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Jeff Bedrick's "Gilding The Lily" |
- Jeff Bedrick |
Artwork Copyright © by Jeff Bedrick. All rights reserved. |
Be sure to peruse Jeff's many stylish masterpieces at his web site above. |
Jeff, thanks for this interview. I urge all readers to read your bio as well as this interview, http://jeffreykbedrick.com/bio.htm, as they will likely be very impressed. You are not only a highly accomplished oil painter, but you have contributed to the creation of huge movie hits such as Shreck 2, and created art for various television, animation, commercials, books, magazines, stage, computer games and projects too numerous and varied to mention here. How did your art skills develop? Where did you go to school, or did you learn art on your own? Like all kids, I liked to draw. Unlike most, I stuck with it. In my teens, I had the good fortune to meet a well-established artist who's work I really admired and was then even luckier to study painting with him in a private apprenticeship. Later, I studied animation and cinematography at SF State University. However, most of my education has been out of necessity when I needed to make a living. I usually just hit the ground running in various positions and assignments. How did your parents feel about you becoming a serious artist at such a young age, I mean, did they support you and your decision to live an artist's life? Well, we lost my mom when I was ten, and from that point on we lived in the Bohemian counter-culture of the early 70s, very much like gypsies. My dad did the best he could, but there was absolutely no pressure or expectation placed on me. It was kind of a hands-off attitude of "Hey whatever you want to do, go for it." I suppose in that culture, being an artist was better than being an accountant but not as good as being a rock star. You are like the player who can play every position on the team. How did you become such a versatile artist? Yes, I've played many positions, but have not necessarily mastered any. I think that I get bored doing the same thing for very long, which even made it hard for galleries to market my odd assortment of work. I tend to move on where my colleagues may find a comfortable niche and go much farther with it. |
I know some of it was for survival sake, but did you always dream of creating in so many facets of art on such a wide scope? Not at first. I just thought I'd be lucky to make a modest living by peddling a few paintings in galleries. I also had an interest in film making but film was much more expensive than paint and brushes. Eventually, I learned that I could make art for film, animation, games, print media, etc. These days, digital technology makes film making much more affordable. Do you work mostly in oils? Most of my early work from the late 70s to mid 90s were in oil. These days, I do almost all of my illustration and animation work on the computer. So you mostly create art digitally now. Do you use primarily paint programs such as Painter or Photo Shop, and do you also do any 3D model creation or rendering with ZBrush or Max, or a combination? I work mostly in Photoshop, but occasionally use 3D Studio Max, Poser, and a few other programs. For animation and motion graphics, I use After Effects which I learned last year while working on a science special called "Exploring Time" which aired on The Science Channel. I think I saw some of that program. It had lots of mind blowing animation, and I think it was in high definition, which is exciting to watch, and to me, makes going to the movie theaters less appealing. I first saw the coming future of computer graphics around 1968 while watching Arthur C. Clarke's and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL, the space craft's computer, was creating all kinds of graphics on his screens, playing chess, and showing movies. Of course, they were only artist's creations at the time, captured and animated into film cells, then projected onto the "computer screens" to look like digital graphics. The first affordable computers and software for artists working at home took a good 15 to 20 years later to arrive. If you are like me, you could never have predicted the constant invention of amazing software available and affordable for so many different artistic uses. You seem to be a forward-looking, inventive, and progressive type artist. Is there some sort of art software not invented yet that you would like to have created for you? I do try to stay abreast on the latest technical developments of creative tools. There are many exciting things in the works, but will not really be available for general use for a long time. I think that the dream of most multi-media artists and film makers is the perfection of something like Star Trek's holodeck... a fully immersive 3D environment over which an artist has complete control. I once read a short science fiction story about a "holosymphony" in which artists could create anything from a small diversion like a flight over cotton candy clouds to a fully immersive mystery story. Artists would not be constrained by realism and could create completely abstract experiences as well as lifelike ones. Many authors have speculated about such technology and we are getting closer all the time. Until then, we work with what we have. Do you use a Wacom tablet and stylus, or do you use a tablet computer? I use a basic Wacom tablet and stylus along with the mouse when I'm working in Photoshop. I like to use the pencil, then scan the image and modify it with digital tools. Do you ever work that way? Occasionally if the style of the image I'm creating calls for a more hand drawn or cartoony look, then I'll draw it on paper first, scan it, and then finish it in Photoshop. However, most of my work requires a more polished style, which I can usually get by "building" an image almost like a photo collage by compositing various 2D and 3D source elements and then blending them to hide the seams. Do you ever look at the digital artists' work at http://www.cgsociety.org/? Yes, there are a lot of extremely talented artists and illustrators out there. It's interesting to me that many of the younger artists have excelled in creating fantastic digital art without ever using any more traditional media. I have no problem with that. If the tools that I am using today had been around when I got started, then I'd probably have done the same thing. You were blessed with an apprenticeship with Gage Taylor, a pretty famous painter of wonderful vistas and beautiful, fanciful scenes. Looking at examples of your compositions, http://jeffreykbedrick.com/thumbnails/landscapegal.htm, the viewer will see subject matter as diverse as the artist himself. Each piece is completely unique and different from each of the others, but all contain the same attention to beauty, great proportions, amazing color palettes, wonderful and inventive situations, breathtaking vistas and just plain fun to look at. "Gilding The Lily", painted in 1994, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches, at first glance, is a very beautiful composition, to me at least, reminiscent of an elegant design from the Art Nouveau Period. That impression was affirmed when I noticed that you were influenced by Maxfield Parrish. Your web site mentions the following about "Gilding The Lily": |
____________________________________________________________________ ARTIST'S COMMENT Appearances are deceiving. This is a wry satire about self-deception and unnecessary embellishment. The parrot and the chameleon are both creatures that have adapted by imitation. The gold paint, the rose-tinted glasses, and the mask all tell of our attempts to alter appearances of things that don't need it. _____________________________________________________________ |
What else is happening in the composition that relates to altering appearances? Even the way the overall composition appears very "staged" reinforces the theme that everything you are seeing has been contrived for the sake of appearances. What else is going on in the image that you would like to point out? I think that all of the symbolism in the image is pretty obvious. What may be less obvious is that this painting marked a turning point in what I wanted to say with my work. Up until this painting, most of my paintings were well-crafted but naive escapist fantasy images. Here, I began to question the value of escapism and wanted to comment on our fascination with such things. Instead of shocking my audience with something like a slaughtered unicorn, the trick was to use the same vocabulary of fantasy imagery of my previous work in a more satirical way. The angel / woman is obviously painting on (gilding) the lily. I see the symbolism and the satire, but do you personally relate to her sometimes, that is, do you think art is easily overdone, or possibly "less" is "more"? I suppose you could say that. When I painted "Gilding the Lily", I was under contract with a major art publisher that was pressuring me to produce art like an assembly line. They had good reason to believe that they could successfully market the "pretty" fairy-tale elements of my earlier work that I was already losing interest in making. So, my solution was to give them a painting that had all the superficial appearance of what they wanted and, yet also satisfied my impulse to make a snarky statement about the emphasis on "prettiness" over truth. Conveniently, it also pertained to a more personal relationship in my life at the time. Was there an actual model for Gilding The Lily, did you use a Poser figure (not sure if Poser was around yet in 1994), or did you simply use a photo reference or sketch out her figure from memory? Yes, there was a model, as for most of my work from that period. You have mentioned more than once that you tend to lose interest in doing some types of work. Is it mostly commercial art that you get bored with, that is, producing art for someone else's interests, or do you just plain get tired of pursuing the same ideas, even your own? The one thing that I never lose interest in doing is defying stereotypes or people's assumptions about how a typical artist should think or behave. For that reason, I actually became bored and frustrated with the traditional fine art/gallery path when I began experiencing pressure to conform to a set of pretentious clichés in that world. Surprisingly, I found the commercial art world to be more honest and straightforward. Client needs a piece of art and is willing to pay so much. Artist delivers art and gets paid without having to do a soft-shoe tap dance about "divine inspiration" to fill the world with more sofa-sized paintings of sunsets. Also, each commercial art assignment is so different that I enjoy the challenge of that. Has digital art displaced your oil or acrylic painting, more specifically, (though I saw none on your web site) have you created any works of art on computer strictly for the purpose of selling them as mixed media, fine art prints? One can engage in endless debate these days over what medium or method of reproduction qualifies as "collectible" art and what fails to meet that standard. Since I have shifted away from creating collectible art to commercial art, then I don't really worry about that much. I never made much money selling fine art prints, even of my traditional paintings, so that's not a high priority. All of my digital art has been created on commission for specific commercial use such as book covers, etc. However, my agent recently persuaded me to create my first original painting in years based on a piece that I originally created on the computer for a client who needed a cool image for some novelty lampshades. The idea was to reproduce it for collectible prints. The painting turned out fine. However, we agreed that we still preferred the digital version. So, we are now preparing to make prints of the digital image, which most people seem to like. It will be interesting to see how well it will sell. Here's a link to it: http://jeffreykbedrick.com/thumbnails/northernlights.htm I agree, compared to other works of yours, Gilding The Lily might appear to be somewhat stylized and "staged". All attention or focus seems to be moving toward upper right, to the lily being painted. The woman's seat acts as an arrow shape pointing to it, the L shape of night sky harbors it near its vertex as the diagonal blue cloud shape behind it seems to also draw focus to that corner, the angel wings point to it, and the barely visible vertical vase and plant help frame it. There seem to be elements that do not want to make their identities obvious. For instance, I am struck by the blue-lined cloud shape behind the moon, or the bright, purple swatch of color in the bottom right. Are those shapes indicative of something, or just meant to be an interesting part of design or balance, contributing, or possibly contrasting to the "gilding" theme, for instance? The cloud shape around the moon is just a bit more of the same kind of overly contrived staging. It's like a window opening in the sky in exactly the right place to reveal the full moon, which is also exactly behind the lily that getting "gilded". There is also a pretty obvious erotic element to this gesture. The flash of purple lightning in the distant lower area is really the symbol with which I most identify. It is the one nagging reminder that all is not as serene as it appears, like the little boy in The Emperor's New Clothes. That's me out there. Also, if you notice position of the candle, it is literally a fire burning under her [backside]. That's me too. Perhaps Gilding The Lily was a little bit of therapy for you at the time, as well as an ultimately great conversation piece? Conversation piece, sure. Although, I never expected anyone to get what I was really saying without me explaining it to them. Most people just see another pretty picture, which is fine. Rod Serling created The Twilight Zone as a vehicle to express his subversive political and social views in an oppressive society that would have never given him such freedom of expression had he not been clever enough to frame it as fantasy and science fiction. It's like a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. So, in that regard I suppose that you could call it therapy. Not for the artist, but for the audience. You're a fascinating and superb artist, Jeff. Much luck in the future, and come back and visit LUYA anytime. Thanks. - Host of Lift Up Your Art dot com |