daniel danger says post your non-gigposter artwork

[Dave Bailey]

a-mazing stuff knnth, reminds me of marcel dzama's drawings - which is never a bad thing!

[knnth]

thanks for the warm welcome, all.

[knnth]

(by the way this board is sort of intimidating looking. can anyone recommend a nice friendly place to get one of my illustrations screenprinted? 4 colour, 18x24. rather than polluting this great thread, you can just private message me if you wish. thanks a lot!)

[pinoretread]

Originally Posted by zeloot

hmm ..isnt it really boring to work on this? knowing what you gonna have to do and how it ll look like beforehand..it seems merely a technical proces to me and little "artistic".
..and such i huge selfportrait seems a bit like self-glorification..
why?

sorry, just wondering..

To me, just the fact that this is a four color process piece of art, being done by hand, to that scale is magnificent. I agree that it seems to be an exercise of facility, but the color theory/pre-thought involved is pretty cool.

[iamnikbohac]

Originally Posted by zeloot

hmm ..isnt it really boring to work on this? knowing what you gonna have to do and how it ll look like beforehand..it seems merely a technical proces to me and little "artistic".
..and such i huge selfportrait seems a bit like self-glorification..
why?

sorry, just wondering..

Honestly, it's not boring at all. What's boring to me is doing layouts for albums, posters...stuff like that. I'm not an illustrator in the least bit. And I really just don't have any clue what this will look like finished. For me, having a photograph that I'm basing my work off of isn't any different than an illustrator who uses a photograph of a tiger to as source material for "getting it right".
I do think this is a question that anybody who does something along the lines of realistic or photorealistic artwork faces. Picasso reinvented abstraction just to avoid this kind of criticism, and in the end, it paid off for him. My work is very technical, but when you get up close to it and look at how it is the colours layer each other and interact to create the final piece, a lot of how that's happening is spur of the moment changes right there on the canvas.

One of my all time favorite artists Kent Bellows, who also happened to be an Omaha resident, died this past week. Kent sold graphite drawings and oil paintings sometimes for well over $100,000 grand and has work displayed in the MoMA, Art Institute of Chicago Museum, and Arkansas Arts Center, among others. His body of work was entirely made up of drawings and paintings, on a smaller scale, based off of photographs that he took. He was considered the greatest living realist by more than just a few of the bigger art critics and he was represented out of New York City. He was doing pretty good. His work was constantly being mistaken with actual photographs, and when asked about that, why draw something if you can take a photograph of it, he always said "Why merely use a machine for something I KNOW I can do. Photographs are nice and all, but I can do what a photograph can do, and there's just something more impressive about me being able to do that than a machine that's made to do it doing what it's supposed to do".

[dspring]

Nik, you just answered the questions by comparing it to 2 others, and quoting sales prices and where it was displayed. I still have not learned anything about your motivation...

you say you are not an illustrator and that posters and album art is boring then I have to ask

A) Why do you post here? because I do not recall you ever posting feedback on anyone elses artwork in this thread or in the comments area on posters. I mean if poster art bores you and you can't be bothered to respond to anything except feedback on your own artwork why are you on a rock poster website? Slumming it?

B) what is your reason for doing what you do in your own words, not comparing it to someone elses?

If your not an illustrator and find poster art boring and are not going to contribute anything except getting feedback on your own stuff thanks for coming out - BLOCKED.

[iamnikbohac]

I don't give an excessive amount of feedback, no, but there are plenty of other people on this particular thread that don't either. But I HAVE given feedback on things I really like. There are, from time to time, things I don't like, but I don't really feel like giving criticism unless it's contstructive criticism. When it comes to vector based artwork or even photoshop artwork, I don't feel I can adequately critique it if I'm NOT into it. I just don't understand Adobe's software much past RAW exposure controls, cleaning up photographs in a digital darkroom situation, and a little bit to do with layering. No clues on Illustrator.

Just because I said I'm not an illustrator and that doing layouts/posters is boring to me doesn't mean that I don't appreciate a good layout/poster. I have bought my fair share of albums based solely on layout. Because I wanted to OWN that work and be able to look at it whenever I feel like. I fully appreciate the work that goes into that kind of stuff, but just like for (I think it was Zeloot) it would be boring to do something like what I'm doing, I get bored sitting at a computer and putting together stuff like that. I've had fun doing the few posters and fliers I've done, but not enough to really make me want to do it for extended bouts of time. You completely took one thing I said and interpretted it to mean something else. Why WOULD I post here if I dislike those things? That doesn't make any sense.

To answer your two questions:
A) Why do you post here? because I do not recall you ever posting feedback on anyone elses artwork in this thread or in the comments area on posters. I mean if poster art bores you and you can't be bothered to respond to anything except feedback on your own artwork why are you on a rock poster website? Slumming it?

Slumming it? Not really. I sincerely enjoy seeing some of the people who post in this specific thread and the work they come up with. I enjoy a lot of what Micton, Goad, Daniel Danger, just to name a few, have to show. I really like seeing an outlet for people to get together and post their work. Truthfully, it's RARE that I ask for any feedback whatsoever, so most of the time I'm posting stuff, I'm just posting to contribute. This thread right here is a nice change of pace from other boards and sites I read where it seems to be people talking about boring and stupid things. I like looking at artwork. That would be my main and basic reason for posting here.

B) what is your reason for doing what you do in your own words, not comparing it to someone elses?

MY main reason for creating what I do is because it's where I've come to, naturally, over the last ten years of creating work. In high school, I got really into pop artwork and specifially the artwork of Roy Lichtenstein. Roy Lichtenstein's insane amount of time spent on process to get the end result he acheived was just mindblowing to me. Unfortunately, I didn't enjoy painting large scale comic pop artwork as much as I enjoyed looking at it. I did a bunch of smaller artwork in high school, and a lot of it was abstract work. My senior year I started to play around with photorealism and never really knew I could do it until I did. It got great reactions from everybody I knew, but at the same time, it got a great reaction from me myself. I was impressed that I could do something like that.
In college, my first drawing class, we had a project where we took a photograph and basically copied it to a sheet of Arches. Same size, carbon transfer from the actual photograph. We were to use india ink and a dip pen to create a crosshatch image from that. I did the largest image (12x1 and I also did the project wrong. Everybody had really loose crosshatchings, where mine was really tight and, when viewed from about six feet away and out, became very photographic. I spent the next three years trying it all. Sculpture, abstraction, wet and dry medias, oil painting, acrylic...everything. I kept going back to smaller crosshatchings and photographic style pieces because I was just drawn to them.
Two years ago I started a body of work that was specifically supposed to be all photorealistic work. I was hanging around a guy at school who is also an amazing photorealist, and it's that same old story of EVERYBODY who goes off to college for art and meets people that inspire themself. This guy's work inspired me to work in a photorealist manner.
I started to get bored with it and got really interested in taking one specific image and doing it with 4-5 different medias/techniques. So I drew up an image of myself at 24x36 and did a charcoal image of it. After that was done, I did a really tight crosshatched image and when I got done with it, decided I was going to go specifically in that direction and NOT do the other medias and techniques I planned on working with. I also had a meeting with the art institute of Chicago where I met with about six grad schools, who all picked that image out as my strongest piece. That had a little to do with it, but really, I came to what I'm doing on my own.
I like solving problems from a photo to a canvas, of how I'm going to make something transfer from that very photographic source and making it translate to what I'm doing. I'm a problem solver, and I like that it shows up in my work. And I like photographs, realist artwork, photorealist artwork that I see, but not specifically that. It's just one of those things I'm drawn to.

I'm sorry this was so long. I didn't mean ANYTHING that I said to be perceived as an attack on people who make a living doing posters and layouts. That would be ridiculous. I hope that "blocked" doesn't mean you're not reading what I have to say anymore, because that I guess I just wasted my time responding to you, and it also just kind of seems stupid to stop reading what people have to say because you don't agree with it (especially if you didn't perceive what I wrote correctly).

Maybe I will just move along.

[VonDada]

T-shirt heat transfer for an Irish dance festival. Definitely lacking in skulls and chicks.

[tanxxx]

Originally Posted by iamnikbohac

I think I'm approaching around 300 hours into this, and any feedback, comments (positive or negative) would be appreciated.

I don't really your stuff, because I don't know why you do that and where you're going. Actually, I can't see the interest of this kind of work. I read your previous posts, but it's not clearer to me. I guess you're more in the contemporary art stuff, but I don't know what's your point of view about it, and about your own work. I mean, posting this kind of work here for weeks doesn't seem to give you the feedback you need. Technically, we can just say 'woaaa" but you didn't explain your point of view enough soon, and now I see that, in fact, I didn't see your work the way you wanted to show it to us (sorry my english isn't so good).

[VonDada]

Originally Posted by iamnikbohac

Honestly, it's not boring at all. What's boring to me is doing layouts for albums, posters...stuff like that. I'm not an illustrator ..."Why merely use a machine for something I KNOW I can do. Photographs are nice and all, but I can do what a photograph can do, and there's just something more impressive about me being able to do that than a machine that's made to do it doing what it's supposed to do".

Your work reminds me of Chuck Close. He's kinda famous for his huge photo-realistic faces done with dots.



I think photorealism like this and others like Richard Estes and Don Eddy was great for that time period (1970s) before the advent of Photoshop. I think your stuff is interesting to look at as a "wow, that must've taken a long time to do" but not in a "that really moves me emotionally" way. It's admirable you take so much time on your pieces. It's not a critique, I feel the same way about Close.

Now, Robert Longo did some photorealistic stuff (the Men in the Cities series) that was full of emotion and raw energy. I would love to see you tackle something like that.