Digital Hybrids

For this work, I combine my background in computers with my studio art; specifically painting. These new explorations in my work were originally driven by pure desire to see the outcomes. Over time there became a deeper understanding of the purpose of the work; to satiate a yearning for organic art in our increasingly digitized era.

Frame-by-Frame Animations

This form of animation allows me to express the motion and story of my paintings even further. Bringing my painting style forward was a natural fit for the frame-by-frame techniques that I prefer to use when creating my animated pieces. Using the interwoven manner of my brushwork in my paintings, I have developed my own styles and approaches to creating these short-run clips of life outside of technology. The game of blurring the lines between nature and art and technology, in an attempt to harmonize them becomes my quest here; creating something old with something new, and paying homage to the beauty of nature.

Digital Collage: Starling Rush

Digital collage and discovery is the premise for this series. My goal was to be delighted by letting chance dictate the final outcome of each composited image. For this project, I created the final collages by combining both hand-painted and digitally created assets that I threw dice to randomly select from. I created anywhere from 10 to 20 variations for each of the nine elements I chose to account for in the final compositions. The elements I accounted for were 'Background' (landscape, flat color, or textures from my canvas paintings), 'Flyers' (murmurations, planes, etc), 'Orbiters' (things that fly around the planet, like spacecraft and the moon in its various phases), 'Body Base' (solid or slightly transparent colors, or textures from my canvas paintings), 'Body Feathers' and 'Head Feathers' (both similar to the features of 'Body Base'), 'Eyes' (color variants and some fun abstract ideas), 'Beak' (colorizations loosely based on the natural apperance of starlings throughout the year), and 'Eyestripe Design' (added for fun, which can include an infinite pattern of repeating murmurations).

Below are just a few of the first 100 birds I created using this technique. I enjoyed this process so much that I have plans for creating another similar series called Owl Rush.

Curated Versions

After creating the first 80 starlings using dice and being delighted by the outcomes of that process, I wanted to treat myself to a few curated versions as well. For these additional pieces, I did my best to combine the features that felt cohesive or wildly abstract or dynamic in their combinations.

This curated extension of the Starling Rush series was super fun, and reminded me of playing with Colorforms as a child.