| In 1998, while pursuing a doctorate in music performance, I created a completely original CD-ROM entitled From Stoneage to Rock. It became my all-consuming passion for the summer. After a performing and recording career as a classical concert pianist for twenty-five years, I was excited to discover that I could express complicated and interdisciplinary ideas on a multitude of levels simultaneously. The computer became my keyboard, camera, and paintbrush. Most significantly, I experienced a profound joy in creating “something from nothing” while combining my instincts as a musical and visual artist with the sophistication of “cutting edge” technology.
Since then I have become intensely interested in discovering the point at which an idea becomes an inspiration, “an entity unto itself.”
As a pianist, I worked with someone else’s creation. I viewed the printed page as the composer’s canvas, - a shorthand, if you will, - of his or her thoughts and feelings, comparable to a “figured bass” in Baroque music ( a series of numerals underneath a moving bass line, which indicate the melodies and harmonies above.) Using the composer’s “figured bass” notations, a Baroque performer would improvise the appropriate music.
A composer’s complete design (and psyche) then and now, could never be notated entirely - a comprehensive symbology does not exist to do so, nor a page large enough (without being impractical or absurd) to accommodate all the additional markings required to express every nuance of his or her conception. Thus, every performance became a unique recreation or “improvisation” of the composer’s canvas.
As a visual artist, I therefore look upon my own work as a “re-composition” or a complex and sophisticated “improvisation” of “nature’s figured bass.”
One of my favorite composers is Johann Sebastian Bach. He worked with traditional Baroque forms such as the fugue and variation, synthesizing these compositional styles already in use, rather than developing new ones. His genius not only perfected these forms but also transcended them, making each work an innovation of both form and style. The key to his creations was in the simultaneous overlapping of musical ideas, often quite disparate in rhythm and melody, creating exciting cohesive and beautiful musical gems.
Three modern-era artists have influenced me and demonstrate an artistic expression similar to Bach’s - Escher, Durer, and Van Gogh. They worked within the traditional conventions of art - respectively using pen and ink, watercolors, and oils - yet each transcended the implied boundaries of their media by creating innovative forms and styles. Escher used perspective to explore and “prove” that two-dimensional relationships can appear as three. Using his refined techniques of perspective, color, texture and detail, Durer, the Renaissance painter and engraver, was able to achieve works of almost photographic realism. Van Gogh used color and brushstroke to express his experiments in spatial relationships.
The Process
I begin each picture with a blank canvas (or screen.) The pictures are not scanned images that are “doctored.” I create unique, one-of-a-kind works of art, derived from wireframe shapes and added textures, while making intuitive decisions about movement, color, and depth. The resulting photographic-like paintings, created and rendered on a computer, are printed on a special photographic paper, with archival inks. Each picture’s wireframe or shell substructure is composed of hundreds of individual polygons. The rendering process of the final image (changing wireframes to objects that have shape, color, depth, and volume,) takes many, many hours, sometimes even days to complete. The finished pictures are several hundred million pixels in size. Often, the images are so large that they cannot be seen in their entirety (in actual pixels on a computer screen) until they are printed. The element of surprise is truly a delight, as often I discover many unusual and exciting effects that I did not expect, plan or see originally on the computer screen.
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