Salon 21 // Cynthia Beth Rubin & Renata Janiszewska

There it is. All right. Hello, hello, and welcome, everyone, to the 21st Techspressionism Salon. I'm going to be your moderator and host, Devante, otherwise known as Davonte Bradley. I've got Colin here, who coined the term Techspressionism. And we have two wonderful presenters today. We have Cynthia Beth Rubin and Renata Janiszewska.

Davonte Bradley

I'm going to give you guys a rundown of the format of our salons. If you're unfamiliar, if this is your first time attending, I see a couple of unfamiliar faces, but it's all good. So how it goes is we normally have our two presenters. They'll give a 30 slash 45 minute presentation. And then after that presentation will be a Q&A session after each presentation. And then after that, it's kind of a Q&A session. So it's kind of like a loose period of time where, you know, there's further questions to be had for the presenters or just, you know, general discussion.

Davonte Bradley

We also like to try and put in like any news going on with, you know, other artists, movement, or if anyone wants to share something with the group. That also comes in after the Q&A session. But other than that, it's kind of like a free space for whatever, because, you know, salons are for discussion. So there you go.

Davonte Bradley

That being said. I'll give a brief introduction for both Cynthia and Renata, and then we can get right into the discussions. Does that sound good for everyone? Yeah, good. I see nodding. Cool. All right. All right. So Cynthia is a new media artist based in New Haven, Connecticut, in USA, with a studio practice extending from New York City to, oh, I'm not quite sure how to pronounce that. Narragansett.

Davonte Bradley

Narragansett. Narragansett. Narragansett. Narragansett. All right. And Ruben is a graduate of Antioch College in Ohio and Maryland Institute, the College of Art. Ruben's selected exhibitions include a solo at the Craft Center for Jewish Life, Columbia Bernard, New York, New York, and numerous showings of layered histories with collaborations with Bob Gluck, such as the Jewish Museum, Prague, and the New York Museum. Ruben's selected exhibitions include a solo at the Craft Center for Jewish Life, Prague, Czech Republic, Legion Arts Center, Cedar Rapids, and Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and Seduced by Sacred, which is a Jewish art salon charter oak cultural center in Hartford, Connecticut. Her video, Le Finite Recouvrez, Recovered Affinities, was featured opening night of multiple Jewish film festivals in 1995.

Davonte Bradley

Recovered Affinities. Recent group exhibitions include Waltz with the Earth at Art Kubutz in Governor's Island, New York, Under the Viaduct at West Harlem Art Fund, New York, and Art Gallery at SIGGRAPH 2013, and annual group exhibitions at the Oxford Gallery in Rochester, New York. Recovered Affinities.

Davonte Bradley

Recent group exhibitions include Waltz with the Earth at Art Kubutz in Georgia, New York, and Art Gallery at SIGGRAPH 2013, and annual group exhibitions at the Oxford Gallery in Rochester, New York, and Art Gallery at SIGGRAPH 2013, and annual group exhibitions at the Oxford Gallery in Rochester, New York, and Art Gallery at SIGGRAPH 2013, and annual group exhibitions at the Oxford Gallery in Rochester, New York, and Art Gallery at SIGGRAPH 2013, and annual group exhibitions at the Oxford Gallery in Rochester, New York, and Art Gallery at SIGGRAPH 2013, and annual group exhibitions at the Oxford Gallery in Rochester, New York, and Art Gallery at SIGGRAPH 2013, and annual group exhibitions at the Oxford Gallery in Rochester, New York, and Art Gallery at SIGGRAPH 2013, and annual group exhibitions at the Oxford Gallery in Rochester, New York, and Art Gallery at SIGGRAPH 2013, and annual group exhibitions at the Oxford Gallery in Rochester, New York, and Art for the duration of the presentation.

Davonte Bradley

And you can feel free to chat. I'm gonna leave your questions in the chat and I'll get to them as we get to the Q&A session. So is this working? The share is on? Yes, it is working. Okay, so

I'm just gonna start by showing a few pieces that I'm gonna circle back to later, but this is one of my most recent pieces and I always feel, although I tried to go sequential, it's nice to have a really good idea of where it's going as you watch the sequence. So I'll circle back to these, but these are all from this year. And yes, that is Hebrew text mixed in with drawings of the plankton. So you'll hear more about this kind of bizarre combination that I managed to do in my work. So I wanted to start with some of my influences to give some context. As an undergraduate, I just adored everything about Hans Hofmann and abstract expressionist and ambiguous space.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

But by the time I got to graduate school, which was in the mid seventies, so I was an undergrad. Oh dear, can I say this late sixties, early seventies, and then a few years working and into grad school in the mid seventies. And pretty aware then that just looking at Western wall painting wasn't like the only way to go. When I was in grad school in Baltimore, where there was a really great collection of Indian and Persian manuscripts. So for years I worked on them. I also, as an undergrad studied with Paul Sherrits and I'm really much more aware right now of his influence on me. If I think that a lot of people are probably familiar with his work, a pioneer filmmaker and I actually sat next to Paul in the auditorium when he saw this piece projected for real for the first time. So it was like one of those great moments where he filmed something and scratched into it and then refilmed it.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

And so the idea of in and out with your medium which is something that has stuck with me. And then I wanted to mention Mimi Shapiro very briefly. Even though she was a great artist, she was also a great artist. Even though this piece is from much later. And I met Mimi in the mid seventies. I'm from the generation that went through college and graduate school without any women teachers in my field in art and in grad school all of our visiting critics were these men.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

And I don't even wanna go there in terms of like the flirting with the women students that went beyond flirting. But in any event, I said to the director of our program, I said to the director of our program, Barb Shapiro no relation to Mimi we need a woman. So we visited Mimi studio and she invited me to have lunch with her afterwards. So that was another like really important connection.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

And she talked about the idea that you can take non Western sources and mix them with Western sources that you don't throw out one worth the other but mix it. I don't know where this stands in today's language of appropriation but for me it really opened me up even further to start looking at different source material. And so looking back at the Indian-Persian manuscript, this is a piece, you know, moving way ahead in the 1980s.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

All through 1980, I worked on this series where I combined different media. There's early color photocopy in here, hand drawing, lithography, drawing back into it, collaging it, cutting things up. And actually, I did a whole series of this. And I like showing this series because this series was actually what soured me quite a bit on the gallery scene. Even though if a great gallery came and said to me, we'll show your work even today, I wouldn't say no. But I had these pieces that everybody today still says, wow, you were doing this in 1980. And even in 1980 and 79, people go, wow, this is really great, but I can't sell them. So this whole body of work that's sitting near my flat-filed desk is a piece of work that I've been working on for a long time. And I've been working on this from 1980 to 1990.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

So this is one of my favorite pieces that I've ever worked on. The idea that you know, my art styles is very influential in my deciding to put my work into kind of the alternative art world. Around the same time in about 1982, I discovered Hebrew manuscripts and it was just I had been working from the Indian and Persian manuscripts for a really long time. I was ready to move on. This is a scroll of Esther. And as you can see, architecture plays a really important part in the motifs. And I was still looking for structure. I wasn't looking for any other kind of content as an artist, as a painter. My weakness was structure. I loved color. I loved texture. I couldn't figure out how to hold it, what to put it into. And so this is what I started doing. I took the motifs and I was painting and beginning to work on the computer in the early 80s.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

These are from the same time period. Everybody said to me at the time, oh, your painting, your computer work really influenced your painting. It was actually the other way around. I was cutting stencils in my painting and doing repeating. And in the beginning of working on the computer, that was basically you had to draw everything by hand into the computer.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

Flat colors here in 84. You could change the size, you could change the colors, you could cut it up, you could put something flat on top of it. So I was, it fit the same idea of kind of thinking of a scroll and imagining the arches. And here I showed these together. You can see the computer piece and all the paintings. And because Greg is here, I had to put in this piece. To prove his photo to show that Greg and I actually knew each other so long that he came to this show in 1985 in New York on the Lower East Side. The first time that the Lower East Side was hip before it became less hip and became hip again.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

This is basically... Greg probably doesn't remember this but here we are. So this is the smattering. I'm going to come back to some of these works. But the idea of the gradients slowly came in the 80s. In 88, I was living in Avignon, and I have some more of these, but I went, I did actually a step down with fewer colors in 88, because I was using the first Apple computer.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

By 1990, I had a Mac 2, and so I could do some gradients, and again, this architecture that came, the idea of architecture that came out of the Hebrew manuscripts, and then the idea of the scroll that fit in when scanning began by 94, I could scan. Although we scanned, you know, under these little RGB wheels, where things came in as red, green, and blue, and that's why you have the intense colors. We didn't have like flatbed scanners. And I don't know if people remember this, you would, you would put your piece down, and there was a little filter thing that had R, and then G, and then B, and you would do all of those, and the software would composite it. And sometimes I would just leave it in the vibrant color.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

So by 87, I was still drawing things into the computer, but we became aware of the idea of color cycling. And so I did a video with David Smalley, who was a colleague of mine at Connecticut University, and he was a professor at the University of California, and he was a professor at the University of California, and he was a professor at the University of California, at college, which is how I first got on a computer. Noel Zoller, who did the music, was doing computer music, and he wanted to have a computer to work on. And he went to the dean, and the dean said in, you know, 1982 dollars, we're not buying you a $30,000 computer.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

The only way we're going to get it is we apply for a grant to bring computers into all of the arts. And then the dean of the faculty, Frank Johnson, pegged me to be the visual art person. So I sat down to write our part of the grant. We got a $100,000 grant so that we could get three computers. But we were still mostly hand drawing and in structure, but we discovered color cycling. So this is a video.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

What you see here is this is all the same image. It looks like it's moving, but the colors are changing because colors in those states were stored separately, they're much more date and color for this work. So it's not as if you're used to it. So that's the point. And we did that. And then we finished the video by getting a scan, which cost $40 at that point. So it'd be like getting an $80 black and white, and I don't mean grayscale, I mean, black and white scan.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

And then use traditional video, ab rolls, to combine the color cycling of the scanned image that revealed the color. And this the source and whoops well I'll just move on that was good enough and go back in 87 88 I was on sabbatical living in Avignon and I was using the computer at the art school and actually to go back down to 32 colors I had been using 256 and drawing things by hand into the computer and then chopping them up and it turned out to be not only a good exercise but it happened that then I was nominated for a big commission from the kinetic commission on the arts mural and they had designated the architect had specified best commission ever because the architect had specified the size and the location I hate this do whatever you want come up with all the ideas and read the architect's plan in six weeks this was like really great and they I picked the piece and I was still in Avignon and I didn't actually know that I had gotten the commission but I did and it enabled me to buy my first computer when I got home and the way the only output at the time was legal sized black and white and I don't mean grayscale I mean black and white and then I printed them out and they were silk screened in porcelain baked enamel the material that goes on road signs and refrigerator doors and the and the pixelation was actually they wanted they wanted to show that we were into computers and it was a really cool thing for me so returning to the Marseille Bible this I this is a manuscript that was done in 16 no that's a manuscript it was done in 1280 I don't have that on here in Toledo Spain and it has these gorgeous architectural motifs and again I really thought I was just looking at the motifs at this point I was working on my computer and I was like well I'm going to have to get this done and I'm going to have to get this done and I'm going to have to get this done and I'm going to have to get this done and I'm going to have to get this done and I'm going to have to get this done and I'm going to have to get this done and I'm going to have to get this done and I'm going to have to get this done and I'm going to have to get this done and I'm going to have to get this done and I'm going to have to get this done and I'm going with some gradients.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

The manuscript has the mycography, little writing, which conceptually is like mind-blowing that there's multiple things happening at once. And so I started bringing that idea into my work that I could have landscape and I could have the motif and I could have all these designs. And then I had my big aha moment. This shows you what scanning looked like. So I scanned a picture from the former ghetto in a little town in Provence and put it into my piece. And I realized that the architectural motifs that were in the areas, I mean, because Provence and Spain had a lot of back and forth and the arch motifs of the areas actually informed what was happening culturally there. And so I got really into place. I did this video. I returned to France. I've had all the work done. I've had all the work done.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

I've had all the work done. I've had all my successful artist residencies in France, except for one in Montreal. And did this video kind of my trip to Morocco while I was living in Marseille. So it's co-copyrighted with Video Parnique. And it's imagining walking down a street in Morocco. It's called Recovered Affinities in English.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

I went looking for a Jewish Muslim connection because I've spent so much time in the South of France where that's a very strong component. But I actually also found this Sephardic Ashkenazi connection that was very interesting for me. So it's kind of all of that. What can you imagine for the lives of the people who were there? And Atta, when he did the research for this, went to his... He was a Sephardic optometrist in Paris. Atta was American, but he lives in Europe now. So it was a great... I learned from him why he was researching the music too.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

It's not very long, but I think I'm going to move on from this and see how much I really got into the idea of the Marseille Bible and looking at the motifs and looking at the related architecture. And you can see here some of the source materials that I used. One of the things that happened at this point was that I had an artist residency at Centre Copie Arts, Centre in Montreal.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

And this was in the days when printing out was just prohibitively expensive. So the idea that you would draw on one of your computer images was just like out of the question, but I could make color photocopies and collage them and put them together. So this is another piece that for me was a really pivotal piece. I was looking at the architecture in Cordoba and Toledo and mixing it into the Marseille Bible, which was from that region, but I was able to cut and paste and paint. And it was a wonderful experience.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

I worked on this for a really long time. Just threw in a few more things to show that I... People think of me as the synagogue lady, but I don't exclusively work from synagogues at all. I had this building in Rochester where my father had his office when we were kids. And this is kind of just a smattering of some other place things that I did. Another piece about Spain, the synagogue in Brussels in the center and a fallen down cathedral in Scotland. So this kind of gets you through the 2000s.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

And I had to show this because I like... And this is from Nova Siberia. We had a big show in Siberia, Sue Golopher and I. And I was like, yeah, this also places when I did these pieces. And then in about 2000, doing things on the web was really intriguing. And I made this interactive web work. It actually was the site of Rhizome's site of the day, which was a big deal, even though 365 pieces get to be the site of the day. It was picked up and a lot of people saw it. I wanted to show all the variations that could go into a piece and have people... And I wanted to show all the variations that could go into a piece and have people experience the different things that you might look at if you were on a site. And so I used two synagogues and former mosque and the former cathedral to give some context.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

And we look at this now. It's like each of these could be its own piece. I should go back and print these out because now we're more into the print world. The intro for this was in flash. So you have to jump if you see it right into it now. And so I wanted to continue. And I think that's a great way to end this. I think that's a great way to end this. I think that's a great way to end this. I think that's a great way to so I wanted to continue exploring interactivity.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

This is an installation of the Museum in Prong that I did an interactive piece with the composer Bob Gluck that tells the story of the Marseille Bible and imagines where it may have traveled. One uses a stylus and kind of a fake book Bible because they didn't walk on the tablet in it. The Marseille Bible was done in produced in 1260 and started in 1865. It was a work that was published in 1865. It was a work that was published in 1865. It was a work that was published in 1865. It was a work that was written in 1870. So that's the last time I've thought have that we're going to have a do in the public library in Marseille, there's Marseille.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

In about the in about 1880. And it was snuck in there, and nobody knows why it didn't go with the come in with the confiscated did in the public library in Marseille, there's Marseille. In about the in about 1880. And this is a work that was published in 1870. And it was an excellent question. And I think about collaboration, how to use video and sound together that continue to inform my thinking. In the end, we abandoned making the video and the sound work together. They're independent because we discovered that music needs a longer time frame and video, people get bored. They want to move on. So that combination, it was great to kind of learn all of that and to work with Bob.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

So around the same time, I went back to Antioch College as an undergraduate. And I was also cleaning out my parents' house. I knew that I had done drawings in the woods. And I found the drawings, but I knew they were there. And I took new pictures of them. And I started combining the drawing and the photographs and doing it. I separated these out for a minute because I wanted you just to be able to experience them separately. But in fact, this became a whole iteration. And most people kind of draw on their photographs, but I put the photographs on top of my drawings. And it was this great interworking of the media that again, has liberated me and brought me to where I am now. I also started working with the Menendure Lab at the University of Rhode Island. So that's the that's where the Narragansett Park comes in.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

They're in Narragansett, which is on the water. They're on the Bay Campus. They're not in the main part of the University of Rhode Island. And this was actually, we started with a for hire job. They had the picture that was behind this of a flagella and a hetero sigma. And they knew it was going to be a big hit. In fact, it was the lead story on the NSF website for quite a while. And so they needed it digitally enhanced. So I got in there and just, you know, did what I love doing, looking at bad photographs and making them better. I just love doing that. I don't know why. It's just kind of like a fun hobby. And then I said, can I take those and do something else with them? And so this is actually much more, taking back on my imagining going into a place. So the hetero sigma and flagella were actually dead in the previous slide.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

But I made them look alive. I made all this, this prey all around the hetero sigma about to be eaten. And it was, it was great. It started me on my whole series of working with plankton. At first, I tried to keep them pretty representational. So working with the serratium, I put in backgrounds from my earlier paintings, but I didn't really dare touch the serratium, which was the plankton we see here. I didn't understand. I didn't know very much about it. But I started going to lab meetings and learning slowly.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

It's like been going to grad school. And I also made this video, which was shown at SIGGRAPH in 2013, of kind of immersing myself in the water. This is a slightly colorized version of the video they gave me. And then I added depth. And instead of doing trails, I did before and after so that you can really focus. On the movement. It's the same hetero sigma and flavella in the water. But it hadn't been filmed for video to show anybody. It had been filmed for research purposes. And I basically kept changing the color contrast in the way that I colored it in After Effects layers over and over and over again, until I was able to recover some of the depth that was lost in the original, just in the lab, sitting there counting flavella, how many are in there, counting splice.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

So this was for me the idea of putting myself in the water has been really important. And so then I had an artist residency with the International Jewish Artist Residency Art Kibbutz in the woods. And I of course was drawn to the water. So I did this work, which was my kind of compositing of photographs and treating it very painterly and trying to give a sense of the moment of being there. But then I used augmented reality to reveal the plankton that were in it. By the way, I was using Orasma, later known as HP Reveal, which has since been killed, no longer available. And so I haven't yet worked on what's going to be my new AR. I thought by now I would be totally into Adobe's answer to this, but I just haven't gotten there yet.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

So yes, I have two iPads that will never go on the internet again with the Rosamond. And I made a video. Show a little bit of this. This is getting into the water, the same water. So much of what people see in the augmented reality is some of this. Obviously super complex. It's all colorized. And this is mud, a lot of mud. I loved the mud.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

So you talk to scientists, they always want you to get rid of the mud. You're here. You're here. You're here. You're here. So the little squiggly things coming through, the really tiny ones are bacteria. Eventually the bacteria took over and killed the plankton. So that was interesting. This was at the time I was teaching at Rhode Island School of Design and we had some really great microscopes. So I actually gathered all this water myself and filmed it myself and let the jar sit and went back up to RISD unexpectedly, actually a few weeks later, and I thought I'll just see what's in the water and discovered that the bacteria had taken over.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

So then I did a piece that was during ISEO, was shown on the ICC tower. So this is just kind of cool to show. I mean, it's stuff from Antarctica where the scientists go. It's nothing that I filmed myself. I obsessed over it. In putting this together, I realized that the first version I had was just as good as like the 20th version. It's really good to go back and do these presentations. But it's a three-sided. So what you see on the left are the three sides together. And then the tower is wrapped with this. It's not projected. It's actually the tower becomes a big screen. Like each light is like a pixel.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

So another one of my big breakthroughs was that Susana Mendendur, who's the head of the lab at URI, said. … We have all these specimens. We really want you to do something with them because we're working with them. I'm like, okay, fine, send them to me. And then it turns out that this is the size, this is the largest resolution they have. I mean, these were like- so, I mean, this is that whole picture you're seeing at 1440 across. It was like so unbelievably tiny.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

So the challenge, I had no choice. I was like, okay, I know how to draw. I'm just stuck this in. Because I'm also from the generation where, although I had not been drawing for a long time, for 10 years, I do from the figure once a week. And so I drew it. I just started drawing. And this is the piece that I then came out with by combining the drawing with the original low-res scan. And I kept doing this. This moved me into the idea of scanning, of drawing what they give me, of course, is always like boring to everybody except the scientists. And then I always bump up the color, but then I started redrawing it and making that the basis of my compositions, just to show you the finished composition have its own impact.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

And I did a few more of these. These are individuals, by the way. These are chains, diatom chains. They're not one creature, although they kind of look that way. And then to reveal some of the sources, I started using augmented reality. These are the iPads that are sitting, that will never go on the internet again, because they still run or asthma.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

And they still work if they just stay off the internet. So revealing the sources, I didn't go to Antarctica. So I'm using things gathered by the scientists. But by this point, I'm going to the lab meeting every week. And, you know, I'm going to be really Like, that's not me. I'm going to be here for the whole day. And I'm going to be here for the whole day. And I'm going to be here for the whole day. And I'm going to be here for the whole day. And I'm going to be here for the whole day. And I'm going to be here for the whole day. And I'm going to be here for the whole day. And I'm going to be here for the whole day. And I'm going to be here for the whole day. And I'm going to be here for the whole day. And I'm going to be here for the whole day. And I'm going to be here for the whole day.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

And I'm going to be here for the whole day. And I'm going to be here for the whole day. And I'm going to be here for the them. And that becomes my research. So it can come to me easy, works well. And then in 2013, I was invited to be in a show on the four humors. And so I turned back to medieval manuscripts and decided to start throwing plankton into the medieval manuscripts. Like, so bizarre. I know. And I only did this a few times. Like in 2017, I took the Dead Sea Scrolls and threw it in with the plankton. And I thought, this is really weird, but it's very intriguing. No one knew the Dead Sea Scrolls were there for a long time. No one knew the plankton was there for a long time. They both have to do with a kind of inner spiritual life of some kind, of some place. And I mean, I define spiritual extremely broadly, extremely.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

I just mean that kind of space you go into that's not your daily life, that imaginary space of something else. And so here it is by itself again. I didn't do this again for a really long time. I did a few of them, like this is maybe two years later. I'm going to take a quick side thing here into another series because it will bring me back. I started collaborating with Yona Verrer, who's an artist who worked on the book. And I'm going to talk a little bit about her. And I'm going to talk a little bit about her. And I'm going to talk a little bit about her. And she works heavily in historical and specifically Jewish information. And she wanted to do something based on this historic synagogue on the Lower East Side. There's a lot of rabbinical commentary back and forth about the nature of mazelon, whether it's something that's astrological or something that's even other than mazelon.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

This is an interactive piece with augmented reality. So the videos that are here are the videos that are coming up with the augmented reality. And we liked the idea of the interactivity so much that we decided to make it into an interactive web work. And I brought in Chris Tonski, who's a web designer.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

And we made this interactive piece, which is live now. That's my aunt who died a long time ago, but my father who also died a long time ago recorded her. So we know that they're 12 months. We've done seven so far. But what it did is it brought me into this idea of quick videos because on the internet when people are looking at this, they're not going to look for very long. And so, the challenge for me was what can you say in seven seconds. And this one.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

I just showed you. So in 14 seconds, can you imagine that you're living on the Lower East Side, thinking of Eastern Europe, with my aunt singing in Yiddish, telling a whole story, who lives in the apartment buildings that you see? Here we're thinking turnips. This is the first of the century. And this one is kind of one of my favorites.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

Because it tells a whole women's liberation story in nine seconds. That's my great aunt, who was holding a book, and she was an early feminist, and this is the curtain that in the synagogue today on the ground floor separates the men from the women. They're women who are observant and don't pray together. And there she is holding a book, moving in and out of it. So in nine seconds I'm able to tell this women's lib story to the people who at least get this symbolism.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

So this is our most recent piece that got very complicated. But what was interesting about this. So this is we just finished this and it's about the month that happens during Passover. So the celery was really important. And I ended up doing a whole series of works, not just on the on my own. I really got into the drawing something, putting back into the computer and making celery part of it. So a few more plankton pieces, drawing, mixing in the digital. Digital. And then about a year and a half, I guess two years ago, I sent something off to Victor, the place in L.A., the guy who prints stuff that you're so active in the downtowns. I can't remember what it's called. The L.A. Center for Digital Art. He has I hadn't been getting the workout and he has a show. If you let him print it, you're automatically in it.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

So I sent this off as a digital file. It came back. The color was horrible. So I said. It's OK. It was wonderful because I started drawing on it. And that was kind of my breakthrough. This shows you that I had drawing on the plankton. And I eventually made these banners out of fragments of this and had this exhibit. This was just before lockdown. I had this exhibit of these huge banners printed on fabric. And one side and on the right side was kind of a wallpaper that I made of an impression of the ocean. And. And what I did with it was used augmented reality to show people sources on one side and on the other side. I held some public drawing workshops and let the public come in. I did workshops with the public library and they drew plankton and then they came in and they found their own plankton.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

So it was really great. And this was some of what I taught them about how to learn about plankton. And one of the pieces is actually you can see it. I had a little bit of a little bit of a. We're moving into towards lockdown. I was in Australia for SIGGRAPH Asia and I went to the Great Barrier Reef and I had this like astounding experience. I was snorkeling, not scuba diving. I don't go all the way down. I was snorkeling and I knew that plankton were in there, but I couldn't see them. And as we were getting back to the boat, I looked down and I there was I was at what they call the great drop off and I saw nothing like nothing, nothing, nothing. I had this experience of looking into the great void and realizing how small and nothing we are. And it was a mind blowing experience. I wasn't scared because I was like three feet from the boat boat if I'd been really far away.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

But I was really close and they had to drag me into the boat. I was so mesmerized by the nothing. And then lockdown happened and I just need to kind of show this because I think emotionally it changed all of us and we don't know where to what it's done for us. But those combined experiences. And then I was asked to be in an exhibit on circles. And so this was actually the first time I'd been in a museum. And I'm to the idea of Hebrew manuscripts and plankton and printing out. And at this point during lockdown, I started sending my work to Zazzle, you know, the people who make the mugs. Well, it turns out if you get them at a 50% sale, you can get like a huge print for $24 and then you can scribble on it. And these are the sources of what I went and started with a Hebrew manuscript from old Cairo that's now in Lennon-Fred, and I put a diatime on top of it.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

And then I started working on this manuscript some more. I was really intrigued by it. And so this is actually... The circle show. This is kind of recapturing that idea of going into the void. And the plankton that are in here, I chose because we have 3D scans of them. And I had this fantasy still that I was going to go do the AR and have the 3D scan.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

Haven't gotten there yet. But what did happen is I started drawing on it. This is the print because the print wasn't that great. It was okay. I had a bunch of different versions that I was drawing on. Here it is in my studio. So you can see that I had my original drawings of the plankton and this print. And both on good paper and poster paper, meaning the poster paper is easy to draw on, but it has to be re-photographed.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

And I took a fragment of it and I made this piece, which for me really works. It has this sense of kind of history and otherness. And I have to mention that I'm illiterate in Hebrew, so I have no idea what this says. I just, it's a cultural reference. It's a note for me. And in fact, way back when I showed the mycography, the tiny little writing, and this is mycography as well, that's just meant to be footnotes. People don't sit there. And turn the page and go around to see what it says. So it's in that tradition.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

And I turned to another manuscript that just to try something else. So again, this is meant to be more decorative and footnotes, not that you turn the page and read it. And I'm still working on this. This is on the wall of my studio. So I was surprised to see that this was the one on the Instagram invite. But I had just put it up on my wall to continue to do it. So it was just like a picture of me drawing on it. So it was like perfect.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

So here it is by itself. Just so that you can see the plankton that's down at the bottom is actually a grouping that makes a star. It's not an individual. But it fit what was happening. Another piece that I've been working on. I was invited to be on a show on Genesis. So this is not plankton. But it's another in and out of the computer.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

And here's a detail of it. So you can see how really involved it is. That's an ice fish from Antarctica, leaves that I took pictures of in the fall, and just some drawing on top of it. And then I returned to that plankton and Hebrew manuscript, and I accidentally tore this piece, photographing it, because it was on really thin paper, and I couldn't find the print. I was like, I've got to redo this, and I couldn't find the print. And I had drawn on it even more. I really loved it. I didn't want to lose it. And I realized that I had taken one of the prints of the other piece and turned it sideways and was drawing on that. So that was amazing. I'm watching the time. I'm at 38 minutes on my clock, so I'm almost there.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

So that was amazing for me to realize that I had changed it so much that I didn't even know that it was my own piece transformed. And then this is really the last piece that I consider my last completed piece. This is a rough, you know, I was on one of those Facebook challenges, take a picture of the floor of your studio, so I have it. But it gives you an idea of all the things that I've lying around that I can pick up. And this is where I am now, getting these inexpensive prints, picking them up, drawing on them. And so the last side I'm going to show you is that I, I have all these playful details waiting to be turned into finished pieces. And that's my, my next challenge. And for me, the big lesson of where I am right now is do what you want. Play with it. We, technology has brought us to the point where things can go in and out of the computer so easily.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

We've been waiting for that moment because it wasn't possible years ago. So this is, this is what I have. And here are some of my thank yous. Basically everybody here today gets a thank you. But if you hang out with scientists, you learn to thank everybody. It's, oh, which is really wonderful. Scientists, I'm hearing, seeing some nodding, Michael's nodding. They thank everybody. And it's such a wonderful thing. Like it doesn't hurt. They know it's your work. So thank everybody. So this is thanks to everybody. And I want to thank everyone who's helped me and everyone here today, because I see so many of my friends here who have helped so much. And I think that's it. Okay.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

So, and my clock showed 40 minutes. Yeah, you're good. Perfect. Thank you for your presentation, Cynthia. It was wonderful. Thank you. So, my website is my website, of course, has to be updated. I mean, you can find the stuff, but that's my next, like everybody else. So if you have any questions, feel free to email me. Don't expect to find everything there.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

Right, right. I'm scrolling through the chat to see if there were any questions that I may have missed because I've been monitoring the chat as your presentation is going. But pretty much all I've seen are, you know, bits of praise all over. I don't know, actual questions. Haven't we been going to the end for questions?

Cynthia Beth Rubin

We're doing them after each presentation. Oh, okay. And then like having kind of like a group discussion for both. Okay. I'm going to stop the share but I can go back in if people want me to refer to anything but it looks like I can't read the chat. If I am. So, am I the person who's going to be the first to respond? I'm the person to call on people. So I see Sherry has a question.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

You have to unmute. So Sherry. Yeah, hi. It's not really a question. It's a couple of comments. I think your work is wonderful. All of it. It really speaks to me on so many levels. I wanted to say something about a comment you made really early on in your talk. I think it's terrific that you have incorporated the conversation. I think it's terrific that you have incorporated other cultures, other countries, scientists, all of that. I call that cultural appreciation and not appropriation at all. And I think it's terrific that you've done that so beautifully. And I think it's kind of a little sad that nowadays people get very up in arms about things appropriation.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

And I think we're missing out on a lot. I think being able to tap into other things. To hear culture's and incorporating that and of course giving credit to it as you have done is terrific. So keep doing it. Beautiful work Cynthia. Thank you. I used to teach a course first at the University of Vermont where we actually had a faculty grant as part of a cultural diversity exploration to teach about other cultures and we... I was just thinking about this the other day because we included Native American because of where we worked and where we lived in North Dakota and Dr. In northern Vermont. And I went to the local powwow that summer. And people were like, so glad to see me. And the woman who worked in the post office said, I didn't know you were Native American. And I said, I'm not, I'm teaching a class in it.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

So I thought that incorporates that. And she said, great, wonderful. But that was the 90s. You know, times change and people's needs change. So what can I say? All right. Oh, by the way, folks, if you if you do have a question that you'd like to speak aloud, you can go ahead and raise your hand. I'm not sure if you're too familiar with Zoom spunkneality. But if you're on desktop, which I'm not, I think quite a few of you are under the reactions tab, there's like a raise hand feature. And if you do that, then you can go ahead and I'll see what works for you. And if you don't have a question, you can raise your hand. Order that's received and you can ask your questions or make your comments.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

But before we get to those two, I saw one in the chat from Sid Walker. Yes, thank you very much, Devante. Cynthia, I want to just tell you how incredible your work is. It's astounding, really. Watching how you've been able to share with us over the years everything you've done is nothing short of phenomenal.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

Would you say that your most favorite substrate is paper for drawing on? It is now. You know, I never had a great relationship with paint on canvas. So coming from the generation, as I'm sure many of you do too, where that was what it meant to be an artist, with apologies to the photographers and sculptors among us, that was the fantasy. And I think part of what drew me to the computer was that I didn't love paint. So I noticed that Roz asked a question that is part of this, like, what do I like working with the most? And by getting these poster prints from Zazzle, which I can't really exhibit because they're not archival, they're dyes, but Zazzle gets the color perfect in their poster prints and they're really cheap. And they take oil pastels really well. And I never liked the idea of oil pastels.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

I thought it was cheating. But if I'm just using it as a phase that I'm drawing into something and then rephotographing and moving on, they really do glide across that surface really well. Right. One of the things I would definitely, because as an artist as well, I'm so conscious of, and especially at this phase of my career, is preservation.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

So I think it's going to be so important for you to figure out ways to make art. And I think that's really important. And I think it's going to be so important for you to figure out ways to make art. And I think it's going to be so important for you to make sure that your work is preserved. It's preserved digitally. I rephotograph it. And often the iPhone works really well. And then I'm kind of into the idea when necessary of making these big, big prints that are not archival. I mean, the big banners were printed by Spoonflower on fabric. I just found out my Makerspace has a large printer, but it's for banners. It's not archival.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

And then smaller prints that are archival that are either printed professionally or they're printed digitally. So it's kind of a matter of making sure that your work is preserved. So I think it's going to be so important for you to figure out ways to make art. And as an aside, I'm going to be contacting some of you because I've had too many printers die on me and I've just been talking to a Makerspace in town about how about if I buy the archival Epson and donate it and then you maintain it and let everybody use it. And I think they might be up for that. So, you know, then I can get some archival prints. But it's and everyone can come use it. But anyway. Thank you. Thank you. Really exciting.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

All right. We also have questions from Patrick, who I guess you can go first. Okay, thanks. Actually, good to see this broader body of work because I've been, of course, I've been familiar with your work for a long time. And, and it's interesting also seeing back to things like Colin and my, you know, like, like, you know, your earlier days and I thought with Greg. So that was that was very interesting. And also, I think that was one of my first new media friends was Miriam Shapiro's son. So it's really interesting how we all triangulate.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

So the one thing I think is interesting here is that I didn't know that you were working with Nizami's work. And so I thought that was really interesting. So what's going on here is that you know we're in working with say like the form of plankton, you know, and the work of Afghan, you know, poetry and then going over into the work of Nizami's work. And so I think that's what I was trying to get at. And that's what I was trying to get at. And so I think that's what I was trying to get at.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

And so I think that's what I was trying to get at. And so I think that's what I was trying to get at. And so I think that's what I was trying to get at. And so I think that's what I was trying to get at. And so I think that's what I was trying to get at. And so I think that's what I was trying to get at. And so I think that's what I was trying to get at. And so I think that's what I was trying to get at. And so I think that's what I was trying to get at. And so I think that's what I was trying to get at. And so I think that's what I was trying to get at. And so I think that's what I was trying to get at.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

And so I think that's what I was trying to get at. Why you know things like this are here in other words like the ability to express oneself through digital media has become so rapid and fluid that you know things things like this community have you know have re-engaged these topics so anyway I'll wait for your question after your answers the first part of it I'm not sure I completely understand because I don't read the hebrew I don't really know about well what I was thinking is that there's a there's a quality to the forms in other words like say for example I work a lot in a semic you know you know I work a lot in you know a semic calligraphy in other words so based on japanese and a little bit of persian calligraphy so the thing is that I'm you know I'm interested in these forms but I'm just saying like what in these forms kind of draws you to the form of the hebrew I don't read the hebrew I don't read the hebrew I don't read them and then the other thing is that you didn't speak so much about your work in sub-saharan africa right yeah I didn't I do have a few pieces from that but mostly that's more of a partnership I spent some time in senegal and I still have a lot of connections in senegal and it was really important to me in a lot of ways to be in a culture that is that different a lot of people know that I go to japan and I go to the u.s and I go to the u.s and I go to the and I go to japan every year of course I've lived in france france is not a different not different I mean it's like this much different you know you speak french and I go to japan every year and even japan isn't that different because it's the same level of technology but when you get into sub-saharan africa and I have some really close friends who are from sub-saharan africa I have I mean 10 gentle to the community and I'm not a big fan of the sub-saharan africa but I'm a big fan of the community from darfur here it is really different and it changes your perspective but I'm not ready I can't synthesize that completely so I'm not there yet one thing I did want to say is there is there are a lot of manuscripts that use mycography to create animals and they're like animals made out of little words with their mouths open gobbling other words and so I know that's what planted the idea of the plankton but I didn't have a quick example to show of that and I haven't actually used it just planted the idea and I have taken calligraphy classes in japan very hard you have to learn how to hold a brush differently the teacher's like I can't believe you keep using your whole arm I'm telling you to use your wrist okay so anything else people I think we're kind of running we're at three o'clock so maybe victor I know victor had one con I guess we could do victor and roz and that'll be it so victor if you want to go ahead victor I wished I'd had a picture of you because I've known you really long time a lot of people here roz and that darcy we've all known each other for a really long time I've known you for a really long time I've known you for a really long time I've known you for a really long time I can't hear you victor technical difficulties they abound it's not coming through do you want to just type it up in and I think he's typing in his question in the meantime I can answer where do I show my videos actually they've been pretty well received at film festivals I haven't submitted any film festivals lately but regular film festivals it turns out are pretty open so and the laser affinity recovery they recovered affinities I have to use a french title called video chronic in marseille was the co-producer right I did it while I was in marseille in the pre-laptop days you know you always had to run around and find a place to work with good computers and besides who would say no to eight months in Marcin.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

And so that piece was shown opening night of major film festivals all over. It was picked up on many compilation reels. So that's why I showed more of that. It's kind of my most famous piece, even though it's from 94. I hope I have another most famous piece waiting in the wings. Specifically, my question about the videos was the short ones that you showed. Yes. So they will use those as the short before a long film.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

The seven second and the nine second. Oh, the nine Oh, the nine second ones are part of the interactive piece. They're part of augmented reality. Okay. Okay. So yeah, that may not have been so clear because I was racing along. They're in the interactive web one. And they also, if we show them in still images with the AR, but I can't feed any more things into Erasmus. So we're really concentrating. The interactivity online at the moment. But I think when I have a bunch of those short ones, I may make something else out of them. Because I think they also stand on their own as kind of a sense of history and remembering.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

It's like the challenge. And I actually have those left over from a presentation because I go to Japan and Nigerian International Film Festival and then I'm supposed to speak to students about ideas. And so I did a whole presentation. What can you say in six to 12 seconds in a story and about it's actually very hard how you pare it down. Yes. How you get to the essence can take like a week of working every day for 10 seconds. Easier if it were two hours. Okay.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

Thank you. So Victor. Oh. I'm sorry if you're hearing extra sounds there. I was trying to I realized what happened by headset what had been switched to another channel. So anyway, I just wanted to say it's more of a comment but yeah as you were saying we've known each other for ages. And it was and I've seen your work, kind of, you know, every once in a while at different venues. So it was so wonderful to see the development across decades. To see that consistency and see how some ideas came back around. And, and it was also wonderful to see like in your later work more recent work how things just kind of clicked. There was this kind of blossoming and this crystallization of stuff. And it was in, and you kind of experienced it yourself as the, as the artist, and it's just comes across seeing the work and then as a viewer.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

You know, if you hadn't even said anything about it. Just, it's there. It's, and that was really wonderful to see. I think I have the pandemic to thank for that. Adding the experience of being in nothingness just beforehand and having the big show. I was the last show at art space New Haven in their project room their place where they put solos. So that came down as the pandemic was starting. One person zoomed into our closing panel because he'd just been in Italy, and, you know, lockdown. And then I had just been in Australia. And I think I was in the, who cares moment.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

What have you got to lose moment and I think many of us have been in that but for me I had layers of reasons to be in that what do you have to lose moment. Wow, that's great. And one last second is that I mean is that one thing I think is really interesting is that your use of AR in this. I mean, I think it's really interesting is that your use of AR in this. In this work and basically as overlays and things like that. I think. I think one thing that you're addressing that's super important for those of us. You know who are using what I would call more emergent technologies and that sort of thing is the is trying to address yet trying to address the longevity, you know, of these forms and that sort of thing. Yeah, because as you just saw, you know, our asthma is gone. And so arrow is really simple to use, you know, you know, could get up to speed really fast on that.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

And I think the only thing is that, you know, since Adobe is such a large company and that sort of thing that is probably going to be stable for a while but you know it's like, like NFTs you know are we going to is the platform going to be online for 20 years I mean this is the problem we have with technology, you know. Yeah, and look away my flash. Yeah. Yeah. I had a flash on that I had. I recorded somewhere I then one old computer if I take it off the internet I can screen record it. I don't know why I didn't do it we all knew it was coming. Anyway.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

Yeah, yeah I think I think it's real I think it's really important as we go forward you know with emergent forms of technology to think about, you know, like derivative. Well you people would call them derivative artworks but the thing is that I think what happens is it's somewhere between. It's just I don't know I don't know the whole point of that. It's not that I get you on the front end. It's not that I get you on the back end. It's not that I get you on the back end. It's not that I get you on the back end. It's not that I get you on the back end. It's not that I get you on the back end. It's not that I get you on the back end. It's not that I get you on the back end. It's not that I get you on the back end. It's not that I get you on the back end. It's not that I get you on the back end.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

It's not that I get you on the back end. It's not that I get you on the back end. And two, loaded with Erasmus, never going on the internet again. That's the only solution right now. Okay. And hiring somebody to reprogram everything. So maybe I'll do that. I mean, that's always an option. It's just not always a cheap option. And actually with Arrow, you could probably get yourself pretty easily. I know I could, but I'm really at that one life to live. Like running out of time of all the things I can do myself.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

There's a lot I can do myself. Too many skills. Isn't that the truth? Yeah. Cut down on your skills so you can tell other people to do things for you. Specialize, right? No generalization, just specialize. Okay. So thank you, everybody. I'm really looking forward to what Renata has to say. I was really excited. That's great. When I saw. The image. So I want to. I'm happy to move on. All right. And as she said, Renata, are you ready to go?

Cynthia Beth Rubin

Thank you. All right. Thank you, Cynthia. And well, you have the floor Renata. Go ahead. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you very much. I'm really looking forward to this opportunity to show and discuss my recent work with you. In the past six months, I've turned my hand to animation. And in this I've been inspired and influenced by Norman McLaren, who is a Canadian filmmaker, was Colin Campbell, who was a Canadian video artist. And Jan Swinburne and Clive Holden, my two Toronto colleagues.

Renata Janiszewska

I compose and perform all the music for my animations. Here's the still work of this moment. In this work, I'm using AI to generate these complex, biomorphic and geometric forms, which I then embellish with brushes that I devise myself. And then I usually add some form of atmosphere, weather in the background to give them a sense of scale, to create the feeling of a heroic tableau, something along the lines of the 19th century history paintings.

Renata Janiszewska

Here's a short animation, and it's called A Little Champagne. ¶¶ I studied art history, painting and drawing at the University of Toronto and experimental art at OCAD University. ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ the campus of OCAD U. In the experimental program, there was an emphasis on unusual materials and unorthodox methods. So for example, the first solo show I had, I did my drawings in colored chalk on tar paper, which I then stapled to frames and hung on the wall. I also used to do a lot of work on large, large, large sheets of paper that would be soaked with varsal. And then you draw on that with either charcoal or oil stick.

Renata Janiszewska

I had Colin Campbell as my prof, and he was a pioneer in video art in Canada. He did dramas in which he performed, he wrote, he performed, he directed, he produced. And he encouraged us to think about alternative forms of making images other than painting or drawing them. Another early influence on me was the Polish poster school of the 1960s to the early 1990s.

Renata Janiszewska

I'm going to show you four images all by the same Polish artist. And in these posters, the artists combined typography and graphic design with the painter's sensibility. So this artist Jan Lenica, who is a painter, is a painter of the 1960s and 90s. The artist Jan Lenica, whose work you're seeing, was somebody that my father knew. And so we had a lot of these posters in our home. So I was exposed to this work quite early on in my life.

Renata Janiszewska

Another aspect of this work is the folk art quality in it. And because I come from mixed Polish and Hungarian ancestry, I see that these cultural images or iconography, if you will, they come in, they surface in my work from time to time. And it's something I don't think you can really avoid. It's just part of what's in the blood.

Renata Janiszewska

Another influence growing up was the art of the Inuit from the Canadian Arctic. So this image is by Ken Ojuak-Aushevak, and it's titled The Enchanted Owl. And she was part of a printmaking school on Baffin Island. And what I liked about her work, besides the bold graphic quality, was that she anthropomorphized her subjects. So I saw a big exhibition of her work at a museum. And in this image, for example, she doesn't say it's an owl. She says, I am the owl.

Renata Janiszewska

It also has a quality of Japanese woodblock prints, the Inuit prints. Even down to the bottom right hand corner, you can see the way that they make their mark, their signature, if you will. And I was lucky to see a few prints of the Inuit in my home also growing up. And I also saw them quite frequently at the local, our local art museum, the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Renata Janiszewska

I was fortunate to live in Paris for a time. I lived just off the Champs-Élysées on Avenue Jour 5. So this essentially was my backyard, if you will. And what I really appreciated about living in France, I also lived in the South, was the strain in French culture of, it has a veneration of beauty. I'm an Aisthete and the French value beauty, not just in their painting or their architecture, but it sort of permeates the whole culture on a certain level.

Renata Janiszewska

So how did I get to digital? Well, in 2010, I had an iPod Touch and I found that I could hold it in the palm of my hand and take my thumb from that hand and draw on the surface of the iPod with my thumb. I was really delighted that I could take it anywhere. I could draw on the street. I took it to Europe with me. And this drawing on the left is an example of that. I have a drawing I did in a museum. It was from a Lucien Freud painting at the Tate National.

Renata Janiszewska

And what I wanted to point out also was even though the pixel quality, even though it's very, very low resolution, the screen glowed and it had, it just, I fell in love. I never have looked back from that day. I only work in the digital now. Within a year, the first iteration of iPad had arrived. So I got one and I started drawing on the iPad screen with my finger, my index finger. And you can see my gesture and my hand in it, in this work. The catalog for the show, I had a show in September of 2011 titled Solar Roses. And the designer made the catalog. And I had a catalog cover in the shape of the iPad.

Renata Janiszewska

And you can see how big the bezel was around the screen. That was the way the early iPad looked. So they kind of wasted a lot of space with that big frame around it. At the same time I had my show, David Hockney had his iPad show at the Royal Ontario Museum. He was able to, or they were able to get lots of iPads from Apple, which they bolted to the wall.

Renata Janiszewska

But I had to solve my problem of how to display my work. So what I did was I bought photographic picture frames. And I had a shelf built. And so there you see the show in C2. And the rest of the show was in the catalog. So people would have to sort of imagine how they would look backlit. But I sold these as JPEGs on flash drives. And you could call them an early precursor to NFTs.

Renata Janiszewska

So you could see how they looked backlit. The show was well received. And there was a review in the Globe and Mail where the reviewer said he thought that gallerists should be nervous because anybody could walk into the gallery now and I would download the work for them to a little flash drive which they could then take home.

Renata Janiszewska

Another love of mine is typography. And the work that I'm going to show you now from now on is work that I've done very recently on the iPad Pro. So my screen size is considerably bigger. And I have a really great series of software that I've put together, which I'm going to talk to you about. So I'm going to show you a little bit of my work. So in addition to being in love with fonts and typography in general, I like to use text sometimes in my works.

Renata Janiszewska

I'm particularly drawn to the kind of Bauhaus styles, the fonts that came around when Helvetica was developed. So I use Helvetica Neue in this presentation. These pieces below are individual letter forms that I've been developing recently. And I'm using them. In a lot of my drawings and paintings. Here's an example of a work that is an amalgam of an ampersand and a letter S.

Renata Janiszewska

And another thing I wanted to mention about this work is that you can see I'm using a fairly subdued color palette. It's pretty easy to go crazy with bright color when you're working on a backlit screen. And when you have such an incredible choice of color because I mix them all. I mix them using software where I can mix black or white into any colors that I select. And it's really precise.

Renata Janiszewska

Here's an animation based on a letter form. And the title of this animation is Tintin Pops. And it's really precise. And it's really precise. I have a great love of literature. And there is a narrative quality to a lot of the work that I do. So I work at making titles that stimulate people into finding a narrative in what might look to be works without characters. But in fact, my shapes and forms that I use are... Oops, I'm so sorry. The shapes and forms that I use...

Renata Janiszewska

Okay. There's a lot of work that I do. They're lush. And I use color expressively. I've always found color to be the most powerful aspect of painting. And I use it extravagantly because I can. Because there's an unlimited choice. And it's all backlit. So it's very saturated color. This is another example of a narrative title. And I had this work in a recent show that was online called The New Digital Art Collage.

Renata Janiszewska

I use these shapes and I think of them as characters in a drama or in a series of moments. This one is called Dune. And it is after the science fiction novel of the same name. Here I'm showing you a picture of a character. And I'm showing you this work because it shows very well how layers can be applied. And how crisp everything is. Even if you have... I'm sure I have four or five layers going on here.

Renata Janiszewska

The resolution of this screen that I'm working on is 2,732 pixels by 2,048 pixels. Essentially, I'm showing you a picture of a character. And I feel like I'm painting with light. I am using an Apple pencil on the screen of the iPad. And these little white areas that you see at the top of this piece and at the bottom left, they're actually luminous. They're not white so much as they glow when you apply them to the work.

Renata Janiszewska

This one is called Chiaroscuro. And it's after the painter Caravaggio. And again, you have a tableau going on here. You have... The kind of dramatic light that Caravaggio was known for. And then you have this spray of luminescence coming out of the character's head. It's kind of a Commedia dell'arte character.

Renata Janiszewska

This is a series now that I've been getting good response to. It's made up of letter forms that I distort. And again, I put the clouds behind them. It's again trying to be a heroic tableau, a large scale in your mind. And I make the sky color very otherworldly because it's actually not of this earth. It's just happening in some other place.

Renata Janiszewska

The brushes I create myself. And I made this so that you could see me apply brushes over top of a photograph. It's a photograph of a garden. That I took in Paris. Outside the Musee Rodin. And you can see that it's very... Again, it's very sensual to work with these brushes because it's literally like paint.

Renata Janiszewska

Coming out of a tube onto your canvas. I'm showing you this work because this is an effort that I'm making more and more to increase complexity and density in this work. And I'm using this work for my compositions. I use a lot of techniques on top of one another. So in this piece, we have painting.

Renata Janiszewska

We have drawing. We have AI generated shapes. We have a glitch program. And it's a collage as well. I'm going to take you through one of my processes. So I start in Adobe Capture. And I put a photograph or a geometric shape or an image into this program. Press a button. And it spits out three different kinds of brush. You can take it in color or in black and white. You can increase the size, the flow. Here I put a taper on the end of this brush in particular. And I have a whole library of them. So I made a sampler for you to see some of the different brushes that I made. The ones on the right were made with photograph. And so they have a real dimensionality to them. Also, you have complete freedom to program any color into these brushes that you would like.

Renata Janiszewska

The brush is a little bit more complex. The brush to the left of this has a transparent center to it. So it makes for a really interesting look. The two brushes to the left of that one, they have a highlight. So it gives them a kind of hard plastic quality. The upper left is a Victorian steampunk decorative brush that I created using a 19th century engraving from a museum that I saw in Paris. And the bottom left, I've made you the same brush but show you just how varied and how subtle the palette can be. You really have a lot of choice when it comes to mixing color. And these brushes are very, very versatile that way. So the next step in my process is I cover the entire canvas with a painting. And that's what I'm going to do. And I'm sorry, we're having a big thunderstorm here.

Renata Janiszewska

I used two brushes in this piece. The floral brush that you see in the upper right background, I call my Murakami brush. You can see on the left where there is an icon of the brushes. That's what it looks like. It looks like a little wreath. And then I use the brush that has the blank space in it. To make those conical shapes. So really only two brushes here. And I had imported an ombre background to start off.

Renata Janiszewska

The next step is I superimpose the painting onto a form that I make in a different piece of software. And in this software, you can make the forms of different volumes of different shapes. You can make glitch application to them. You can animate them actually. But I've stopped using this because it's not very sophisticated for animation. But it's very, very high res. And you can export them with a clear background. So you really just have these wonderful shapes to work with.

Renata Janiszewska

Then I put the shape into another painting program where I put a grid over top of it. And I also have the option of distorting the shape. So I'm going to distorting as stretching. So there are a lot of different ways that the form can be manipulated. Here's what I did with that form. I really bent it all out of proportion just so you could see how easily you can change it up. And make it look very different from what it was. And then I put some clouds in the background just to give it that depth, that element of distance in the background. And this is post-processing. I generally use photo editing software to work on my pieces before they're finished. And this is the final product. So I made some choices with lighting and with the kind of crispness.

Renata Janiszewska

I really enjoy the post-production part. Just getting it to look a certain way. Another great thing about digital is it can be scaled up to a huge, large dimension. This is a public art piece that I did in 2018. It's from a small, it's from a fairly small file. But it blew up really well. It was 10 feet across and 8 feet high. It was printed on Dibond aluminum and then glued to wooden panels.

Renata Janiszewska

And it was outdoors for about 10 years. And it was a period of time. Here's another view of it from the west side. And I was very happy with the color. It was really true to the original. This slide shows you a detail. I was also really happy with how crisp the detail was in this work. I'm showing you something from my social media feed. And the hashtag electronic canvas was coined for me in 2011 by the novelist Yan Martel.

Renata Janiszewska

It serves me really well on all my social media accounts. I'm really happy to be able to connect with so many of you Techspressionists and other artists on social media. It's a kind of bargain with the devil because we're giving them our data and we're subjected to ads. But I go through this process a lot of trying to decide whether it's good or not. And I keep staying with it because it's really great to see things as they come off the drawing board from other artists. The immediacy of it and the fact that we can talk back and forth.

Renata Janiszewska

Here's a short animation called Picking Pimpernel. Pimpernel is a project of me and my family. Pimpernel is a project of me and my family. Pimpernel is a project of me and my family. Pimpernel is a project of me and my family. Pimpernel is a project of me and my family. Pimpernel is a project of me and my family. Pimpernel is a project of me and my family. Pimpernel is a project of me and my family. Pimpernel is a project of me and my family. Pimpernel is a project of me and my family. Pimpernel is a project of me and my family. Pimpernel is a project of me and my family. Pimpernel is a project of me and my family.

Renata Janiszewska

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much, Renata. That was wonderful. You're welcome. All right. So now that we are at the end of the presentation, does anyone have any questions that they'd like to speak? It looks like we have two hands up. Hold on. We got...

Renata Janiszewska

Give me one moment. Sorry. Steven, I think you were the first one to raise your hand. So why don't you go ahead and share your question? Yeah. I'm just very curious about... Well, two things. First one is what applications you're using. And secondly, perhaps you could comment a little further on this very interesting connection between typography and your interest in biomorphic forms.

Renata Janiszewska

Sure. Sure. Sure. So the major apps change all the time. You know, I've been at this now for 11 years. And a lot of the good apps, they leave. They go. And so I have to adapt. I have to grab the next ones that are coming. I would say the most professional and best for overall is Procreate, which has been around for a long time. Then the Whirl app is the one that makes those geometric forms. It's W-H-O-R-L.

Renata Janiszewska

Then I use usually Adobe Capture and Adobe Sketch, which is also on its way out. They want you to use a different painting program in Adobe now. But I believe it's called Fresco, the new one. It's very similar to Sketch. So that's where I make all those really nice brushes that are so diversified. And I just love them. And I can still make them in the new app.

Renata Janiszewska

So for photo editing, sometimes I use Snapseed. Sometimes I use Adobe. They have Lightroom, I believe, is the name of the photo editing. I have a lot more. I can send you a list, Stephen. How's that? Awesome. Terrific. That works. Also one of the glorious pluses for technology. Just send them resource lists. Could you print the list so we could all see it? Sure. Sure. I could share it. I also had another question if I could speak. I was wondering when you were selling the JPEGs on flash drives, I was wondering about audience acceptance of that and how that went for you. Did you consider it a success?

Renata Janiszewska

Yes, I did. The people who purchased the JPEGs knew that they needed a photographic picture frame in their home. They knew that they would have to make that $150 or $120. They knew that they would have to make that $150 or $200 investment if they wanted to display the work. The idea of putting it on as a screensaver or on your television, we weren't quite there yet with that. There was some technological reason for that. So you found people to print it themselves and got a frame? No, they didn't print it. They purchased a photographic picture. They printed it on a computer frame, an electronic frame. They put the JPEG into the flash drive into the frame and they had the static image glowing.

Renata Janiszewska

I see. Hold on. Let's not do that, Aldryn. Okay. I had problems with gallerists, though. A lot of people in 2011, they didn't have a clue what digital art was. How? How could you? How could you conserve it? What was its value? How could you stop people from copying it? The whole issue was wrought. Oh, let's see. Michael, you have a question?

Renata Janiszewska

Yes. Thanks, Renata. I really enjoyed your presentation. I like the organic fractal-like quality. I guess you said that those forms were created in the Whirl app? Is that what you said? Yes. Okay. Yes. So I guess there are two things that I'd just like to hear a little bit more about. You stated that primarily your work is for...

Renata Janiszewska

Yes....digital display more so than like a printed visualization of your work. So I'd like to hear just a little bit more about that. But what I liked about your work today that you've shown and that I also saw in Cynthia's work as well is this combination of kind of the hand-drawn element... Mm-hmm....with the other software-produced things. You know, shapes. Now, what I liked about both yours and Cynthia's work are you successfully did that. I've seen a lot of artists try to do that where they just feel...it feels like oil and water. It just doesn't quite mesh. Mm-hmm. Your work that you showed today, I really find that you have successfully sort of brought those two things together. Can you speak to... Mm-hmm....either the evolution of how you got that to work or any tips or tricks or things that you would sort of recommend?

Renata Janiszewska

So I'm curious to hear about those two elements. Okay. Well, one thing is I didn't study mathematics or science. And I don't have a great facility with the computer and the mouse. I prefer to use the hand-drawn method. Because I'm a painter, because I'm somebody who drew. I did all my work for years and years until 2010 not on the screen. But when I got the screen, I wanted to treat it like a piece of paper. I didn't need to kind of delve into all the things that it could manifest.

Renata Janiszewska

You're absolutely right. The hand-drawn quality, the superposition of paintings that I make onto those forms is very important to me. Because I want my audience to read the painter's hand in it. I also want them to know that I'm using some wizardry that we didn't have 10 years ago. So, for example, Hockney, as much as I admire and love him, he does very descriptive iPad paintings. Right. He actually had an app made for his last iPad show. Because he used to use brushes, which went out about four years after it appeared. And he had to have somebody make him because he had his marks. Okay. That he knew how to make. And I give him all the credit in the world. Because I seriously was much more interested in pop art than in Abax when those movements were going on. And so Hockney drew me in at a very early age.

Renata Janiszewska

And I've gone to hear him speak. And I've traveled to see his shows. But he only uses the iPad as a painter. I want to use that manipulation that technology has allowed us. And I'm super excited about continuing to use it. To add my painterly ways. But to go deeper into the text. To use the AR and the VR, as it were. Well, just as somebody observing your work, I think you're doing it very, very successfully.

Renata Janiszewska

It feels natural. Even the synthetic organic shapes feel holistic with the hand-drawn elements. It really does feel like one piece and not separate. So, yeah. Thank you very much, Michael. If I could add one more thing. And that is that I had a Bauhaus-type influence growing up. I had a designer. And I tend to integrate a lot into my work. Because I have that grid in my head. Okay. From a long time ago. And it's always going to be there to prop up the rest of the thing. Thanks, Renata. You're welcome.

Renata Janiszewska

All right. Next up we have Cynthia. Okay. So, thank you. Was it me? This Cynthia? Okay. Yep. More than one here. Really great presentation. Somebody has. Yeah. I'm trying to figure. Coming from me. Nice music. But not mine. Okay. So, when I first looked at your work. Maybe because I've been working with oceanographers. I actually saw.

Renata Janiszewska

Seashells and kind of very organic. Oceanographic forms. And I responded to it. I love it either way. I love the three dimensionality. I put something in the chat about the 2d to 3d. You're not decorating the 3d. You're actually. Mushing it into 3d. And I find that very inspirational. But I have you looked at oceanographic sources or other natural forms? Is, is that an influence or was I just projecting? Something organic on it? I think that I have a real affinity for natural forms. I think nature is the best designer.

Renata Janiszewska

So I've always studied nature a lot. But in this case, it's more a question of the software leading me to those forms. And then. I treat them in an organic manner. Maybe it's just the feminine. Kind of love of. The natural world. I don't want my work to come across as cold. You know, I want to touch people in their heart. I want to touch their emotions. And I think organic forms do that a little better.

Renata Janiszewska

Then for example, you know, Piet Mondrian great work, but it's very, very controlled. Yes. Right. Yes. So I really relate to that. And also you said you're not a scientist. I mean, my, one of my big things that I try to do is point out. Is that you don't talk about your presentation as something that's You see like that in my LinkedIn drawing workshops as regular drawing workshops, you know, 32nd poses, 10 second poses. Yes. People have always been taught. Oh, it's scientific. That means, you know, scientific illustration.

Renata Janiszewska

Forget that. That was the part of your. That was actually the part of your presentation that really hit me in the face was when you showed those tiny little images that the scientists gave you at 72 DPI, and you had to make them bigger and you drew them and the drawings were so graceful and so beautiful. And that was the part where your work really grabbed me. Thank you. I was forced into it, but now I have this evangelical, I give lots of plankton drawing workshops. I even just did it for a group of scientists who were quarantining in England before they went on a research trip a few weeks ago, because they had nothing to do for two weeks. So I'll teach you to draw.

Renata Janiszewska

Anyway, thanks. Pleasure. All right. Next up. We have Clive. Hi Renata. I first of all, thank you for the compliment. That means a lot to me. And Jen's not feeling well today, but I'll tell her what you said too. Thank you. Yeah. I love your work. It's smart and it's beautiful at the same time. Really put it in a focused way. But I'm really interested in your highlighting the fact that you use backlit media. I've always found that really interesting. Right? I mean, it's not talked about very much. I mean, you've really taken it on board. It seems like your work is really for backlit media. And I find the history of that going back all the way to stained glass windows is really fascinating. Yes. So if you've actually thought about that and really felt it. And so that would be a simple comment for me about what I really love seeing in your work.

Renata Janiszewska

And I also find that the animations are new to me and I love those too. So I'd like to see more of those coming out. That'd be great. Very much, Clive. I'm very flattered by your comments. Not really a question. Just compliments. Which that's perfectly fine too. We give out compliments and praise freely here too. So it's all good.

Renata Janiszewska

Next up. Thank you, Clive. Next up we have Sid who has another question. So Sid, do you have the floor? I see Lee too. Lee Musgrave hasn't been able to make a comment yet. Lee, do you want to go first? I love the work. I wanted to let everybody know that the National Endowment for the Arts just released a big report, big study that they've done on technology and artists.

Renata Janiszewska

It's a nationwide study that they did. It includes a great many artists. It's a wonderful report. I think all of you should take the time to read it. Thank you for letting us know. Sounds good. Yeah. I just saw that as well and there's like a lot of old Hangouts that new media artists have been in like NetTime.

Renata Janiszewska

The mailing list and that sort of thing is in this and this is really kind of nice thing to see places that have been kind of like some of the mainstays of online digital culture and that sort of thing be seen in something like this. Such a such a document so it's heartening so you know that somebody's paying you know that you know that these things that have been around for a while sometimes I think a lot a lot of us who work in our technology and I think a lot of us in the room can speak to that is that you know by and large you know sometimes you know there's this feeling of maybe not being being seen you know by the what I'd say the larger contemporary the larger institutional things you know because of you know because of some of the difficulties of showing the work you know and the thing is that this is this was a this was a really nice report so go get it definitely going to look into that all right now sid you have the floor thank you I just something quick for renata renata I'm bowled over by your work absolutely fantastic can you just talk with us a little bit about that moment where animation kind of was it I mean you're so technically skilled was you know did the technical aspect drive you to the motion or was it a combination of the great balance that seems to be inherent in your work or just talk to us a little bit about that I started really small with 30 seconds and I have a composer husband so I asked him for music and I started making short ones but I didn't really like the fact that I kept having to go next door and say I need 34 seconds of so I took out instruments and started making my own music to go with these animations which are more important to me somehow now than my still work I really want to develop more and I'm trying to do that now and I'm trying to do that now and I'm trying to do that now and I'm trying to think of venues for them I'd like to see them in a room where you have screens around three quarters of the room and people sit in the middle of the room on a swivel chair and the movement goes around the room I saw a similar piece by william kentridge and he does amazing animations that are quite low tech but it's the idea of immersing people in color and sound and getting an emotional reaction from them so that's where I'm going I'm really trying to focus on the animation now great can you put in the chat box or somewhere how we can reach you certainly and my website has animation on it and also I'm on vimeo so it's just my under my name on vimeo great and on my website you can reach me for sure thank you I'll go ahead and drop those again in the chat thank you Davo yeah no problem all right we only have about eight minutes left of official time for our salon so karen I think you might be one of the last people to make a comment or a question so you have the floor oh you're still muted oh good then you didn't hear me stutter no that's how I was trying to catch my words I really love both your work presentations today just to see what you can do and all you astounding, love the oceanographic, you know, influence, etc.

Renata Janiszewska

But I'm, I have always been interested in text and image, and it's always influenced my work. And I think Stephen sort of touched on this a little bit. I'd love to hear your comments on what the text brings to your artwork. Is it strictly just the form or is there a form of shadowing or echoing syntax of language even if it isn't language?

Renata Janiszewska

That's a very good question. Thank you for that question and thank you for your compliments Karen I'm a big fan of your work. I read so much and I don't want to give the reader sort of given the viewer of my work, a puzzle to solve, but I have an affinity for these shapes that we use in our alphabet. It can be, typography is so incredibly varied. There's just such a huge amount of font choices out there, and they all say something. They all have, you know, I'm very careful when I publish something, I put the font that goes with the text. So now I'm making these letter forms, and I'm just feeling my way through it. This is actually only been since February that I've been doing some of that work that I just showed you. So it's pretty new. So I'll check in with you about it maybe in a few months.

Renata Janiszewska

Nice, definitely. I love what you're doing with that, and also Cynthia too, with the small micro texts running around inside. It's just lovely. It's very nice to have you. Thank you for your attention, and thank you. One other quick thing for Cynthia. Are you talking about the lab that's south of Providence?

Renata Janiszewska

That's the oceanographic lab that projects in real time on the internet, all the deep sea researching. Okay, so that's NOAA. Oh, that's what it is. But it's right next door. It's also actually based in Narragansett. They're both in Narragansett. So the University of Rhode Island has multiple campuses. Their main campus is in Kingston, but Narragansett is on the water. And oceanographers like to be on the water. In fact, they go up to Woods Hole when they're launching a cruise. When they say cruise, they don't mean like a Disney cruise. They mean like bunk beds, almost a almost a submarine sardine situation, not something I'm going on. I would if I were like 40 years younger, but they are on the water. So, and they share an adjacent campus with NOAA. And so we're aware of, there's a lot of stuff because NOAA is your tax dollars at work.

Renata Janiszewska

All of that is public domain and they do have live video feeds underwater. There's so much about I kind of don't, you know, right now I'm into sticking to whatever the people in the lab are working on in their research. Their imagery is not fabulous. I'll probably go up and do my own images, but I can hear them talk about, I sampled here and this was the density. These guys are eating this stuff in this weather condition. So it's kind of like getting into the home of the plankton, their domestic life of the plankton.

Renata Janiszewska

Okay. So thank you. Anyway, thanks. All right. So we now have about four minutes left of official time for the salon. It has been great so far as usual. Another great salon for the records. It will be going onto our YouTube channel if you guys want to check it out. So thank you so much for joining us. We'll see you next time.

Renata Janiszewska

Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Thank you so much for coming here and making these meetings as great as they continue to be. I hope it continues that way. Thanks to everybody. This is like the best audience ever. So thank you. And thanks for the combining with Renata. I thought it was nice. Really welcome.

Renata Janiszewska

Very good. I'd like to say thanks as well. And it was a pleasure to be combined with such a distinguished group. An artist as Cynthia. I don't know. The flattery, it just keeps going. Yeah, it keeps going. And to be hosted by such insightful, wonderful people, really great. So I hope to hear from people. And that's basically it. Yeah. And I think with that, we can close things out. Thank you very much, everyone, for being here. You don't have to leave. Some of us will definitely remain after this, but the recording will stop momentarily. So with that being said, thank you. Thanks, Dabo. Thanks to the artist presenters. Awesome. All right.

Renata Janiszewska

And done. Fabulous.