Environmentalism and Art

sustentavel by felipeart

Found on Graphic Design Junction

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle by Summon-The-Wolves

Found on Graphic Design Junction

by Edina Tokodi

Found on Take Part

An artist's perspective on creativity

Fleeing Creativity by ~berthjan on deviantART

As an artist, I think about creativity a lot. Like many others, I often wonder whether my creations are worth the time they take.

This past Saturday, an artist I truly respect, Mindy Smith, did a presentation to a group of fellow artists about creativity. There were so many things she said that I thought were worth exploring further, and she spoke about them so beautifully that I often thought it was a shame we weren't recording her talk. Because they are her ideas and not mine, I will not attempt to outline them to you - they are hers to share. However, there are a few things that I thought so glorious, and have continued to think about since her presentation that I too must explore them and share them.

First, I'll turn my attention to what it means to be a creative person. The dictionary defines the intransitive verb "creative" as in "the creative arts" as "having the quality of something created rather than imitated". In other words, creating is not the same as reproducing. Or, as Mindy put it: "creative is being willing to go beyond what you know now." Being a creative is part of me. I can't be separated from it, but unlike Mindy, I have not yet learned to separate myself from my creative work. I wish that I felt like my creations, once created, did not belong to me - that they were meant for someone else. I think that my separation from them would be less painful, that negative opinions of them would be less painful. However, would I miss out on something truly special if I were completely separated from my creations? Just as God does not wish to be separated from us - His creations - should I wish to be so with my creations? I think for my own sanity, I need to learn to let them go and become what they are to become under the lights of others. It is too disheartening to be defined by one's work. Rather, I think taking a perspective similar to Mindy's, by understanding that the work may come from me, but does not belong to me. For me, this is a hard thing to do.

Second is the change of perspective to seeing what is good about a piece and continuing to work on that rather than constantly critiquing what is wrong with it. I have often wondered... when I hear parents ask their upset child, "what's wrong?" should they instead be asking "what's right?" Mindy's suggestion here takes the idea of focusing on strengths rather than dwelling on weaknesses and applies it to creating art. It seems to me that if we could apply this fundamental idea to all areas of life, including art creation, then it could improve our whole lives. But it could also help with the previous problem I have with feeling too close to my work... It was suggested that we let the work become what it wants to become.

And I'll leave you with this quote from Mindy: "Art is so determined to exist that it will exist in spite of you."

Abstraction in Maya 2011

So the other day I came across this really interesting 3D image on deviantArt

"Tactual" by xxtjxx

And I was once again looking at the image today, thinking "how would I do that in Maya?" when I noticed that this artist was inspired by another artist. So, I went to look at Jason-C's work, where I found more beautiful 3D images such as:

"Mandala" by Jason-C

This image, as noted by it's artist, took over 255 hours to render. I didn't see that before I started my own version. Anyway, so our tech guys finally got Maya 2011 to install on my work computer and I got in there to see how much had changed between the 2008 version and this one. What better way than to play with an idea of how I could create something similar. Maya crashed on my first version before I saved it, so in the last 25 minutes of work I created this:

 

It's not so bad when you consider the 180 layers + 3 lights in only 25 minutes with a total render time of about 1 second. With some tweaks - adding an environment, turning on raytracing (so it will show reflections), and adding more lights, etc - it could look pretty cool, and perhaps might make an awesome background for something. And amazingly enough, it took no script writing, which is very similar to programming and I don't really do that so well.

And of course the next question is... how could I make this in true 3D out of hand-dyed fabric?!