other times he becomes involved in the performance.

Penwald 4: unison symmetry standing is a three-hour performance in which Orrico draws on a white wall with perfectly orchestrated bilateral movements. Slowly but surely a densely woven symmetrical image emerges, which bears a strong resemblance to the two halves of our brain. Three performances from this project can be experienced live during Flux/S art festival in Eindhoven, Holland.

Tommaso Nervegna :: Iannis Xenakis, Notre Dame du Haut

Iannis Xenakis (Ιωάννης Ιάννης Ξενάκης) (May 29, 1922 – February 4, 2001) was a Greek modernist composer, musical theoretician and architect. He is regarded as an important and influential composer of the twentieth century. His music theory book Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition is regarded as a very important, if esoteric, work of 20th century music theory.

“By 1979, he had devised a computer system called UPIC, which could translate graphical images into musical results”, wrote Andrew Hugill in 2008. “Xenakis had originally trained as an architect, so some of his drawings, which he called ‘arborescences’, resembled both organic forms and architectural structures.” These drawings’ various curves and lines that could be interpreted by UPIC as real time instructions for the sound synthesis process. The drawing is, thus, rendered into a composition. Mycenae-Alpha was the first of these pieces he created using UPIC as it was being perfected. In 1982 Xenakis developed his Music Timbre and Cadence Scale which is used quantifying musical styles in modern music.

In conversation, Iannis Xenakis frequently distanced himself from being seen in too strict terms – like many other composers for whom method and structure were the easiest aspects of music to discuss verbally, he sees the role of such things as relative. One way to envisage this approach is that the method constitutes a thematic germ, a starting-point, and from there the normal musico-aesthetics, personal obsessions and practical considerations play their normal role in finishing and shaping the piece. Indeed from the 1970s onwards Xenakis’ use of this method became deeply assimilated into his general musical thinking and he reports in interviews from that time that the strict application of statistical processes was no longer necessary to produce the results he was looking for.

Xenakis appeared easily bored in interviews when people attempted to take an overly simplistic view of him as ‘complex’ – the various clichés surrounding him appeared to greatly annoy him in interview and he would frequently make recourse to the wider aesthetics of music in general and the other arts, in order to contextualise his contributions to music making. In a sense his early statements about “looking at music statistically” were a response to what he saw as the mistake of placing too much emphasis on the likely benefits of applying methodology too rigorously. It is also important to note, however, that this does not constitute any true dichotomy between Xenakis and his peers – the application of single-minded rigour to composition in post-war music was relative and momentary, and as with his own work, the poetic and aesthetic significance of the gesture as a modern equivalent to programme-music, as well as the vital role played by musicality and music-editing/shaping has been widely undervalued in favour of simplistic characterisations of such music as purely intellectual.” (Source: Wikipedia)

Official website: Iannis Xenakis

let the music play

 

These music scores could be performed aurally, visually, kinesthetically, synesthetically, interactively, literally, symbolically or philosophically.

 



                                               Randy Raine-Reusch :: 'Leaves 2' (1993)




                  George Crumb :: 'Makrokosmos II - 12, Agnus Dei [Symbol] Aquarius' (1973)




Murray Schäfer::'Divan Shams Tabriz' for orchestra, seven singers and electronic sounds ('77)




               George Crumb :: 'Makrokosmos I - 12, Spiral Galaxy [Symbol] Capricorn' (1973)

Etsuko Ichikawa :: Traces of the Molten State

Etsuko Ichikawa: “My work is a continuing investigation of what lies between the ephemeral and the eternal. Moment and memory, absorption and evaporation, light and shadow are some of the triggers that inspire me and relate to my work. My “glass pyrographs” are made by drawing hot molten glass, which is one way to capture and eternalize the immediacy of a moment, while my hanging and floating installations are about ever-changing states of mind.”

www.etsukoichikawa.com