Minted and dropped the last of my 32-Blocks project (for the time being). These are a fun concept for me, and it’s been real interesting reading people’s strong opinions about pixel art NFTs while I was doing this (general conversations on Discord, not anything directed at me, personally). Pixel art was not my intent, rather to call into question the whole idea of how many pixels a digital artwork needs to be ‘valuable’ as an NFT. Since everything we do in the digital space is pixel-based it all comes down to how tightly we pack those pixels into a small space, do my landscapes have less value as art because I decided to simplify the pixel algorithm and force you to back away from the image or make it smaller for it to be ‘fully resolved’?
Wouldn’t you know it? At the exact same time my creative brain was rousing from a long slumber I just happened to be mowing my yard and daydreaming about project ideas when I accidentally ran my mower over a large swarm of honey bees – needless to say they were not happy about my transgression and went on a massive attack (at least for a typically gentle bee species). My mind was already racing, then the bee venom was added to the mix and the result was vivid dreams over the next 3 nights. The dreams served as a perfect inspiration for the next series of images where I simply “let go” of all my artistic inhibitions and went for it – the results surprised and excited me!
Dreaming up Art
The dreams the bee’s gave me reminded me that I have been keeping dream journals for many years, as I grow older my insomnia increases, I wake up mid-dream extremely often and I always try to write down what I remember immediately. The experiences of Bee Venom inspired me to crack open those journals and use them to inspire new individual artworks that are meant to express my dreams (which are all short stories) as a single artwork.
Exploring Writing
As I continued to write while making artworks it occurred to me that the two were interchangeable, and so I began writing my first short story, a science fiction tale that will be illustrated with artworks I create. This series is about a distant future where humans have long ago become extinct, an alien race projects their energy to Earth and begins exploring it, the discoveries will both surprise and alarm you!
Start of a New Concept
nostalgic about simple computer artworks. This is where my new series of work comes in – “32-Blocks” is a project where I take classic landscape photographs made with a modern digital camera at maximum resolution, and reduce them to 32-block mosaics in an effort to enjoy the basic elements of design that attract us to 2D artwork in the first place. I believe that even at this reduced resolution the subjects are still identifiable and have many formal elements of beauty and begging the question – how much information do we really need for visual enjoyment?
Art Block 