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Progression of my paintng styleHow introducing digital imagery to painting leads to dead ends and open doors
To simply generate images on a computer as the basis of paintings provides a flimsy means to communicate with a viewer. The quiet thrill comes when the computer image and oil paint blend into the unexpected. For some artists using a computer to paint would seem a dreadful punishment; at times, it is for me. It does not make painting easier, sometimes leading to failure and dead ends. But manipulating images on a computer generates the unpredictable, a valuable quality for a painter who wants to create painting language not before seen. My relation with the computer became confusing as I continued to use it as a starting point for paintings. Rather than steadying or entrenching my perspective or style, it continues to widen it. The computer tears subjects up, leaving both artist and viewer to patch them back together. Applied as a sketchbook, the computer’s perceptions change our own. One can legitimately claim that I preplan paintings—even down to individual brushstrokes on occasion—on the computer. I paint backwards, composing much of painting and working out some of its problems away from the canvas. Distorting images on a computer helps me see the essentials of a subject more clearly, its twisting and spindling of an image dispelling preconceptions about how to depict a subject or feeling.
Planning the Improbable: Process of Creating a PaintingI begin a painting with digital photographs from a promiscuous array of sources: friends that model for me, jpegs emailed from friends, images of masterpieces, live web cams, and other sources. I distort the digital photograph with an image manipulation program called Adobe Photoshop. There is no single button on the computer to press to create the image but a series of steps to explore, to disregard and to try differently. While keeping the qualities of paint in mind, I try to reach an unfamiliar place to paint from, a place I would not have reached on my own. When I’ve reached an image that I’m interested in painting, I print out a small image and enlarge it by hand onto canvas using a grid pattern.
A Rigid Upbringing: Early Experiments
My early paintings were rigid patterns of squares or rectangles, partly inspired by New York painter Chuck Close. But while Chuck Close worked from a photo print visually broken up by overlaying a transparent grid, I started with grids or pixels on the computer, as seen in “Face of a Woman.” I was by disappointed the flatness of rigid square and rectangle pixelation, which was too similar to the needlepoints that my grandmother would stitch and a familiar pattern to anyone who had magnified a digital image.
I began explore shapes that were less rigid, as seen in the “Suspended Figure” and “Torso.” Ribbons of the paint suggest the contours of the figure. Suggestive of the exoskeleton of an insect or of an armored samurai, I felt lost. I experienced a sinking feeling that one can’t really connect the two high voltage cables of painting and computer in meaningful ways. I couldn’t return to traditional sketching media such as graphite on paper, in which the black outline on a white background had defined representational art for millennia. I knew that I had stumbled upon a new means of representation by using computer and canvas where painting’s conventions no longer applied. Finding the Groove: Figurative PaintingsI drifted away from contouring bodily shapes with the computer in and gradually realized the opposite approach of juxtaposing odd digital shapes created dynamic, irresolvable images. Through tightly wound or improbable shapes to depict subjects, the resultant painting seemingly radiates a perpetual motion, propelled by the eye’s endless effort to solve or resolve the painting’s contradictions.
Much of my work is inspired by the models that I work with, by their appearance, body language and sometimes by their personal stories, including Travis, a minor league baseball player whom I photographed a couple of years ago and consequently became the subject of a number of larger paintings. Other models included Pat, a Filipina-American woman, and Nicolo, an African-Italian young man who endearingly declared upon first seeing my work, “è stupendo!” and modeled for photographs before returning to school in Italy.
Manipulating Traditions: Tributes to Old Masters and Occasional PortraitsIt was something of a jolt to the art world when British painter David Hockney claimed that the seventeenth century painter Caravaggio covertly employed a lens or a convex mirror to project the image of his subject directly onto canvas as the basis for his paintings. Perhaps this partly explains of my perennial fascination with Caravaggio’s masterpieces; they deliver an unprecedented, almost photographic fidelity to the human form through what was a novel visual technology in the seventeenth century. Since childhood, I had been astounded by Caravaggio’s almost photographic rendition of the human form.
In my naïve tributes to Caravaggio, I enjoyed the luxury of applying current visual technology to painting in a more open way than Caravaggio was afforded, and became comfortable with criticisms that I lacked spontaneity in my approach to painting and cheated by using a computer. Perhaps they are accurate criticisms, or perhaps the model of what a painter is has changed in my case. The computer has become another way of exploring painting and I use it candidly; an artist is better suited to sharing openly rather than to hiding techniques as if they were trade secrets. Though a seemingly antiquated exercise, I join Warhol and Close in reviving the challenge of capturing individual likenesses. Paradoxically, digitally distorting the photograph an individual’s faces helps me see the essence of likeness more clearly, perhaps through the computer’s facility to dissolve the nonessential features of a face.
That Split Second: Recent Works
Occasionally individuals associate my work with deconstructionism, a concept that more accurately applied to texts than to images. Perhaps I’m a sympathizer of deconstructionism, since one can interpret my works as meditations on direct experience rather than on explorations of meanings or concepts. My paintings don’t say or signify anything any more than classical music does.
In my mind, they suggest the split second before one completely comprehends an image. Perhaps my paintings are more of a blurring of time than of image. Get Lost: Going ForwardOne of the difficulties that a painter faces in continuing to evolve is compounded by the painter’ own productivity. Taking on a fresh approach requires setting aside one’s previously completed work and putting oneself in a position of simply not knowing what to do. It forces one back to reinventing painting from the fundamentals and learning new rules rather than self-cannibalizing by repeating previous successes.
I’m starting a commission for a New York client in unfamiliar format for me, the triptych. While using multiple panels to create a composition is a familiar motif in the weighty religious painting in the west, one can associate it with more poetic, stark east Asian screen painting. These compositions works both as individual panels and as a whole, and I’m struck by some of the Chinese ink painters of the Tang and Yuan dynasties, who paint on silk or paper; such indelible surfaces provide but only one chance for the correct brush stroke. It amazes me that they could construct a figure or a landscape with just a few deliberate strokes of ink while at the same time creating dynamic compositions. It underscores for me the lessons that less is more, and that one must set aside the calculating mind when painting. Recently the conductor of the Bangkok Opera, Somtow Sucharitkul, an extraordinary composer and writer, saw my website and asked me about creating the stage design for a future opera production in Thailand. Working in this large of a scale will be a new experience. Such projects help one grow by making me lost. If I knew ahead of time where this kind of painting would lead to, I would never have started.
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