Interview 22 // Karen LaFleur

Hello. Today is March 1st, 2022. I cannot believe it. And here we are without mask. May the world go on and forward in a better way. My name is Roz, Roz Dimon, D-I-M-O-N. And I'll just say a few words about myself and Karen LaFleur, who I am interviewing today as part of the Techspressionism interview series.

Roz Dimon

I mean, in a short word or two about me, this whole story of being digital has been a total accident for me. My oil paintings filled up with pixels when I was in New York City. After 10 years of paintings that filled with pixels, I had to go to something else. And I was in the forefront of digital media taking courses at the computer, the School of Visual Arts. And it's all been quite a ride since then. But enough about me.

Roz Dimon

I want to talk to you a little about Karen LaFleur. Fascinating artist who's part of our group, Techspressionism. And I'm just going to say a few words about her and then we're just going to let Karen share her screen. And we'll see if she can answer any questions. And tell us about her journey. Karen LaFleur is a digital artist, a writer, and an animator. She combines traditional drawing and painting techniques with digital renderings and computer animation. A common theme in her artwork is the concept of resiliency.

Roz Dimon

The interplay between interior and exterior worlds. Her artworks exhibit nationally, including the Renwick Gallery, the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C., Cape Museum of Art in Massachusetts, and the Hammond Museum in New York, the Union Square, San Francisco. And she can be found in private collections worldwide. Oh, and if I didn't mention it, Karen is joining us today from Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Welcome, Karen. It's great to be with you. It's a delight to be here.

I'm so happy to be here with you, Roz, and to show everybody what I do, to be part of the Techspressionism group.

That's great. And Karen and I know each other through the Techspressionism salons that are every two weeks, which are open to other people. And that's been a really interesting thing, hasn't it, to be part of those salons?

Yes. It's been a wonderful community of people who are doing so many different things in Techspressionism, all different types of digital art, and yet we all have the same sensibility. Like we found our people that understand the challenges and be able to express the joys of working with the computer.

Right. I agree. Colin Goldberg really has made a wonderful open platform for us to all share. And of course, we have a show coming up that we're both in, the Techspressionism show that will be opening close to where I live in the Hamptons, in Southampton. That's going to be a very exciting show. Thank you. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with us today. Thank you so much for having me. Looking forward to that. I'm glad that you will be in it and I will be in it as well. We do have other questions here as part of our interview process. But I think I'll just let you share.

Roz Dimon

Karen, we talked about that because our art is how we tell our journey. But we want to just cover your background. Background maybe remember to talk about what made you become an artist or like you said you had no choice I think you said love that a little about your influences and then we'll talk a little at the end about expressionism in the future but just go for it I may interrupt once in a while if I have a question if that's okay I

Think that's fine and I think it's great for the audience to be able to see what I'm doing too as I'm talking about my backgrounds and things so let me go and share my screen and bring up my lecture screen can you see that great excellent so Roz asked me in a way you know when did you know you were artists is one of the questions they ask and I said to her with my first breath and it's true because it's really how I have seen the world right from the very beginning and so my artwork in general speaks to the resiliency of the human heart to survive in ever-shifting landscapes and I do that by exploring the interplay between interior and exterior worlds with a focus on adaptability and a lot of this comes from voice where we have thoughts and in our head and yet we're a social human being and we're speaking out loud and it's sort of that interior world and we're speaking out loud and it's sort of that interior world and we're speaking out loud and it's sort of that interior world and we're speaking out loud and it's sort of that exterior world that picks up in my artwork in all different forms but it stems from this duality

Has that always been evident to you from the beginning that's where you were going or did it take you a while to figure out what you're doing right

From the beginning right from the very beginning I mean you know well before six years old oh the very last slide I'll show you some of these little twig and stone villages and communities I think that I've been working on some of these little twig and stone villages and communities I think that I've been working on some of these little twig and stone villages and communities I think that I've been working on and I'd put them in the marsh grass and I just leave them there for people to find and wonder what was this community where did it come from this

A lot

Earlier so I was already working with this duality right from the beginning so when I talk about my work I start with me and I'm a writer as well as a visual artist so let's start me look there are pictures and stories inside my hands that's nice to hear everyone said just don't forget to wash them before dinner but I didn't wash away the pictures and stories and they're still inside my hands even today all these pieces if you're curious were all done on the computer and when I'm working on the computer I don't use any paint programs it's strictly photoshopped the trackpad and mouse a

Quick question Karen are were we looking at three different pieces or is that all one triptych or are they three different pieces

To show the range of what can be accomplished wow yeah so we start at the beginning I'm from the Boston area really very close to the city I mean I could see it was 10 minutes right there is my horizon so in the winters I was in the city in the summers I was on the island and the ocean left a huge impression on me as a young child because of the freedom and also the freedom to explore the microcosms the ocean is so changeable on the moment's notice one tidal pool will have one community in the morning and it'll have a different one in the afternoon and so on the right side of this slide you'll see these little nurse figures and the other big influence for me was my health because right from the very beginning I had a severe heart condition and we were literally waiting for the heart lung machine to develop so I'm an experimental case coming through in the early 60s when they did the surgery so I had this sci-fi world that I would be in for months at a time in the hospital and then I would have this amazing amazing freedom when I came home at the at the ocean so they were like these two worlds duality again happening

Yeah that really explains the interior and exterior and psychological experience when

You were young yes and when I was in the hospital you know it wasn't all doom and gloom you were still being children and so we would empower ourselves to be children because back in the 50s this is the early 50s we're talking about we didn't have therapy dogs or social workers we were given a deck of cards and a pad of paper and a pencil no television no nothing so we learned to be children in the middle of chaos difficult chaos and I found the community to be extraordinarily empathetic and amazing observers of people if you weren't feeling well someone would lean against you while you were playing cards until the pain passed and then they just lean away and we were all into six years old so this left a huge impression in terms of observation so text and image right from the very beginning I always was putting text and image in my work I'm not signing this my name is part of the picture it's part of the community and these small microcosms that I ran into at the beach I would go into imaginary ones when I was a kid and I would put them in my little drawing pad at home I was also writing stories but if you notice the words disappear because I'm extraordinarily dyslexic and I can't read in fact I can't read more than three pages per hour until I was in my late 30s and yes creatively decided to do a master's in English literature to study children's literature from text to image I was like okay But you

Were already writing even though reading is difficult was writing a ball of wax story it

Was always story driven behind the art but the words were too hard to get out so that when I went and did the Masters what happened was is I was photocopying material I needed because I just had a little library here on the island that didn't have interlibrary loan and I found out that by photocopying the page, I could read 30 pages an hour. If you hand me a book, I can only do three.

And why is that again? Can you say that again? I think it's because of the tracking and dyslexia.

Dyslexia is a timing issue because there's no area in the brain for us to read. It's a man-made construct reading. It's not a biological construct. So we use this part of our brain and this and this and this and this, and we're firing it off in a bazillion times per second. And dyslexics, sometimes the firing doesn't happen. So you

Can get a lot of different anomalies.

How did having a copy of the page be, how is it different than reading from a book? Flat.

No curvature

To the page. Oh, I didn't get that. Oh, I see. That's important.

Yeah. It is. And a lot of dyslexics have other reversal issues or whatever, but this tracking was my best. Main issues. So when they came up again, technology is chasing me through this whole lecture in terms of opening up more doors for me with my health issues. Even though, you know, I'm advancing as an artist, the health issues are getting worse in some areas, but the technology would come along and catch me and save me and push me forward again. Oh, wow. So when the tablets came out, it was like, thank you.

Well, there's so many geniuses who are dyslexics. So I don't know.

Well, it has nothing to do with intellect. It's a timing issue. Right. So I'll try to go along a little quickly here. This is high school work. So I'm working on my drafting and my drawing abilities, observation abilities, and I'm still putting text and image in things. And I didn't really recognize this till a lot later, maybe like I was in my 20s and I went through some old work and went, huh, you know, I've been doing this my whole life.

Wow.

So I'm trying to build another world with living inhabitants to tell their stories, even if it's an abandoned village in the marsh grass that still tells a story of who was there, their footprint. So by the time I get to college, OK, I can draw. Now what? And this is an as you know, it's a pre-digital age. There's no Internet. There's no anything. And you're doing drawing. And you're doing sculpture or whatever. And I'm like, but I want these things to move.

Karen LaFleur

So what happened was, is I had to take a sculpture class. So I took the ceramic class. But naturally, I'm not doing plates and teacups. I start building marionettes. My characters are starting to come alive. And they built a little art on a little dusty library on how to build traditional European puppets, the big ones that are in Vienna that are about three feet high. Right. And they're all built in the classic form in high fire stoneware. And is this one that we're looking at three feet high? Yes. She's about 32 inches. She's a little under three feet.

Oh. You know, it's funny when you start to see an artist. I'm just interrupting a second, but because I have looked at your work and from the very first slide, there's some patterning and stuff as part of you. And that's evident even here in the puppets.

Yes. Yes. Right now, I'm trying to work on 3D gesture. And in this particular puppet, her eyes are closed in a big sort of squinting smile. But in reality, it's the eyes that sort of suck you into the internal character. And so for this particular one, I was trying to work on movement. But there are others with their eyes open that you'll see that come along. Meanwhile, we're kind of outside of New York. My husband and I are sort of, he's an artist too, brilliant artist. And we're headed to the city. We're now like in their early 20s.

Karen LaFleur

We send out, you know, information on our artwork. And we get a call back from a letter back from a major gallery in New York. And they say, hey, you get your stuff close to New York. We really want to see it. And of course, we're dancing. We're like, yay. This couldn't be better. And then 24, 48 hours later, we get a phone call. And they told us my husband had 30 days to live. And I was three days away from having my son. So we side tripped back to the island.

Wow. My voice has a way of interrupting art. It's a real bummer, isn't it?

It is in a way, but it also makes you extraordinarily creative. Of course. You just don't give up. So it's like, you know, a tragedy on one level. But on the other level, it's made me the artist I am today. So of course, here we are back at the ocean, my muse. And what are we going to do? Because he needs a transplant. This is going to be a long haul. They're barely doing transplants at the time. You know, in fact, he spent 17 years on dialysis through all of this. He did for 30 years. He was with us. So what are we going to do? We're artists. So we bought this little house, literally 20 by 20.

Yeah. Now hold on. I have to back up. They gave him 30 days to live. But then he lived 30 years? Yes. Oh, there's the nice surprises.

This is wonderful. And the medical community just kept him going. You know? And again, he came forward with technology and I came forward with technology because if we were born 10 years earlier, we wouldn't be here. So we're actually technological creations. My husband and I. So we bought this teeny little house. It was pre-1770.

Karen LaFleur

It had about a 20 by 23 foot footprint, little teeny thing, and a fixer-upper. And we put this room on the back of it. And we created our own art world. If we couldn't have an art world in New York, we were still going to do it. And it was really, Roz, one of the best things that could have happened to us.

And you're in the Cape now, right? I just want to help our audience who are listening to this. But you're back in the Cape. And yeah, so they can figure out where you are.

Yeah, Cape Cod, because this is a lot of capes in the world. But they call it Cape Cod in the islands. And everybody here calls it the islands. So I'm doing local speak. But we had this little house. And what happened was, is millions of people would come here in the summer. And they would come in. And again, no interest, no internet or anything. So this was their experience to art. And we just love putting our stuff out there and responding with our audience, seeing how they reacted, having these wonderful conversations with them. My husband was a found object sculptor as I was doing my figurative work. And I think I might have told you before, but we would have customers that came to the Cape once every 10 years. Then we'd come home from a trip to the hospital, and on our front step, literally, this is true, there's a tractor seat.

Karen LaFleur

And from Idaho, they drove all the way out here with this tractor seat to give to us because they had been in our gallery 10 years earlier. And this just wonderful exchange between audience and artists. So it was a sideways trip, but it was a good trip.

And that would be something that your husband would put in his found object kind of sculpture, right? More than you.

We had, well, this is the other thing about living in this era. We had a lot of people who were in the middle of the world. And we had to think with your family. And you know, in that year, you really had to think with your family.

And you know, you would have to think with your family. And you know, you would have to think with your family. And you know, you would have to think with your family. And you know, you would have to think with your family. And you know, you would have to think with your family. And you know, you would have to think with your family. And you know, you would have to think with your family. And you know, you would have to think with your family.

And you know, you would have to think with your family.

And you know, you would have to think

With your family. And you know, you would have to think with your family. And you know, you would have to think with your family. And you know, you would have keep the gallery going we made clothing we made jewelry we made you know fix the lawnmower wheel we worked with a lot of designers we worked with doing Bloomingdale's windows you know they would call up artists in that day and say hey we need 45 porcelain hands for the windows and you know in New York which we did then we'd ship it all down to them so it kept us going in terms of financials we didn't sell one thing we did many things so these are the figures that I was working with at the time and these were my studios little ones clay studio all the faces in these are hand-built I didn't use molds and I would make many things so you know if we had one doll I made 12 because when they made out of fabric or plaster or wood or what fabric with armatures aluminum armature wire rigging porcelain faces hands extremities antique glass eyes I used to work with a company in New York that had a collection from 1900 to 1910 that were four dolls in the late 1800s so they were just really beautiful eyes I'm trying to move it along because we don't get through this stage we'll get to the end stage but these are the things that I was building at the time a lot of these sometimes were in almost an installation tableaus in the in the gallery almost like little mini theater productions right here's one of the sculptures is

That you that's me of course it is I want to be sure though I'm just helping our audience know what we're looking at oh that's wonderful oh that's great now that's a pretty large piece that you're standing next to some

Of them are large some of them they ran between 20 inches and three three and a half feet and we sold this all the time people really responded to our it's much different than it is today did

You

Guys show other work or were you really a gallery of two and you did everything like we

Did everything kingdom

Of two well

It's a kingdom of two because of our health we couldn't I mean sometimes we were open for three weeks and then if there was an emergency which there were many you know we would chase the ambulance to Boston and or got police escort and then we were up there for a while and then we'd come back and open up again so we couldn't do that to other artists I

See what a special relationship and story this is here's

Some of the other ones and I'm still working with puppetry as you see on the left her hair is all fine copper wire so this has nothing to do with the beach where every gallery on Cape Cod you know well not every but many of them were selling the picture of the beach the picket fence the cottage and then there was us and a few other galleries and it just became a wonderful audience that we ended up collecting oh that's you wouldn't think it would be but it but it was I'm also doing paintings I'm doing sculptures and this piece I put in because it's actually not one painting what I was doing was painting individual shapes and then assembling collages from them so it's almost like a precursor to using layers in Photoshop yeah very much

And it moves backward and forward a little in a way that yeah that feels like layering which is such a such a word these days you know in the new dimension we're in yeah

Like the eyes are all cut out of the circles out of it and then they're all put together to make one piece and this is around like the early 80s so like 81 82. And like I said I was working with a lot of designers so and so this one is like the theater set the little stuffed Christmas ornament in the upper left actually goes with that Christmas tree in the centers the Boston ballet and they had a Christmas tree that went from normal size to like 30 feet high and all my ornaments were on it so we would work with set designers I was also working for a museum in their collections departments for four or five years and during that time through them I cataloged the collection of a Hans Hofmann student of 6 000 pieces over two years so I learned a lot about how to provenance your own artwork along the way very important very important but I never gave up the story and the image through Hans

Did working with Hans Hofmann and his collection have any influence on you or not so much it

Wasn't Hans Hofmann it was a student of Hans Hofmann oh okay so did it influence my work no it gave me more of an idea of how to like I said provenance and artwork and realize that the artwork has a history beyond you just creating it which is an important lesson in my 30s and 40s to realize and

It's a big deal now with nfts if we can get beyond it all being about the currency itself but giving provenance to a piece that's totally digitally created but I don't want to yeah that would be

Difficult somebody's going to come up with a solution though they have to hold

On I got to get my barking Yorkie one second that's okay come

Here a little bit on this come here yes

This is how you know our interviews are live folks yes and I have the piece okay

Sorry to interrupt but oh no so anyways I'm still trying to do the text in the in the image these are the drawings that I was doing this is charcoal I'd paint with India ink and different sheared layers rubbed in graphite but about this time this is probably my mid-30s now I started to lose my eyesight so that I can't really focus on these details anymore and so I didn't really draw for four or five years until technology came into the picture and then I could blow things up big and you actually get back to the visuals but that little hiatus

I love how you're in and you're telling us your story in that way and how technology was helpful to you and in those ways absolutely because

Having this little hiatus away from the drawing and still making stuff for the gallery and the designers but it gave me a chance to write you know that I got that so I had the writing for three or four years and then the visual came back with technology so here we go digitally I started in 1981 I bought the computer because I thought it would help me with my dyslexia and I thought it would help with the business forms and things and at the time there were no computer stores so I would go to the big trade shows up in Boston because I was a business I could get in get in and the guy who sold this to my first computer to me said lady you get 128k you don't need any more memory I could have blew that out of the picture real fast

But once I got a hold of the machine I knew it was going places first computer if I may ask I started on an Amiga a little a year or two after that Apple

2e Apple TV of course yeah and I've been Apple the whole way that's another story we'll get into but I'll tell you later so in the beginning I'm just testing the scene machine to see how far I can push to get back to my drawings and so this is literally Matrix dot printer because the trouble with the machines was yeah it's great on the screen what do I do with it you know that I can't get it off right yeah period of time so eventually it gets going up close enough that it's getting real close that I can actually start to say yeah can start to sketch on this machine and have the freedom to work. But I still am, I'm chasing the story. So I decided to do a master's in children's literature in Boston. It's a premier program up there. It's wonderful. And it's really not about children.

Karen LaFleur

It's about the texts. And it's about literature. So this was a wonderful experience for me to go through. And they were extraordinarily supportive with my husband. You know, if he was sick halfway through the class, they'd say, go home, take care, come back, you can do it next semester. They were very, very good.

Karen LaFleur

But going through that experience, I realized, so what if I want to get this to press? Because back then, as you know, there were no pre-flighting software. You could make this picture and now what do you do?

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, we took pictures off the screen with a, like, catch the burglar 7-Eleven camera. Exactly. And then we'd take it to, you know, Dugal in New York. And yeah, it was a whole different, different ballgame then. It was.

And I'm on an island and there's no place to go with this. So I ended up, after doing the master's, I did a certificate in computer graphics at RISD, Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island. And this is how they traditionally trained you to mock up a piece going to press, which now a lot of this is built into the programs, but it taught me exactly how things have to be.

Karen LaFleur

The detail that needed to be done. So when I was doing this, we're talking maybe early 90s now. The piece on the right is Illustrator. And then everybody goes, yeah, it's Illustrator. I said, yeah, but it's Illustrator 1.0 and it didn't shade anything. So this piece, all the shading is done by me in bazillions of little layers.

Karen LaFleur

Then I did a third degree. And a master's in illustration from Syracuse that was for studying the visual back to the text. First one was the text to the visual. This was visual back to the text. And now I can draw on the computer with my little mouse the way I could before this whole journey. So this whole journey took about 10 years to get to this point. I see. Now it becomes, where are you going to go with these visual stories? Where is the technology going to take you next? So I'm starting to break down the story in terms of how to push it across the page.

Karen LaFleur

And then I started writing sudden fictions. And this is one of my sudden fictions. I hope the sound will work. Put it way up. You're going to get to that as you go.

It's a very compelling image. Very interesting.

Thank you. It's a key, important piece for me to start the next phase of this journey. I do not count the years since my disappearance. To do so, I wrote what little footing I have in this ancient land. And yet, in truth, what is a year? Without measurement, time still brings a new moment. Passes. I've learned that at least, if nothing else.

Karen LaFleur

To survive, I try not to think of home. I live by the idea that one cannot miss what one cannot recall. But more often than not, I break my own rule. A night sound, or just a half stage before sleep, just a fraction of a second, that's all it takes, and my thoughts skip back to a former life. Rain on a night drive, red light waiting for green, windshield wipers flicking back forth, back forth, and the scatter of fallen leaves across wet pavement.

Karen LaFleur

Strange what the soul remembers.

Beautiful. Nice words. I like the words. I'm a big reader as well, so I appreciate it. Thank you.

It's an integral part of every piece that you're going to see from now on. You may not see the words, but they're all driven by stories. And this is a really important piece for me, because it's playing with the dualities again. When you first see it, you say, oh, a mythic character. But by the time you get to the story, you realize, no, this is a modern character caught in mythology. It totally flips the whole thing of its head. And there's a lot of different dualities in this. I could teach for 15 minutes, but we need to move on. But it is a key piece that started this whole genre going into sudden fictions. I say sudden fictions, which is now probably equates to flash fiction. Back then, there was no name for it. But for me, it's a story around 700 words or less. It takes place in a single setting with a brief time span and contains a number of limited time frames.

Karen LaFleur

And it's a story that's not just a story, it's a story that's about a limited number of characters. One, maybe two. But most importantly, it speaks with immediacy. Like you and I are having coffee together. I'm going to tell you this story right now. It professes an uneasy familiarity so that you're like, yeah, I get this. I get where this is going. But it ends up on the brink of revelation. It doesn't really tell you, and I lived happily ever after. It's the reader that has to bring that epiphany to the piece. It's done in very short form.

Karen LaFleur

So this is what you can do with 113 words the little box had a finial on my mother's age worn hutch a cloisonne with red roses and hollyhock shimmery clear like melted candy drops picked off the tip of your tongue and held to the light a delicacy on silver legs my mother's treasured possession the one she kept out of childhood reach but never out of view oh no never out of view the only spot of color in an otherwise gray room with no curtains two chairs and a floor mat covered with dirt from too many feet and not enough time I laid the little box in my mother's hand she smiled I think at least that's what I'd like to believe so with this background realize everything is being done and I'm going to read you a little bit of the book that I wrote about the being driven by these stories I did a collection called night driving it's women's voices and I started to pull apart the story these are the internal stories we tell ourselves versus the outer world you know your mom your wife or whatever that you have to deal with is still this internal person so that's what this collection was about this one here on the outside quick

Question were you showing the on where you were is the audio part of the piece or when you think of the is this are you just sharing the background of the audio or is that something that you would share if you were showing these pieces only

If I'm doing the animations now but back then there was no access to animation these are just digital prints but when I gave a lecture because I'm dyslexic and I can't read my own writing well I would record them and this started me on this whole journey of putting wait a minute I can put my voice in my artwork and I'm going to put my voice in my work thank you that helps that helps and then my gallery was open you got to realize at the same time and we would have to do the christmas fair for a week for the town or whatever and all the businesses had to come up with something you know so and so hired a harp player somebody else did you know christmas decorating for ornaments for the kids and what I put out every year are a collection of doll houses that we built they were just architectural models and I would run these videos I made videos out of these and ran them in the back room and people would be able to hear them spoken that way so it's sort of like my beginning when

I'm getting into animation so

This

Piece was important to me because in the in the in the frame around the edge the stories pulled apart and that's literally the story that's outside the story inside in the brown area is very rigid and straight and that's the internal voice of this particular character the theme is the fear of saying yes to love so all this is going on side but this is fear holding this character like this I also in this story put interior stories so you can read it by color so if you chose the pink text it would read to mark its passage only the tiniest of flake drifts in december and you'd have these other little stories inside the story so I'm playing again with pushing the story apart this is ella jean she's about teenage love being wiser than the parents actually because the parents are dysfunctional and this is about motherhood and the loss of identity and yet retaining identity she's literally courting a little superhero in a suit and a cereal bowl how

Large is this they

Were running probably 22 by 28 and I would sell these in the gallery constantly and they're all digitally created on Photoshop digitally created yes now we are at 10 of

Three I don't mean to hurry us but I want you to be thinking about we definitely want to see what you're doing now so you know how many slides you have here but I'm just putting that in there

So how much more time do you think we have ross because I think I'll I think maybe 15 minutes let's unshare the screen because everybody's going to be able to see what we're doing next so I'm going to put this on the screen so I'm going to put this on the screen so I'm going to put this on the screen here we go!!!!

Karen LaFleur

Yeah okay so pull it forward a whole bunch of time and I'm still writing and I'm still doing text and image and I end up back on the island and now where is my muse and my muse becomes the ocean that I started with so I start a series called a diary of a tidal pool and I began to realize the story could be pulled apart just visually and abstractly.

Karen LaFleur

So I would visit this title pool every now and then and I would get these different impressions and then just come home and do a painting. I never did a sketch or I never did a photograph. And then I started doing landscapes.

Now are these multi-layered or do you just do one layer or how do you work your process? Hundreds and hundreds of layers on Photoshop. It has a real... Something interesting about this because it really speaks to the medium you're working with a lot. Yes.

This one here before the pandemic is called What the Sun Said to the Moon. So again, there's all stories behind these. And now the pandemic's here and this one is In the Shadow of Jupiter. And I'll just quickly go through these again. They're just landscapes and...

Do you work from looking at something or do you work with photography or do you just totally pull it out of your mind and...

Totally out of my mind, Mara.

Well, I'll start a little bit. You have to be.

Well, there was a series I did after I did the night driving series that were fairy tales. And I started to take that beast picture that you saw and I would find very, very early fairy tales like pre-Grimm. And I would read them and I'd put them aside and then I'd just write whatever happened. It might be a love story, a mystery, whatever. And so I got in this habit of taking, the impression of what I just experienced and bringing that back to the studio rather than sketching for a photo book.

How long do you work on a piece like one of these, if you can share that?

Maybe a week. If it's an animation, it's longer, definitely longer. And then I did an exhibit of these, this whole series with the title pool in my stories. I think there were 50 of them. 52 pieces in this exhibit. That'll give you an idea of the scale. These are my animations that I'm working on right now. This is a series that I did month by month as we were sheltering in place.

Karen LaFleur

So wonderful. And this one should run for you. Oh. Is that working for you? Yes. Yeah. And this is this one here is based on healing. So there's a, there's sort of this normal beginning of fracturing the part and then healing back together again, but in a different way.

And this is during COVID?

Yes.

Yeah.

Fascinating. What are you using to animate? Photoshop, Photoshop for my artwork. I do my artwork on vellum and pencil, then it goes into Photoshop. From there it's broken down into the layers. And from there it goes into motion, Apple motion, and then it goes into final cut pro by Apple. And that's the end of that one.

Karen LaFleur

And so these are stills of other animations that I've done.

Okay.

Very lush and full. Thank you. I'm still writing. This is a series that came from misfiring neurotransmitters in my hands. And I said, Oh, what does that look like? And it got me to think back to this experience that I talked about earlier. So I started to write these stories down and they're really just a celebration of childhood in life. So for those stories, I'm developing characters.

Karen LaFleur

I'm working on a project that will be probably in a book. I don't think this will be an animation. But again, it's all that flat puppetry. They're all joined so that they could animate. Now, is this older or this one's new as well? I work on multiple projects at the same time. So all these are in development right now. I see. Yes.

Karen LaFleur

And then I'm working on a project since the beginning of the pandemic. I take four photos per day on my cell phone of whatever detail I can find. And it's very meditative and mindfully present moment of my day. It takes 10 minutes. And then this is what I'm building out of them. Nice. And this will be an exhibit online in the 3D gallery eventually.

Do these have stories too?

Or are they more exercises?

I don't know. I don't know. I don't

Know. This is more of an exercise in observation. So it harkens back to that whole early experience.

And do you design them in Photoshop for a certain size? Mm-hmm. How big are these?

Probably about 25 by 25 inches square. And I'm also working on animating and rotating the cubes, which has been an experience.

And do you work in 300 DPI or a little lower?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's the most comfortable DPI because it's big enough to give the detail and blow it up if it was printed or on screen. Totally. But at the same time, it isn't bogging the machine down.

Right.

And I'm working on a solo right now. How much back to the old? It's just in the front. It's not so thrifting. It's not so light. I'm just going to get it all in the back. And I'm just going to get it all in the back. And I'm just going to get it all in the back. And I'm just going to get it all in the back. And I'm just going to get it all in the back. And I'm just going to get it all in the back. And I'm just going to get it all in the back.

Karen LaFleur

And I'm just going to get it all

In the back. And I'm just going to get it all in the back. But these things, they seem to be getting more lush and more full and all of your things are coming together, which is exciting to see.

And this would be a still image. So that's what I do, text, image, and the same voice, this interior exterior world that I've been chasing since a kid. Well, technology is getting me further and further into these other worlds that I can create.

Very fascinating. Can you talk to us a little bit? Do you have more? Should we get back to our, should we unshare for a minute or do you wanna talk while the slide is up? I wanted to ask you a little bit like, what interests you about Techspressionism? Thank you for sharing. That was a wonderful journey.

You're welcome. Well, like I said in the very beginning, all this that you've seen, this whole transition, I mean, it's been a lifetime. And I would say only in the last, say, what, 15 to 20 years, that digital art is really sort of slowly coming into its own. So to find people into expressionism that are all doing these amazing things around the world. I mean, I'm fascinated by how people are using technology and being creative in our group. So for me, I think that's the most important thing. For me, finding Techspressionism not only gives it a label to the artwork and we go back to that provenance experience.

Karen LaFleur

I have something to call this, but I'm also linking with people around the world who are eager for the same things.

Really happy to be in the group. Oh yes. It has been quite an experience. I agree. And you may have already answered this in a way, but how do you see the future of art in the future? Art if you were to if you could say a few words about that we've

Always done it and we'll always do it you know even if we only have a stick and sand we'll do something but I do see it going more digital and I do see it opening up huge horizons for digital artists coming forward especially with the younger generations that are so in tune with the machine I mean they're doing stuff that's kind of like really I agree

I agree I totally agree it's fascinating to watch and it's I do think we also have to tie to our history to give a real sort of resonance to what we come from but at the same time it's you know it's like any revolution it's gonna change the financial way we do art it changes the way we collaborate with art I mean look at us where we talk on a salon with third-generation artists of color we talk about how they've changed what they've done over the other artists every two weeks and we may have more going on with them than the artists in our own neighborhood so you know the metaverse has arrived and it's but it's I love what you just said because it's still it's still all about art and emotions and sharing and connecting with others absolutely

So I think that human need is driving the technology to find itself you know the community around it I

Agree well listen this has been wonderful and I'll see you at the next salon perfect

Thank

You for the screen share