New art, “Last Seen in Vientiane”

If you saw my last piece, you might be surprised at how different this one is from it. The last one looked like a painting and was all drawn from the imagination on the computer. This one is a very elaborate collage of photographs I took in Vientiane (I’ve lived in Asia for about 7 years). It’s also a bit of a testament to why I do “digital art”. There just would be no other way to do something like this, which is made up of stacks of layers, most with masks, and at different transparencies.

In the picture below, look at the palette on the right showing all the levels I was using.

The image is fairly large, but the cumulative levels made the file so heavy that it came in over a gig and bogged down my computer. When I do this sort of work, the levels keep expanding, and I try to group them or combine them to simplify matters.

Below you can see some of the masks I was using.

This piece is almost a diptych, because I both sides work well on their own. There’s a balancing act between them in terms of composition, color, values, and textures, so that the combination was more difficult to achieve than two separate pieces.

I’m not going to offer an interpretation on this one. I don’t want people to confuse knowing or figuring out a meaning with actually understanding the art. After all, one could understand an interpretation without even looking at it. This one could be appreciated on a purely abstract level as well, in terms of just getting into the colors and luminosity of it, which reminds me of looking into those old View Master toys the more wizened among us used to have as kids.

The following is a gif animation showing several stages of this image. The original pictures I took are really nothing special, but I took them because I saw some potential in them for something I might do later, which has now happened.

Below is the full image again (though not full-sized. It’s much larger). Try looking at it for a few minutes (while listening to music) if you have the time? I finally figured out how to display larger images than can show up within the blog column, which was to “link to image” in the properties of the image, so if you click on the pic, it will show up by itself at a much better size for viewing!

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Various prints, and greeting cards.

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