Art of eVan

Whispered Context is what I call this one. The female form visually whispers to the reader of the text as one reads it. It’s too obvious here to be a subliminal communication, but it implies this concept anyway. The last image I did like this I blogged and showed you, called New Morals, captured a new idea I happened upon in my lucid states of creativity.

I read Facebook’s rules concerning showing art with nudity in it, and it sounds like they are okay with it. After all, busts of the Greek statue David can be found pretty much anywhere, so I felt confident in sharing this image with you. This new series I’m developing reminds me of Greek statues, what with their marble statue resemblances behind the lithography of text.

As is a well-practiced art now, I used reversed and flipped text in this piece to bring attention to the shapes, patterns, and groups that letters, words, and sentences form. The designers of fonts put a lot of effort into designing letters so that they allow the eye to flow across them as they are read. Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing machine, back during the Renaissance, even did mathematical calculations for the characteristics of each letter, such as the middle part of o’s being wider than their tops and bottoms for example.

The foundation of this digital illustration is a collage. I pasted texts, words, and paragraphs from different sources together at different angles. They are all perpendicular to one another however so as to create a degree of stability. The piece as a whole is vertical, making it nice for near a doorway perhaps, or any other area of your house that can allow some vertical space.

As I mentioned previously, I’d like to use portraits of people who are interested, and incorporate them into future works. The face, I find, expresses so many things for people. People are just drawn to faces in art. I wanted to combine undefinable abstractions (such as reversed and flipped text) with the human face and form in order to create a synchronistic synergy. You may notice the text next to the left of the woman’s hair, creating an effect that looks like a breeze or wind is blowing her hair to the left (her right).

Another synchronicity I played on is how the woman’s eyes are right next to the bold text “EYES,” drawing attention to that area with your own eyes. Eye contact is another powerful connection people make with one another all the time. In art, I believe it’s a centering, and deliberating contemplation you can make as you wonder how this specter moves so well through all the black and white print as if she were made of a liquid lighter than water, combing with ease through all the denser materials collected together in this space.

This limited edition print (limited to 25) is: 30 x 20 inches

For: $90.00

If you want it framed with glass, it is: $400.00

If you are not satisfied with your purchase within 60 days of purchase, you can return it to me for a full refund.

What is this? It looks like the shape of a cartoon heart at the bottom center. I didn’t realize that I would get this shape when I was in the process of manipulating the photograph from which it came. I think I will let you figure out the source. I mean, it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?

I wanted to turn the digital photo I was working with at a certain point into the shape of a vase. But the heart shape didn’t resemble the bottom of your typical vase. Therefore, I decided to title this piece Apex of a Heart. In anatomy and physiology, the apex of the human heart is at the bottom of the heart. I found this to be contradictory when I learned about that because when I normally think of the word apex, I think of the apex of a mountain, which is its peak.

Anyway, to overemphasize the “bottomness” of the heart’s apex, I made the point of the heart you see in this image touching the very bottom of the picture plane. The curtains behind the central form give you the sense that they entirely surround it, hiding it from everyone’s view (except yours) as a strange anomaly that oddly resembles something you can almost identify.

I filled in some holes and gaps to touch up the continuity of the form and the curtains. I made other variations of this image, which are more colorful. I decided however that I would like to use this fifth version to show you because the colors weren’t too jarring. Not that jarring colors are bad in general, it’s just that for this piece I felt I balanced this palette well enough after the second day of working on the visual document.

I would like to work with the human form to create more abstractions like this in the future. I would like to work with portraits of friends and acquaintances and incorporate them into my textual artworks. You saw an example of that in New Morals. If interested, send pictures of yourself with minimal background so I can select your image and put it into new works. This theme, and many other concepts, I’m developing currently. You’ve seen my other themes already, so I don’t need to explain them.

The diffuse glow, the soft feeling of cotton, and the exclusivity that this piece invites you to feel makes it an intimate experience. The nice thing about it is that you can return to it and remind yourself of it again and again. Just imagine having it as a limited edition print (25) in your collection of art from original artists. This print is 23 x 18 inches. Just the print itself is $70.00. Remember, there are only 25 that I will make, thus insuring their value for those who own them.

They look like wrinkles in the sheets of a bed. They look like nine square beds fit closely together for storage, creating a plane of mattresses and sheets; like fields of farms below an airplane as you travel overhead. Of course I hadn’t thought of this perception while I was drawing the original piece on collaged paper, which is derived from After the Crash J1 for which I posted previous to this one.

I selected this area of that drawing and repeated it eight more times, thus creating nine cells for which you see here. I turned each cell however so that each adjacent cell is not identically positioned, thus rendering a random—what looks to be—coded image.

It looks like the black cloudy spots in each cell could be nuclei for biological cells, and the surrounding speckles on the borders of each cell are the membranes. There are skin cells in the human body called cuboidal cells. I liken these abstractions to them.

Having made two comparisons already—cells and beds—I note to you that skin cells on the epidermis of your body are rubbed off each night on the sheets of your bed. The colorful impressions of your dreams are added to the folds of your soft sleepfulness as well. But you turn every once in a while to reposition your body in a more comfortable position while you sleep, like the Andy Warhol film called Sleep.

In my healthcare statistics class, I calculated simple formulas for hypothetical bed counts in hospitals. That’s part of the reason why I titled this piece bed count. When a hospital is a maximum capacity, all the beds are used leaving no more beds for new arrivals. That’s why an exact bed count is so important for healthcare workers to know working in a hospital. If there are less patients than there are beds, they can be calculated in ratios.

I don’t know if you can see the salt crystals mingled with the blue areas, but there is indeed salt that I used on the original drawing. I did this to create clouding and bleeding effects. I also used rubbing alcohol, which I splashed on the nervously applied random dots speckling the borders and the spots. You can see the bleeding effect in some of these areas creating an off purple color.

This is the latest drawing I recently finished. It’s titled Happy Zephyrs. The image you see here is based on the original drawing. The original drawing was done on paper with felt-tip and gel pens. I used different metallic gold gel pens for the tails of the pisciforms you see repeating regularly throughout the picture plane. 

For some reason, I’ve been fascinated with metallic gold pens. I think it’s because in formal art, using things such as gel pens (perhaps even especially metallic gold pens) is considered low value, scrap-book, hobby, not serious type art. In this, I see a challenge. Therefore, I’m drawn (all fun intended). 

I decided that Happy Zephyrs, the original drawing as converted into digital imagery after scanning, was asking me to make a background for it. It was a subtle beckoning, but I heeded. I tweaked a few of the filters and adjustments in my editing program, and thus produced variations of what you see here. I feel particularly satiated with achieving an oxidized copper effect. This gives me the weathered, stressed, aged look that I often seek. 

I know many artists have experimented with and explored techniques of aging, weathering, stressing, ad hoc, and imperfect expressions already, so this really isn’t anything original on my part. I do feel, however, that this approach is something that has immeasurable depth and possibilities to it. In a sense, I feel like I let nature flow through me sometimes when I make art; like I’m letting the forces of nature with a few of its tools work the various terrains and mediums of earth. 

Electronic art is just another dimension to this process for me. The vortex, the force, the warp adjusting, the attenuation, the pattern recognition and hybridization are all within me. I am a doorway through which ideas come tumbling out and find security within the various mediums I record them in for present or future purposes. Even the ideas I supposedly complete in final works still have possibilities for future morphoses into new ideas. 

The word zephyr means a light wind or west wind. It comes from the Greek word Zephyrus, which was identified by the ancient Greeks as a god of the western wind. In my making of this drawing, I hadn’t delved too deeply in researching the myth behind Zephyrus. Perhaps it’s something you may embark upon if you feel so intrigued to do so. I just thought the pisciforms in this particular drawing looked like windsocks with happy faces, so I made the connection: Happy Zephyrs.