Stefan Viljoen <spamnot@ wrote:

> 
> Don't you just hate it when that happens? I'm still learning a lot, and this
> has happened to me too - spending hours putting in extra detail, only to
> find that in the final image it is invisible...

At least I had the good luck ( not really through foresight but more 
through the cautious methodologies of age, and because it made the 
modelling a little easier, ) to break out the added detail into a 
separate piece which I can include, or not, as I wish.


> 
> You wouldn't consider documenting exactly how you did that and putting it up
> somewhere on the web? I read your description of its creation and the bit
> you say here just makes it sound even more involved. 

That is a nice invitation.  I will give it some thought.  When I work I 
save off my models at different nodes or points where the modelling is 
about to branch either into a new level of detail that can't be 
retreated from, or into an alternate approach to the problem.  So I have 
something of a record, not really complete, but something anyway that I 
can consult.  Still, there was so much trial and error and backtracking 
of steps that it is difficult to reconstruct and remember what I 
actually did... and further, to sense what might be of interest and what 
wouldn't.

As a ancilliary thought, I am quite convinced that this object would 
have required about the same amount of work if I'd modelled it with 
SDL/CSG.  There would probably have been less trial and error on 
technique and approach, but at lot of fussing with transforms.


> talented people can produce. I've often sat, bored, wondering what I can do
> next that would look cool, 

People make images for all sorts of different reasons and motivations. 
It has always been my contention that there are as many different 
reasons for making "art" as there are "artists."  And also, that the 
tribe, if you will, of people who self-identify as "artists" is far more 
various than "non-artists" think it is.

I remember seeing a show of photographs, years ago now, by a 
photographer who never did "make it"  But she had gained some sort of 
access to a group of people who were producing S&M materials and at the 
same time, of course, indulging in these practices for their own 
enjoyment.  It seems to me that this was in the early eighties just when 
such things were becoming popular or "mainstream" but had not yet 
reached their present state of commodity.  It was like these people were 
the early commoditizers and she felt she had discovered a secret, 
furtive world.  (That is just how it seems to me, I really know very 
little of that world or its actual history.  I am probably revealing 
myself as impossible naive! )  Anyway, this is a lengthy preamble to a 
short point.  I remember that in her documentary, it was quoted that the 
  S&M participants "couldn't believe" that anyone would be interested in 
these materials.  That for them the interest was purely in doing it, not 
watching.  And I have known many artists who viewed their art 
similarily, as merely the by-product of their activities, interests,... 
obsessions even.

For instance, the guy who taught sculpting at my undergraduate school, a 
macho ex-marine, often ruddy from liquor, quick tempered and surly, 
considered his own work to be so much "dirty linen."  (He cast heroic, 
oversized, contorted male torsos, headless and limbless, in bronze, in a 
Rodinesque, factured style.)

So I can't tell you what use, or art, there is to going to a museum, 
picking out some artifact as a subject, then modelling and rendering it. 
  All I can say is that I can't really stop myself and spend a good 
amount of time trying to rationalize it after the fact.

When I finally began to emerge from depression after loosing my job and 
9/11 and all that, I began to work doing aisle sales selling printers. 
At that job I met yet another ex-marine.  He had a regular job with a 
lot of responsibility in a large brokerage firm, was due to be made VP, 
but still he worked the weekend aisle-sales job.  He also did peoples' 
taxes on the side, and various speaking gigs on identity theft, ( I 
dunno, but he was formerly Special Forces, ) and I don't know what else. 
  Anyway he once said to me that one very wealthy man he knew 
(money-wise) had stated a simple credo, that one should never put energy 
into anything that didn't make money.  Well I have put most of my 
energies in life into things that don't make money.  And presto, I don't 
have much money! It's a serious joke, my friend.

There is one person here who mentions something in conversation that is 
very close to my own experience.  The person is Jaime Vives Piqueres, 
and what he talks about is the role of "surprise" in his motivation for 
making pictures.  I think it is significant that he, like me, is mostly 
a mimetic artist.  This role of surprise was crucial to me during all 
the years I spent painting.  It may seem counter-intuitive to others but 
realists or mimeticists can be genuinely surprised at the outcome of a 
painting or image.  It is really at the heart of it, even when the sole 
purpose is to reproduce some object.  It has something to do with the 
idea of garnering and displaying empirical information.  Though he 
doesn't talk about it, I sense that this same factor is also strongly 
present in Christoph Hormann's "Earth View" pictures.

I also wanted to mention Rene Buui's work as a further turn of this 
screw but it will have to wait.  Time to go on shift!  In fact I'm late.

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