This date marks eight years and seven months since the tragic (and, in my opinion, heroic) death of Christina Grimmie. These four portraits are “works in progress,” I suppose. They have their origin in screenshots I took from Christina’s YouTube channel, but they have been imaginatively reconceived in many ways (using various tools of digital media).Graphics media continue to explode with dizzying new possibilities (too many!). I have been working with crafting photographs into “digital art” since 2013. I don’t understand the technological manipulations that make this work possible (anymore than I understand the science behind photography). The introduction and increase of so-called “artificial intelligence” into graphics widens the scope of what can be done with existing images, but still in the manner of a blunt hammer that opens up paths to pursue but also creates new problems. I have little use for the currently trendy “word-to-image” gimmicks, which don’t work for my purposes except insofar as they facilitate some small corrections.
My experience remains that of an photographic artist, who works with new tools that expand the plasticity of photo images so that they can be “sculpted” in ways that correspond to the inspiration and “intuition” that guides what I’m trying to do. Digital tools offer powerful “preset physical alterations" than can contribute further material for this creative inspiration and suggest wider paths for the artist's work. But these same tools (so "easy" to apply) can often deflect the artist's attention away from the personal trajectory of his or her properly aesthetic inspiration, and “take over” the unfolding of the work—distracting the creative process and resulting in a sculpted image that is not only mediocre but also dissatisfying and frustrating to the artist.
The digital world is hyper-saturated with images, and with tools that promise to produce more images quickly and easily. Lots of this involves simple image-making for illustrative or functional purposes (and there's nothing wrong with that). Too many "creative images," however, are pretentious, strange, flippant, inconsiderately fantastic-for-its-own-sake, cheap and homogenized, ugly, or violent. I have made more than my share of cheap stuff Nevertheless I'm betting that a new art form may be emerging from all this chaotic visual experimentation. In time it will find its own aesthetic measure. Perhaps this art form is a kind of extension of photography, which was struggling to find its own proper creative possibilities a century ago. Later on, cinema and television would develop and fight for recognition in analogous ways under the condescending and skeptical eyes of dramatic artists who used “traditional [stage] media.” Improvisational music also struggled—first as the misunderstood marvel of jazz, and then with the addition of electronic amplification and tonal manipulation, the “popular music” that is heard everywhere today, most of which is banal and forgettable, but which occasionally is borne up to astonishing heights of beauty (analogously) by extraordinary, gifted, and hard-working musical artists.
Christina Grimmie was one of those artists (and many other things too, which I have discussed at considerable length on this blog over the past eight years).
Critics raise legitimate and important points, but they must be not simply dismissive but also attentive. The realm of beauty is as extensive and analogous as the realm of being itself. Artistic creativity is a human activity, which requires more than just the happy accidents of algorithmic associations. It requires a person who uses these resources to craft an object that “incarnates” a real creative intuition of the luminosity of being (and digital bytes are material, for all their complexity, so they can ultimately be crafted into a material thing under the vision and intention of the artist).
I may never rise above the level of mediocrity, but I am trying. I have spent many hours, much laborious attention, and a decisive amount of “hands-on” work on my digital landscapes (from my own photographs) and—more recently—on portraiture that concentrates on a handful of frequently photographed and interesting faces of celebrities that I have some sort of connection with (because portraiture that arises from insight into the beauty of a person has a higher and more sustaining “aim” for the artist).
There are some others "models" too, as well as a few “original” faces that I have developed over the years, and—of course—my own goofy mug as the subject of the most outrageous experiments in self-portraiture and caricature. Anyway, you get the idea. My portrait efforts focus on human heads and faces, which are inexhaustibly fascinating if one pays attention to them. Usually they include shoulders and some of the upper body simply attired with something like a tee shirt, so that the emphasis remains on faces and facial expressions, ears and hair. I have literally thousands of "drafts" that I keep in my "digital notebooks," some of which I revisit from time to time. They represent my efforts to work up visual ideas within a wildly expanding medium. They are the fruit of experiments and repetitions that may eventually lead to something I regard as finished, but more often are practical exercises engaged in for learning purposes. Very occasionally, I share on this blog a portrait I consider to be "finished," if particular circumstances warrant it. But I post my "best effort" portraits of Christina more frequently as part of my endeavor to remember her unique history and ongoing legacy every month (I think Christina would encourage me to risk a limited viewing of the artistic process that she has inspired me to take up, especially with respect to her own face that is no longer seen alive in this world).
I realize the delicacy and particular responsibility this work entails (notwithstanding the fact that faces seem to mean nothing the more they are ubiquitously represented in the multimedia world). These faces I work with are the faces of persons, and their inner qualities—the more-than-meets-the-eye facets of personality revealed in their faces—stir up my vision and motivation to “present them” afresh, even if it's only a kind of "practice" for myself in this new emerging craft.
I’ve already written so much about why the late great Christina Grimmie is my chief inspiration and “muse” in this artistic adventure. She had a strength and beauty of soul, a light that shined from the inside outwards to generate a welcoming environment for others. In her art and in her life, she was courageous, willing to take risks not recklessly but boldly in the service of love. She shed light on the path of how to live in the world of today, how to surrender one’s self to the will of Christ in everything—including her presence in the Hollywood celebrity world—and how to die ...with arms wide open, in utter vulnerability, welcoming a stranger at an open meet-and-greet (because Christina wanted to meet everyone).
I have much to learn from her example. Meanwhile, I’m not afraid to risk pushing forward a little in the uncharted territory of digital art. That’s what she would want me to do. I may never get it “right,” but I will struggle to do my best.
