Fred Tomaselli paints intricate psychedelic patterns onto covers of the New York Times.
THIS IS WHAT I WANT TO DO FOR THE FILM I’M WORKING ON. SOMEONE WITH EXPERTISE PLEASE HELP.
(via thedapblog)
A damn good read between some very developed artists (Zak Smith, a Yale MFA graduate who was an alternative porn star and Ernesto Caivano, an artist whose work I deeply respect). This summer, maybe I’ll just draw and write.
ZS: I’ve always preferred work that looks good to me and then when I look closer, it looks even better. Or I suppose you’d say “work that is formally interesting, and then when you look closer it’s even more formally interesting.” Your idea about “order” is interesting to me. I guess when I look at your work, the words that come to mind are “decadent” or “sophisticated”, which kind of are the same thing. What I mean is, “sophisticated” doesn’t just mean “smart” or “complicated” or “advanced” - a “sophisticated” idea is one where a whole lot of evolution and civilization and advancement and argument had to be made before that idea even came up - whether it’s good or bad. Like, for example, a velcro iPod holder built into an SUV is a more sophisticated object than, say, a spoon - not because it’s hard to make, but just because a hell of a lot of technology and civilization had to have already happened before it makes sense. You need to have invented cars and gasoline and recorded music and computers before you get an iPod holder, whereas all you need to do is invent soup before you can see why you’d need a spoon.
Your work seems to have a fixation on the sophistications of cultures which to some degree have vanished. Even the birds you draw have less kinship with the kind of far-flung generalist animals - like blackbirds or finches - you see all over then with weird birds-of-paradise that only developed in one specific corner of the world after thousands of years of in-breeding. I guess that also brings in the idea of specialization…
EC: Interesting that “technology” is both responsible for a better fast food burger as well as Stealth warfare, and making sure our entire “data-bodies” exist beyond our domain. Then once we agree about specialization and sophistication there are the implications: a better burger, a better missile, but at what expense?
It’s fascinating to see how technology has been informed by our body, and how now, it seems like we want technology to attach and go into our body. Specialization is really a way of thinking of something specific for a short period of time, like looking into a microscope. My specificity with the birds, for example, is to avoid generalizations with the more common species and all of its associations. The idea of a bird of paradise-evolution-confluence is to create a more dramatic relationship with the characters in the story, as the knight is obsessed with a material fetish… hence the birds are a bit extreme at times in their regalia. But this ornamentation has a root in language and symbols, like a coat of arms.
