Spirit Animals
Wildlife rendered in the colors they don't have.
I have always seen animals in colors they do not have. In dreams, in imagination, and in altered states, forms arrive saturated past anything the eye receives, shimmering and pulsing across their own surfaces. I have been chasing that since childhood.
The rule is simple. Every color on the canvas must be as high in saturation and value as acrylic will go. No neutrals, nothing shaded down. The method is divisionist, the intent expressionist.
Each painting begins in control and ends in surrender. I outline the animal precisely, in the brightest yellow I have, then add colors one at a time in descending value, taking a little less care with each. By the time the form holds, instinct is choosing. The distribution of color is mostly unplanned, which is the point: the finished painting surprises me the way the original vision did.
I call them spirit animals because the animal in the painting is the one that showed up in my head, not the one that exists. A spirit animal is a creature you are given rather than one you find. These arrived that way.
Paintings
Murals
Animations
Every animation starts from a photograph of a finished work. Nothing is generated. The color is already there; the motion only does what the color was doing in my head.
Carson J. Bruns, Associate Professor, ATLAS Institute and the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Colorado Boulder.