Woman With Sceptre, 2024

Here's a digital painting I made last year called "Woman with Sceptre" -- although for today's purposes I'll drop any subtlety and call it "Liberty."

The Way Home, 2024

Here's "The Way Home," a digital painting from 2024. It's based on a pulp fiction magazine cover from 1952 by Walter Popp, and the background is derived from a detail in "Landscape with a Water Mill" by Francois Boucher from 1740. I'm very interested in how mythology connects to more recent "low" culture like science-fantasy and super-heroes. And of course, how it all relates to our impending post-human future. Eek.

 

Future People, 2024

Future People (2024)

Like most of my work, this piece is based on "found" images which I recontextualized so as to play around with their original meanings. In this case however, the found elements weren't exactly images -- they were stock figures from a 3D modelling software called "Poser." The idea in Poser was (and still is) to take digital mannequins and pose them for use in digital illustration or as reference for drawing comics or other traditional media illustrations.

For my purposes, I wanted to put the default Poser man and woman next to each other and then load the various standard stock "poses" for them in Poser's library - to see if any unexpected combinations would emerge. Mostly the results were pretty prosaic, but once in a while they were interesting enough to use. I made nine images this way in the mid-1990's.

Late last year I revisited one of these pieces and ran it through a number of "painterly" filters in Photoshop to make it look less mechanical (I'm aware of the irony there) -- and also to bring out the flat landscape inherent in the liminal cgi background of the older versions (being from Manitoba, I have a soft spot for flat landscapes).

Although I "warmed" the image up with the old-timey paint effects, I wanted to push ahead with the spooky futurism of their anti-gravity swimdance -- so I so I was quite happy when Photoshop's algorithm balked at rendering any naughty bits!

I Can Be Your Action Marine, 2025

This piece is a response to both the current state of the world and my own media-influenced boyhood fantasies. It's a restaged version of an ad from the back of an old comic book, and it's intended to invoke both early 1960's G.I. Joe dolls and Russian and Chinese propaganda posters from the same era. The original doll face has been replaced with a (much younger) self-portrait.

Here's the source image:

Devs Qvi, 2024

 Here's Devs Qvi, a new version of one of my older digital photo collages. It's based on an illustration from the "Sforza Hours," a medieval prayer book (see below). The title includes a deliberate transliteration of the original caption, which was "Deus Qui" ("God Who" in Latin) and used the ancient Roman "V" instead of "U".

I'd found the Sforza illustration on a CD-ROM disk of old paintings and was looking for a way to base an art piece on it when I came across some (cheap bootleg) "Outer Space Men" toys in a retro store in Los Angeles. I was delighted by the number of formal correspondences between the St. Michael figure and "Commander Comet" - the wings, the red boots, the shape of the scale balance versus the shape of the crossbow, etc - as well as between the Devil and "Colossus Rex", so I used them in the piece.

I had a hard time not feeling sympathy for the Devil, trapped as he is in predestination, but I also admired the merciless innocence of the angel, and his fabulous blue bouffant. As a funny side note, the Devil's face in the older (1997!) version was posed by a friend who was a practicing Satanist.

Abbey Forest Goddess (2024)

Many years ago I worked as a photoshop artist at a big photography studio owned by a giant corporation in Manhattan. They wanted to expand the studio business into compositing and digital effects, so they had me create a bunch of portfolio pieces to show their clients. 

One idea I had was to create an elaborate "Greek Mythology" scene incorporating ruined temples and magical creatures along with scantily clad models (this being the commercial art world, no consideration was given to justifying the sexual politics involved).

We staged a number of shoots for the project using professional models and elaborate props, and actually got it pretty far along before I was transferred over to a different arm of the empire (which is another story I'll tell when my NDA finally runs out).

Years later, I used some of the outtakes from one of the shoots to create a few of what I called my "Reflection" pieces, which were photos I distorted to the point that they became almost unrecognizable. I wanted to see if they would still carry some sense of their original meanings (which is why I used "loaded" sources with violence or nudity).

One of these pieces wound up resembling a sort of half deer/half woman chimera rooted in a fleshy substrate, which I thought was cool given the magical Arcadian vibe we'd been after in the original shoot. But, as always with my digital work, I wanted it to look more like a painting -- so in this version I slathered on plenty of digital painterliness. 

Here's a detail (click to enlarge):

The Carbon Atom, 2024

Here's a new version of a piece I've been making since 1991, when I was a wee artist in my late twenties. It's called "The Carbon Atom", although it has a longer title which I'll explain below.

As I often do, I based this piece on a "found image" from an old printed source, in this case a book about space exploration from the 1960's. Years later I found out that the image was a repurposed publicity still from a 1950's sci-fi movie called "The Man From Planet X". In the reprinted version I used, the caption reads:

The carbon atom is basis for

life as we know it

and probably for whatever life

may exist elsewhere, but

local conditions may make strange forms.

I liked a lot of things about this combination of text and image. Besides the oddly charming way the caption is formatted like poetry, there was also the obvious irony that the "strange form" this alien life took was basically just a human dude with a long nose and big eyes. Moreover, it was a lowbrow sci-fi "space invaders" trope, even though the book itself purported to be "scientific" (the article being illustrated was by the then famous German-American science writer Willy Ley).

I made a great big acrylic painting of it on canvas, which I showed in a few galleries and then rolled up in my basement. A few years later I was in a retro store in Los Angeles and came across a set of small plastic toys, one of which strongly reminded me of the "Carbon Atom/Man From Planet X" alien (it must've been based on it). 

By then, I was making work by photographing toys and other props and digitally collaging them together with human models, so I thought this would make a perfect update, and I restaged the piece (using my own eyes and mouth for a smidgen of self-portraiture).

I liked this version better, because the "robot-like" spaceman seemed to be both organic (ie, carbon based) and mechanical -- a "transhuman" being. I also liked the way his weapon was painted red -- as though it wasn't phallic enough already! -- and he had a concave target thingy on his stomach, making the whole thing into a sexualized game of sci-fi paintball.

As was usually the case with my digital work, I still wished it had a "painterly" quality -- the icing on the Conceptual cake for someone trying to turn "low" culture into "high" -- so I bided my time until computers could accomplish that properly. They can do it now, although ironically it's because they're becoming a new type of "life" -- alien, threatening, and not based on carbon.

When He Becomes the Creator, Will He Let Us Exist? 2024

I’ve finally stopped working on — I hesitate to say “finished” — a big and complicated piece called “When He Becomes the Creator, Will He Let Us Exist?” (A line from the great X Ray Spex song “Genetic Engineering”).

As I’ve mentioned in a few past posts, this image is a “Hellscape” in the European tradition of Bosch's "Last Judgement" or Bruegel the Elder's "Dull Gret" — but it's actually based on an old book illustration I found many years ago of some geologists looking at the inside of a gigantic volcanic caldera.

My thinking about the piece as a whole revolves around the relationships between creativity and religion (God the Creator) and the imminent arrival of artificial intelligence - and with it, artificial artists. The central figure is this new AI Creator wielding a ceremonial paintbrush, which He waves in the air like a conductor, willing different scenes and scenarios into existence.

However, He isn’t the biblical Creator up in Heaven (we actually see a distracted Yahweh in the clouds at the top of the piece, dreamily reimagining His past Glories). Instead, this AI Creator is in charge of an underworld, in a direct nod to Harlan Ellison’s AM supercomputer in “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”. One other note: the Creator’s mask (see detail below) is a reference to a meme popular in AI circles, where HP Lovecraft’s “Shoggoth” monster wears a smiling fake face to cover up its terrifying underlying form. 

Racial Doom, 2024

This is a new version of one of my old digital pieces. It's based on a panel from a 1959 comic book story by Otto Binder and Sid Greene called "Warning From One Million B.C." which I read (avidly!) as a kid in the early 1970's.

When I came across it again in the late 1990's (see below for a pic), I was struck by the (hopefully) inadvertent racist connotations that had crept into it over the decades. Terms like "racial doom" and "black blight" certainly hit the ear differently than they would've in the 1950's, and the drawings of the butterfly people themselves reminded me of representations of East Asian people from popular Western culture of that time (without even mentioning the skin colour choice).

I restaged the image in 1999 as a photocollage using digital photography of toys and models, but the undercurrents of the source were mostly lost and I was never happy enough with it to bother finishing the background.

Time keeps on tickin' though. I came across the image again recently and thought how the theme of "racial doom" resonates even more strongly today, from the "Great Replacement" theories animating anti-immigrant nationalism across the world to the plummeting birth rates undermining everyone's retirement plans.

And needless to say, I'm also struck by images of scientists working to save us all at a time when multiple existential crises are erupting from our use of technologies (including AI, which powers the software I used to make this work).

With all this in mind, I made the new version more dramatic (and maybe a bit more Weimar Republic) by troweling on some Expressionist painterliness.

Future Love People (2024)

 

Like other images I've posted recently, this one is a reworking of a digital photo-collage/cgi/painting from long ago - 1999 in this case.

In those days I was experimenting with an inexpensive 3D figure rendering software called Poser which had all sorts of controls for changing a character's physique. Some of them could be cranked up to ridiculous extremes, which I loved because the results looked like "transhuman" superhero fantasies from the science fiction of the time.

For that first version of this piece, I created a cgi render and then collaged digital photos (taken with one of the earliest commercial digital cameras, a Sony Catseye) of myself and my newlywed wife Melissa into it. I imagined the resulting scene as the two of us surviving together romantically as impervious metal cyborgs in a post apocalyptic Eden, and I titled it "Super Love People."

As was usual in my digital work back then, I wanted the image to have a clear formal relationship with the history of Western easel painting (which is just artspeak for "I wanted them to look more like paintings") but I felt constrained by the inability of the tools at hand to do that very well. Instead, I kept it all in my back pocket while I puttered around with other projects for a few decades, waiting for better "painting" filters.

Better filters are here now, along with lots of other changes in digital imaging. Those advances have me feeling worried and melancholy, so in revisiting this piece my idea is less along the lines of an ironic wink at the silliness of our transhuman fantasies, and more about a posthuman future in which all of our fantasies are just something else's digital memories.