Kansas City, Missouri

May 18-20, 2012

From their site:

Spectrum Fantastic Art Live! is a natural extension of the eighteen-year success of the award-winning Spectrum art annual. As an international melting pot of talent, Spectrum: The Best In Contemporary Fantastic Art has come to symbolize the vibrancy, diversity, and overall excellence of the creative community

See you there!

http://www.spectrumfantasticart.com/spectrumfantasticartlive/

Over the holidays I painted a commercial assignment in what I call my New Style (improvisational, emotional, painterly, unresolved).  The piece was large (~30″x40″), painted in acrylics on illustration board.  I’m not at liberty to share the complete image yet, but here are some notes I took at the end of the process:

1. REFERENCE:  I took reference photos for the main figure, but printed them out in black & white at low resolution.  That was insufficient.  When I printed them out large and in color, at high resolution, they solved lots of difficulties I was having.

2. TENSION:  When I deviate from my reference, I struggle to make convincing decisions.  On the other hand, when I conform to my reference, I struggle to keep the dynamism of the sketch.  There’s a tension between reference and sketch that I must anticipate and constantly observe in future paintings.  Part of the excitement and freedom of painting in this new way means accounting for such challenges in real-time.  I don’t know that they can all be solved through preparation.  The success of this way of painting is a direct result of this struggle.

3. LIGHTING:  Where preparation does make a huge difference is in lighting.  That’s the primary issue I wrestle with when improvising.  I find dramatic, convincing lighting is almost impossible to invent fully.  In future, I must get good, consistent lighting reference on all the main elements of the piece, and limit invention to under 50%.  Referenced lighting must sell the lighting for things which are invented.

4. SKETCH:  A solid sketch is helpful, not just in preparation, but as a reminder, when I’m neck-deep in painting, of how the piece is intended to feel.  When the painting gets stale, pull out the sketch and compare.  I did some additional sketches mid-way through this piece to loosen up my eye and hand.  It helped re-ground me… helped me be decisive when pushing the painting away from the reference.

San Diego Convention Center
111 W. Harbor Drive
San Diego, CA 92101

Look for me in the Artist’s Alley with fellow painters Scott Hampton, John van Fleet and Durwin Talon.

http://www.comic-con.org/cci/

The fifth annual IlluXCon symposium will take place in Altoona, PA on November 8-11, 2012.

ALTOONA HERITAGE DISCOVERY CENTER
1421 12th Ave.,
Altoona, PA 16601 (main show location)

http://www.illuxcon.com/

Here’s one of those elements.  I’ve come to the first scene featuring the mighty dreadnaut “Holy Song of the Prophet.”  I had already built a few ships, notably our hero’s battlecruiser “Devout Tiger”, but nothing this massive.  So, instead of drawing or painting this morning, I sat down with Goggle Sketch-up and built  Holy Song.  Here she is, with the Devout Tiger for scale.  The Tiger is 420 meters long as compared to the Song’s 1160 meters.  The mightiest ship in my little fleet is ready to make her debut!

Interstellar Scales

Parsec (pc)

- 1,000 parsecs is 1 kpc (kiloparsec).

- one parsec is approximately 3.262 light years.

- the center of the Milky Way is 8 kpc (26,000 ly) from the Earth, and the Milky Way is about 30 kpc (97,800 ly) across.

- the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), the most distant object visible to the naked eye, is a little under 800 kpc (2,600,000 ly) away from the Earth.

Lightyear (ly)

- (9.4×10¹² km)

- 9,460,730,472,581 km 

- 63,240 astronomical units

- 0.3 parsecs

Distortus Vicis (DV)

- roughly two light years

- 1.9×10¹³ km

Astronomical Unit (au)

- The currently accepted value of the AU is 149 ,597 ,871 Kilometers (about 150 million) 

- (1.5×10⁸  km)

Sublumina Hora (SH)

- 75,000,000 km

- roughly half an astronomical unit 

Particle Density

- HEx shuts down at ~5 particles/cm³.   

- Sublight Drives shut down at ~25 particles/cm³

 - Q-beam fire grows increasingly inaccurate (but more powerful) as the target point approaches 25 ppc.  It shuts down altogether at ~30 ppc.

- Interstellar Medium (ISM) = average of  1 particle per cm³

- Zodiacal Cloud (out to 5 au from the sun) = Varies by system and closeness to the sun. 

- Molecular Clouds (a variety:  Giant, Small, Dwarf and  High Latitude) = 

- High Latitude (“above and below” the galactic disk) = 30 particles per cm³

Iron Empires Geography

- Dimensions of the Iron Empires, c. 587 HE = 4000 ly (n/w) x 3200 ly (e/w)

- The Iron Empires’ most distant frontier (from Earth) = 1600 ly (North)

- Area of the Darikahn Empire = roughly 2000 ly (not counting x/y axis)

- The Human Federation’s most distant frontier (from Earth) = 10,000 ly (North), 18,000 ly (to the easternmost sectors in Veil Prefecture)

Galactic Distances

- Diameter of the milky way = 100,000 ly

- Thickness (Outside the core) = roughly 1000 ly

- Earth to the Galactic Core = 26,000 ly

- Orion Arm = arm containing Earth

- Perseus Arm = arm 6,400 ly to galactic south of Earth

- Sagittarius Arm = arm 7-8,000 ly to galactic north of Earth

Stellar Neighborhood:  Including the sun, there are currently 66 stars comprising 50 systems known to lie within 16 ly (8DV) of Earth.

- Proxima Centauri = 4.2 ly (2.1 DV) away from Earth.

Nebulae (distance from earth) 

 Sagittarius Arm:

- Lagoon Nebula (4100 ly) – this is 2500 ly north of the Urfan border

- Trifid Nebula (5400 ly)

- Eagle Nebula  (7000 ly)

Orion Arm:

- Eta Carina Nebula (~8000 ly)

- Orion Nebula (1500 ly) – this is 1100 ly inside Vaylen space

- Rosette Nebula (5200 ly)

There’s an African proverb:  ”when death finds you, may it find you alive.”  Alive means living your own damn life, not the life that your parents wanted, or the life some cultural group or political party wanted, but the life that your own soul wants to live.  That’s the way to evaluate whether you are an authentic person or not.”

-Michael Meade from an interview in The Sun magazine, November 2011

I came face to face with this fact last week, while working in a rustic barn with twenty-or-so colleagues in the Berkshire mountains.  To a man (and woman), these folks paint with oils, while I’ve always done my work in acrylics.  I thought it would be the perfect environment in which to begin experimenting with oils again.  I bought an assortment of paints and brushes and set to work on two small paintings.  The unfortunate truth about working in an unfamiliar medium is that most of one’s technical instincts are rendered useless. Right away, working on the first painting, I put down a brush stroke and, without thinking, reached out and flicked the mark with the side of my thumb to feather its outer edge (something I do all the time when working with acrylics).  Not only did I feather the outer edge, but, because oil paints don’t dry quickly, took the entire face of my main character with it.  Oil doesn’t dry quickly.  My conscious mind knows that.  My unconscious mind, on the other hand, just knows what you do when you want to feather a stroke, and did it before Supreme Headquarters could put the brakes on.

So I painted all week with my conscious mind fully and acutely engaged, and my unconscious mind more or less pushed to the background.  It was painful.  It felt like swimming through mud.  Everything was alien to me.  I had to think about how to clean my brush between strokes.  I had to think about how to arrange the colors on my palette.  I had to remember not to use my thumb to blend, not to dip my brush into the water pot standing nearby, not to touch anything for fear of smearing it… on and on.  What it showed me, acutely, was how much of a load my instincts normally carry for me when I’m doing a painting.  They allow me to deal with “higher” considerations.  How do I want the light to reveal the form?  What is the compositional focus of the piece?  What story do I want to tell?

By the end of the week, I was exhausted.  I went to bed early.  While everyone else went off to dinner, I lay in the dark, tossing and turning and feeling sick of painting altogether.  As I lay there, an image came to me of a winged figure holding a black orb.  It had something to do with what I was feeling, but I couldn’t have said why.  All I knew was that it was an image that held some power for me.

I hesitated for a while:  my bed was warm and cozy, I was tired, I felt frustrated and upset, the last thing I wanted to do was paint.  Eventually, I got up, pulled on my clothes and walked to the empty barn.  My easel stood in the corner, surrounded by my fellow artists’ glorious oil paintings, all in various stages of completion.  I pulled out a large board, grabbed a handful of brushes, and spread my big pots of acrylic paint around me.  I plugged in my iPod and let my sleepy mind just float away.  In a couple of hours I finished the painting of the winged man holding the black orb, letting as many of my decisions as possible be made instinctively.  I deliberately kept my mind in check, watching and gently directing my strokes and color choices, but staying out of the driver’s seat.  It was a huge release of tension, to be able to let that part of my mind loose, to act as its guide without constraining it.  I was happy with the finished piece.  It felt so much more potent and exciting than the poor, cramped little oil paintings I’d spent days and days fighting with.

I’m convinced, at least in my case, that the unconscious mind is where all really satisfying art comes from.  I’m not sure how to harness that fact in my commercial work, but it can’t be impossible.  I will keep struggling with oil paints.  I think it’s important to challenge myself, and to build up new skills, but I will also look for opportunities to let this most potent part of my artistic self emerge.  Back in the early ’90′s, I wrote a graphic novel called “Faith Conquers”, which ended with the following line from its narrator, plucked straight from my unconscious and kept in the final draft because it “felt right”.  I’ll give him the final word:

“When my solid life was shattered, I took a new name.  I left my wife, my child and my home and entered the River of Fire.  I have no guide now, save instinct.  Mine is a floating world.  No foundation.  Nothing to stand on.

The River of Fire.  Everything else is an illusion.”

FINDING YOUR MUSE

Artists communicate visually.  It’s what we do, at the most basic level.  Musicians communicate with sound, writers with words, dancers with movement.  The language we use, as artists, includes symbols, colors, stories, composition, mark-making.  While I’ve always known that, I’ve never thought to apply it to my internal dialogue.  What do I mean by that?  I’ve found that there are moments when the language I use in my internal dialogue can, very naturally, shift from words to visions.  This usually happens when I’m meditating, or when I’m falling asleep, or in the morning, when I’m deciding whether I should hit snooze one more time or get up and face the day.  Those dream-like, half conscious moments are times when images and thoughts link-up very naturally.  

Here’s an example:  the idea for the personal piece above (“Waiting for Europa”), came when I was having trouble drifting off to sleep.  I was agitated, one part of me feeling old and useless after my divorce, another part feeling angry and defiant.  I’m not useless!  I thought “I should paint this”, and let my mind drift, imagining what that painting might look like.  Word-thoughts fell away, and image-thoughts took over.  I saw a huge-bellied bull, standing on a dark hill.  Very still, but radiating a deep, hidden power.  He was mostly in shadow,  lit only by a slanting golden light.  He was so huge that he dominated everything.    My initial vision had a small, pale-skinned woman standing in front of him, but she disappeared when the painting actually happened.  As I painted it, I was reminded of the myth in which Zeus came down from heaven in the form of a bull and ravished the human woman Europa.  In my vision, he became a tired, passive, chained god, looking sad and still, but capable of divine fury.  Instead of “The Rape of Europa”, it became “Waiting for Europa”, which just felt exactly right.

Another example of this is an idea for a painting that’s come out of my experience keeping chickens in my backyard.  Several of the chicks I raised over the summer turned out to be roosters, and I had to cull a few of them or they would fight one another.  I went out one morning at 5am, when they were sleepy, and wrung the necks of two of them.  It was a profound and awful experience.  Ever since, I’ve had this vision of a rooster, like the bull in “Europa”, mostly in shadow.  His proud, erect head and neck are lit by a golden light.  We see him from the back.  His head is turned, his proud comb blood red.  He’s fixing the viewer with his piercing, golden eye.  I haven’t painted it yet, but it’s a tremendously powerful image for me, that touches on my own feelings of guilt and sadness and identification.

Obviously not all personal work comes from the same place, but at this point in my career, I have to have an emotional hook before I can feel confident about where I’m going with a personal painting.  When that hook is there, I find I can invest fully, and that other ideas suggest themselves as I’m working, so that a whole series of associated images can grow from that initial seed. 

I have no idea where this sort of image-making will lead me as an artist, but it’s tremendously exciting and satisfying.  After 20 years, it’s helping me forge a strong, new relationship with my art.  If that’s something you desire, I would encourage you to carve out some time in your schedule and see what happens.  If you find yourself struggling with a personal piece, seek out those moments of mental open-ness, and do what artists do best. Think visually.