This is a timelapse video converting one of my American Graffiti Montages into an American Graffiti Painting. This is 100 hours of painting sped up to 45 seconds. This is a very basic piece but most pieces take months or even years to create.
American Graffiti drawings are made on the computer by manually taking photographs of paintings. Then, artists draw every square inch of them. Eventually, the original photos become nothing more than the color palettes. The new resulting compositions are now completely complex drawings. Often, they encompass over 1,500,000 manual brush strokes. These include manual mouse and tablet manipulations. The drawings/paintings have original sizes often exceeding 5 feet by 21 feet!
With these thumbnails or even the full-screen images, you cannot see the details in the compositions. You can click on any of them to make the image fullscreen, but full details are not visible. To see the full details, you need to examine them in the original printed aluminum. They could also be on metallic canvas or metallic cotton fiber. Many of these abstractions or micro-abstractions harbor “spacelings” a nickname the artist Dowling has affectionately given to them. These “spacelings” are like abstract creatures you find when the observer drills in on pieces of these abstractions.
You will also find abstract “totems.” Totem poles are the largest objects. However, they are not the only ones that coastal Pacific Northwest natives use. These objects depict spiritual reverence, family legends, sacred beings, and culturally important animals, people, or historical events. Here Dowling pays homage to totem art. The influence of traditional totem art can be seen on the vertical axis of many of Dowling’s more complex pieces.
3 Comments: