How do you describe yourself and your work?
I’m a writer who happily went years without writing anything creative, and a painter so engrossed in brush work and techniques I haven’t developed a definite style.
Largely for the sake of self-discipline, I resolved in the late 1980s to abandon my pursuit of the Great American Novel and concentrate on smaller, less ambitious pieces. Most of the pieces in the Tales section are novellas. They’re studies in ordinary, humdrum reality and the small, easily overlooked moments of transcendence that animate it.
Addendum, April, 2005: I wasn’t able to abandon the novel, after all. I tried. I did my best to sabotage it. Darkness and Light is done. If I never undertake another novel, it will be soon enough to suit me.
The painting I’ve been doing the past year or so is less experimental than the preceding two or three years’ worth. My work is realistic in source and attitude and manner, but I seem to be gradually moving in impressionist directions. I was hostile toward impressionism as a boy, and am still less than whole-heartedly enthusiastic about it, but it seems to lead me closer to my visual roots. It’s become apparent during the past year my fascination with technology for the sake of technology leads both my imagination and finished pieces astray, so I’m trying to let pieces develop more simply, in ways fairly closely related to traditional water color and oil painting.
Why do you paint digitally?
I find it easier, faster, and more productive and intellectually rewarding than using traditional methods.
Painting digitally reduces some of the time, labor, and frustration of working traditionally. When I botched an element in a traditional water color, for example, I had to start fresh; by contrast, since my digital work method includes saving numerous successive iterations of pieces, I simply back up one or two or ten versions and try not to repeat my mistakes. Painting digitally necessitates limiting myself to a far narrow range of colors and surfaces and effects; conversely, both my tools and color palette are instantly accessible, require very little maintenance and no cleaning with malodorous solvents, and can be modified with ease.
The obvious analogy is between writing a novel on a typewriter versus writing it with a word processor on a computer, which is faster and more flexible, and involves considerably less drudgery. The analogy falls flat on its face at production, since putting digital color on paper is still in its infancy. I’ve tried everything from low budget ink jet printers to Heidelberg printing presses, but the average $29.95 introductory water color kit from any hobby shop still delivers a measurably larger color gamut and more finely adjustable colors than the best digital output devices in the world.
How do you paint digitally?
I used to start with 35 mm transparencies; I now use a digital camera. I’m at best a mediocre photographer, so 90% of the shots I take are wasted. If it need be said, shooting digitally is much less expensive and time-consuming than shooting traditional transparency film. I try to compose pieces while shooting, but haven’t achieved much success. I occasionally sketch and draw traditionally, scan my work, and develop it on screen, although it’s usually faster and easier to work in Painter. I’ve scanned cloth, paper, crumpled aluminum foil, and other materials to use as texture bases, as well as water color washes.
I open photographs in Adobe Photoshop’s LAB mode, and typically spend between one and three hours sizing, cropping, removing scratches and specks, and making preliminary color revisions and adjustments. In theory, this stage of composition and color development takes the place of traditional drawing and underpainting; in reality, it rarely alleviates more than half of it. I generally don’t do a great deal of collaging at this point, but frequently remove backgrounds, alter proportions, and recast images to suit my purposes. Toward the end of this phase, I switch to the RGB mode, since neither Painter nor many Photoshop filters support it.
I’ve found it necessary to work on a pair of monitors: the larger for works in progress, the smaller for Photoshop’s, Painter’s, and Adobe Illustrator’s numerous tool palettes. A second pair of glasses whose bifocal lenses focus my vision at keyboard distance and somewhat greater digitizing tablet distance has proved well worth the expense.
I do most of the middle work in Painter with a Wacom tablet and digitizing stylus. Painter includes a vast, albeit carelessly organized collection of digital brushes that emulate, and in many cases, far exceed the limits of traditional brushes. The user interface may be slovenly, but the application is fast extensive. Painter lets me mix traditionally hostile approaches with ease: water color and oils, for example. Its multiple levels of undo let me meander into techniques and experiments without having to bear potentially ugly consequences in mind. The Wacom stylus becomes a plain number 2 pencil, a water color wash brush, a narrow, overloaded oil brush, a palette knife, et cetera, all in fractions of a second—and just to ice the proverbial “cake,” flipping it end for end turns it into an eraser.
I typically switch between Painter and Photoshop two or three dozen times as a painting develops, since Photoshop’s layering, masking, color altering, and selection functions are far superior to Painter’s. If a piece includes type, I set it in Illustrator, open the file in Photoshop, and rely on its layers and channels for placement, edge control, and fanciful effects. Painter’s texturing tools are powerful and reliable, but pattern-based, so I do nearly all my texture work in Photoshop. Although it’s possible to draw and paint in Photoshop, brush and pen and pencil and crayon and airbrush work is faster and easier in Painter. Digital brush work can be perfectly interchangable with traditional brush work or far, far removed from it, depending on the way one works.
I use Photoshop filters from start to finish; curiously, the more third party filters I buy, the more restraint I seem to exercise. A filter is a mini-application that works within Photoshop, Painter, and Illustrator to alter an image or part of an image. Modifications may be as simple as blurring pixels to remove film grain, or so complex the image becomes unrecognizable. Like the effects they produce, filter interfaces and prices run the gamut from sensible to ludicrous. The filters I use most frequently are those included with Photoshop, Alien Skin’s Eye Candy and Xenofex, Kai’s Power Tools, KPT Convolver, and Xaos Tools’ Paint Alchemy and Terrazzo.
Digital color is radically different from color achieved with pigments, and typically requires several years to master. RGB color is additive, (all three colors add up to white;) CMYK color is subtractive, (all four colors add up to black,) and LAB color can be thought of as multiplicative, (lightness is separated from red-green and blue-yellow spectra.) CMYK color behaves most like pigment-based color; it’s capable of actually producing, however, only about 8,000 distinguishable colors of the approximately 30,000,000 we’re able to see. All but a handful of expensive prepress monitors skew color, (generally toward blue,) so what you see most probably won’t be what you’ll get, and the skewing tends to worsen as colors are saturated beyond or screened back from middle tones.
All my pieces end up in Photoshop for final color balancing and tweaking, unsharp masking, edge finishing and extra-last work done on a pixel by pixel basis, and preparation for production. I used to have my work produced as 35 mm transparencies and those printed, but have abandoned the search for reliable vendors. I was happy for awhile with a Lambda device, which uses a trio of laser guns to expose minute dots on photographic positive paper, but switched to a Light Jet 5000 device for its greater resolution and color fidelity. The process is expensive, and limits me to the surface textures and color gamuts of photographic papers, but the predictability and resolution are acceptable.
If you’d like to take a look at the creation of a fairly simple painting, please see also A Digital Painting, added in February, 2000.
If you start with photography and end up having your work produced on photographic paper, are you sure you’re a painter rather than a photographer?
Yes. In the first place, I wasn’t exaggerating by describing myself as “at best a mediocre photographer;” in the second, I’m sure if Vermeer and other classical painters felt free to use cameras obscuras, I might as well make use of lenses, too, and in the third, the work I’m doing is painterly in both attitude and technique.
I’m less interested in what actually is than what I can make it into, and the way I go about imposing my vision on source images is wholly pen- and pencil- and brush- and marker- and airbrush- and palette knife-oriented. I work on a flat screen that’s directly analogous to paper and canvas and board, and end up with two-dimensional points and lines and areas of color on paper. I’ve encountered people who are skeptical of digital painting and regard work such as I’m doing as a curiosity of no enduring aesthetic value; then again, I was assured as recently as 1992 that a novel written with a word processor inexplicably “wouldn’t be a real novel.” My use of photography as a tool, incidentally, doesn’t mean I regard it as less than an art form in its own right: merely an art form that hasn’t captured my imagination.
How do you find models?
I advertised once in one of the San Francisco free tabloids, but ended up with too many prostitutes intent on enlarging their clientele. I had better success with a small flyer I put up on photography and art supply shop and art school bulletin boards, but flyers didn’t accomplish much in Silicon Valley. I trust the muse will send me models for continued portraiture and nude studies when the time is ripe. I’d like to work with more models as graceful and poised and self-assured as the woman I refer to as “the dancer,” as well as study a model through a pregnancy; it’s been my experience, however, that the less particular my hopes and expectations, the more I accomplish. Please send me an E-mail message if you’re interested in modelling, and see also my Note to Prospective Models.
What are your influences and sources of inspiration?
Light and shadow have always moved me deeply. As a child in the middle west, my favorite time was twilight, when light subsides and shadow gathers strength, and their relationship undergoes a slow, complete metamorphosis. My favorite season was autumn, when light seems somehow refined or distilled, much more delicate than during the rest of the year. I was most deeply drawn to seventeenth century Dutch and Flemish still lifes, partly because they’re so rich and subtle at once, partly because, then as now, I was mad keen on brush work. Vermeer’s small corpus remains my favorite, along with Rembrandt’s and Turner’s. I’ve lately sat down with a volume of Edward Hopper’s work, but can’t yet say what I’m finding, other than an affinity for flat, very restrained color and what I perceive as a curious lack of interest in drawing. In literary terms, my influences are hopelessly, even laughably muddled. The last time I went on a book buying spree, I ended up with Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Faulkner’s Snopes trilogy, and a handful of thrillers.
Grace and simplicity and small jewels of ordinary, frequently overlooked elegance intrigue me far more deeply than beauty and drama. I’ve been fascinated by the colors and textures of flowers since boyhood, though I’ve never gardened or grown plants, nor even troubled myself to learn the names of many flowers.
Do you think digital technology and/or the internet will revolutionize painting?
No, I’m sure they won’t. Like engineers, artists tend to try out new technology the moment it appears and adopt whatever proves useful, but the fundamental nature of art hasn’t changed since we drew bison on cave walls with charcoal and ochre. I think the impulses to create and acquire art are intrinsic to our species, and deeply linked to an innate tendency toward contemplating the eternal mysteries.
Today’s musical synthesizers are far removed from our first drums, but rhythm is still rhythm, and harmony is still harmony, and song is still song, and dance is still dance. I’ve never attended a ballet that featured dancers circling a fire, but am sure there’s an abiding, powerful element of so-called “primitive” worship underlying dance, music, theatre, and all the other arts and every act of creation. The arrival of acrylic colors didn’t sound the death knell of oil and water color painting, so I’m sure the digital methods I’m using portend no drastic changes.
I hope and trust computing and the internet will evolve into a communications technology that will serve as a powerful force in favor of democracy and individual and social and cultural freedom; the prime mover, however, was—and remains—the printing press.
Do you think you’ll ever return to traditional painting?
I already have, albeit in a limited way. I occasionally concoct backgrounds for paintings with brushes and water colors on paper, then scan and modify them in Photoshop and Painter. The longer and more intently I work digitally, the more traditional my vision seems to turn, but it’s nearly as difficult to imagine myself returning to oils and water color and India ink as think of writing a tale on paper with a fountain pen. I’m sure I’ll make occasional use of traditional tools and techniques, but I’ve never heard of a water color or oil brush with an undo function.
Do you consider yourself more an artist or writer?
Yes. Like most people’s, my visual and verbal tendencies aren’t antithetic, but do seem mutually exclusive. As often as I try to think my way through a painting, for example, I end up with an overwrought mess, and when I let myself visualize to my heart’s content while writing, I usually end up with elaborate, self-indulgent word pictures. The tendencies cross-fertilize each other, and since I’m hyperactive and insatiably curious, I presume I’ll continue to flip-flop between writing and painting.
Why are’t your tales available as HTML pages?
They were too ugly. I spent several evenings turning Big Girl into a collection of HTML pages before I opened the site, but couldn’t stand to read them after printing them. Sad to say, only the Macintosh operating system supports f ligatures, and HTML doesn’t let typographers work with any of the fundamental elements: tracking, kerning, justification, hyphenation, leading, and the like. The beauty of Adobe’s Acrobat PDF (portable document format) idea is that it’s completely platform-independent. I can set type professionally in Adobe InDesign, convert a document into a PDF in minutes, and be assured it will remain presentable no matter what hardware and software are used to download and print it. The least common denominator is never the standard in the arts.
Why are your tales free?
Primarily because very few people bought them at the grand sum of $5 each. Dozens and sometimes hundreds of people help themselves to the tales each month, and a few comment on them, almost all favorably, to my surprise. If I still had grand authorial ambitions, I probably wouldn’t give them away.
What do you read?
Virtually nothing but fiction, gun magazines, and the occasional software manual. Like most people who deeply enjoy reading, I like to consider myself an eclectic; in reality, of course, I’m simply undisciplined.
Do you have a day job?
I did. I may go back to work again one of these days. I’ve been a marketing, advertising and public relations guy for twenty-odd years. I write, edit, do graphic design, illustrate, set type, publish, do press checks, and generally manage projects after an orderly fashion. I have no idea how I ended up becoming the adult supervision.
Why is your site so plain?
It’s deliberately plain, since I’m impatient with large, complex sites whose pages take forever and a Sunday afternoon to be transmitted over a modem, and the life span of visually exciting web graphic elements is measured in days and weeks rather than years. I’ve concocted elaborate navigation schemes, roll over buttons, pop up forms, tables within tables, and the like, but greatly prefer to paint than present paintings. Even if I found HTML’s limitations more intellectually challenging than aggravating, I’m contending with injuries to my right hand, wrist, and arm resulting from years of mousing.
Why isn’t your autobiography more informative?
I’m one of the most boring people you could dread being stuck in a corner with at a cocktail party.
How can people buy your paintings?
Please send me an E-mail message. I’m sorry that’s less convenient than dialing a toll-free telephone number and flexing plastic, but this is a very small enterprise.