Inorganic Art in the Material World (Test Images for Dell)
I have been working with the wonderful Dell since late last year and we came up with a concept to do a collection show for London Fashion Week to celebrate the new model of the XPS. In that process I pitched the idea to create visual images through Dell’s hardware to design your own makeup looks. In that process I got to play with a huge amount of different concepts because I had just sketched all my imagery for my MAC collection, which was a learning curve. I’ve never used an on screen stylus so it opened up a new way of creating.
I started to learn a lot of the AI processes that go into digital imagery today and I wanted to take a recent video I did and show an example of how I turned images I took at Kew Gardens into concepts for artistic makeup, without it becoming too evidently digital. It’s kind of like a play of organic vs inorganic, in a non existent world. I love when you push photographs to the limit because essentially it reminds you that the real thing has multi facets, scent, form, shadow, growth, movement, shape. Photos are just an arrangement of colour and that’s how we record things, an imitation of something alive. I wanted to create different makeup looks that were using my Dell XPS but became painterly, not clinically digital.
The six images below took some photos, and they’re almost like a modern face chart to anyone that remembers the old MAC way of coming up with imagery. Sketches. You can now hover over any image you take on an iPhone and it takes out the BG. It’s kinda amazing, and that gave me a blueprint to start editing. I created the base face, then I imported the photos and manipulated them to look like paint. I loved the cactus imagery because I love a heavy lid, and the cactus spines reminded me of crystals. I loved playing with the insect eating plants and they became almost like bubbles as painted by Georgia O’keefe. The rose became a Pucci print, and the colours are just amazing I’m already thinking of how to create something.
The water lilies inverted became an ultra violet storm of flower power, which is gonna have to be done with some painterly strokes, using a brush as a stamp and creating those shapes. The palm leaf inverted became a Ziggy reference, and finally the glorious leaf eye shapes definitely can be recreated with a painterly printing technique, building up colours on two sponges, smushed together and wacked on the eyelid. I thought it was a different way of me showing some art tests and I thought you guys may enjoy learning about my process.
