Apparitions – Procedural Notes
Impetus:
Began as lucid dream of moving through the mountains
Wandering quietly through the area following the stream of consciousness
Came upon a road called Thunderstruck
Went down a long side road, one lane, back to a furniture builder’s studio and gallery
Back on main road saw an artist’s studio and gallery
Near the bend imagined “saw”, near a house that had been there since the 1800’s the “ghosts” of the people who lived there… Apparitions… They left traces of themselves in those hills.
Rounded the bend and there was the river. Beautiful… across the river, the opposite bank was a wall of rock going nearly straight up several hundred feet
Sat quietly at a little pool that would be a good fishing spot
Came home inspired visually and painted 5 oil paintings
Inspiration:
Kevin C gave me several books to look at over winter break. One was titled “Visual Music”. In it was a section on the Joshua Light Show. They began by providing light shows, on screens behind… for people like Jimmy Hendricks, Janis Joplin, Frank Zappa and etc. Their techniques involved projecting light on a screen using lights passed through celluloid filters, flexible mirrors bending and distorting images, oily colors in bowls of water with light and camera overhead and several others. I found this psychedelic approach very appealing and so began working to create further techniques to distort light using Maya.
I began by putting some of the paintings inspired by the Thunderstruck wanderings onto thin flexible planes and then making them semi-transparent. I put those into mirrored rooms and made them move. I also put mirrors into the rooms and created many layers of each.
The idea is to create non-objective representations, bordering upon abstractions, inspired by the entire experience.