Black and White

In this section you will find notes from the artist about his work and his styles.

Developing the Carbon Canvas technique

I would have to say that since the year 2000 I have been evolving a style that would be of my own ideas and thoughts without the influence of already known styles and techniques (at least none that i am currently aware of).

This technique traces back to my young artist days when I discovered that I was able to reproduce any objects that I observed onto paper using primarily an HB pencil. Later on without any further training or special art class I discovered a way to give more life to my art work using shading and shadowing. During my high school years I mastered shadows and blending. One of the most difficult tasks was translating a specific colour into a shade of grey in addition to the level of shadow that is applied to the surface of the subject. I became very interested in making very detailed drawings and precision was key, so i switched to using technical pencils with various sizes and hardness levels. High school art class gave me an opportunity to work with other mediums but none was interesting to me more then pencil drawing. Not just sketching but something very beyond that, almost photographic in image quality and clarity.

My college years in the graphic design program took me somewhat away from my beloved pencil drawings. Learning and creating commercial graphics was very interesting but it was missing something and I felt that I was not able to get fully creative because there is already a certain standard and style that follows a mainstream in commercial graphics. The course that really added to my pencil drawing skill was on perspective, although I learned prespective in highschool this course completed any remaining unknowns I had about it. It was in college that I started thinking about my future in art and maybe developing something to uniquely identify my art.

After college i worked mainly on webpage graphics and content with some limited print work. During this time I was also drawing on my spare time developing my skill more in depth. I started drawing on Illustration board that we used in college. I very much liked the available options of the board surfaces, they gave me a lot more control to detail of lines that I made with my tech pencils. I still use illustration boards to produce my final art pieces which you can view on my webpage. During that time until sometime in April of 2006 when i decided to create my very own technique. This involved the use of charcoal onto canvas, which through experimentation I found out was very difficult to blend so for a few months I experimented and developed a way to blend charcoal exactly how I wanted to. My first experimental art piece was "Popes Revelation" and i was very pleased with the end result of the image and the control of the charcoal I was able to achieve. In my next art piece "The Flight Of Light" I was presented with a new problem of adding white overtop of the charcoal. I quickly found a resolution in pastels, using a pastel white to highlight and to add extra white where it is needed. I look forward to fine tune this Carbon Canvas technique as is needed. I look forward to producing many art works using this technique.

Why not draw/paint in colour you say?

In my opinion and studies on colour there are several reasons from artistic to scientific. I must also point out to the reader that these opinions are based on the work that I produce and study and are in no way directed against artists that produce art in colour.

One scientific but simple answer is that colour does not really exist. Colour is arguably a psychophysical phenomenon that exists only in our mind. To understand how humans can see colour requires some explanation.

There are several important basic factors involved, everything needs energy to function or work even the objects we see. After the function of the eye, light is the most important source that gets the information to the eye. Without light there is darkness and nothing is visible and now you may be thinking that night vision devices can see objects so whats the deal? The deal is that even night vision devices need some kind of light energy to be hitting the object and the moon light is the perfect source. Night vision devices only amplify the level of light to a level the eye can see. So what exactly happens during the process of light hitting an object and why is light (sunlight) white? Sunlight or a source of light (flashlight) that is white is the mother of all colours that we have names for. When white light radiates onto an object and depending on the angle of reflection this angle determines the colour of the object that the eye can see. To fully get into details of this process would take several pages but the point to note is that colour is dependant of type of light to type of objects the light is hitting and above all to the kind of optics or eyes that are viewing. Even then you dont have colour until that data hits the brain which then translates and links the data to thoughts and knowledge. Ever wonder why most people dream in black and white? It may be because there is no source of true light in our dreams. The few that can dream in colour are the ones that have a very precise and strong control of their dreams.

So to move on to the topic at hand and now that we have all this light and colour that is very blinding in its current state we have the dark side to balance out the equation and give limited life to this white light, this is known as Black. Black along with White give birth and destruction to all colour. What I find uniquely interesting about black and white art is that as the observer you are presented with the subject without the distraction and digestion of colour. With the touch of a skilled artist or photographer black and white art is elegant and distinct.