Finding Myself in the Winter Salon
I just finished a commissioned piece that started simply enough and turned into something more important for me. It’s not every day that my work touches on something more significant.
About ten years ago I banged out some dumb little thing to be a cover for one of my band’s EPs, “The Winter Salon.” It was a little vignette featuring a snow covered tree with two Victorian chairs and an accent table with a bowler hat on it. The EP never materialized (which was ok because we went on to do a full-length CD instead) and so that little illustration dropped into limbo. And, honestly, that was ok too because it was shit. I was still cutting my teeth on Photoshop. The sky was just a Difference Clouds filter, the furniture and tree were just photo manipulation of stock images and garbage from around the net and the snow was all crappy grunge brushes. At the time I thought it was pretty fly.
Skip ahead to November 2013 when one of my online friends approaches me and wants to hire me for an illustration. Absolutely, that’s what I do! So, we initiate a conversation about what she wants so I can write up the brief, and she sends me that old EP cover. Holy Christ I didn’t even have a copy of that anymore! I was gobsmacked that anyone on earth even had a copy let alone remembered it. Kind of flattering too.
It was actually an exciting prospect, because I connected right away with the Ian that did that comp in the first place. I knew immediately that I could develop it into something greater.
This piece turned out to be somewhat significant for several reasons. My art—my heart, rather—has always existed in a liminal kind of place between the city and the woods. I have always been a city boy. That’s just embedded in the warp and woof of who I am. My parents like to tell stories about how, when I was a boy, we’d go camping or stay someplace in the country, and I’d have trouble sleeping because there weren’t any streelights, or I couldn’t hear the hum of a freeway somewhere. Even today, those things make me feel alive. When I lived in Phoenix, I loved the big city. I loved taking the I-10 through downtown at night, in between the big buildings and through the tunnel underneath Main Street. Every big city I ever visited all over the world has just been such a galvanizing adventure. As life would have it, I currently live in a smallish town, and I’m doubly damned because I love my little house very much; it saddens me greatly that I can’t pick it up and set it down in a much bigger city. C’est la vie, eh?
At the same time, the woods and mountains have always had a certain allure too, albeit in a wholly ambiguous way. I really can’t put my finger on what it is. I wouldn’t ever want to live in either the woods or the mountains, but there’s something about them that is definitely attractive. I find myself saving dozens and dozens of foggy forest pictures from Tumblr. I draw mountainscapes when I doodle. I stare at photos of long, sunlit vistas for long moments and picture myself flying above them.
Here’s another bizarre disconnection: So, I’m an unabashed sci-fi geek. Obviously, right? I just adore it. I’m all about giant robots and prickly biomechanics, spaceships and moon Nazis. At the same time, though, I love primitive folk-art, especially the dark, almost “country gothic” stuff you find in those dim, dusky stores tucked away in Pennsylvania and Ohio. The rag doll crows, the yellowed paintings of shacks in the middle of lonely fields, the crazy handmade candles and worn down, black furniture…I want a room of that stuff some day (yeah right—right next to the art-deco Bioshock room).
So what’s this all have to do with a throwaway, amateur graphic?
As I said, my heart—and art by extension—has existed in some liminal dimension that straddles all of these realities. It’s a boundary zone like a land-based version of brackish water where they coexist in a weird and surreal dimension.
Reworking the old piece into the new one revealed a scene from this place, and “The Winter Salon” exists here. There are the trees, there is open terrain. This is clearly a somewhat rural setting. And yet, beyond the obvious presence of furniture there are power lines in the background reaching back to, perhaps a city? The tree in the foreground has technical enhancements. A switch for the light? Wiring? There is a human presence inserted here, an industrial one. And the bowler hat and type of furniture suggests even a metropolitan one. Nonetheless, here it all is in the dark, snow-dusted woods where some folks would fear to tread.
To me, it looks like home. Doing this piece was tremendously exciting, like I had finally managed to pull one of those bizarre locales I see in my head all the time out of the fog far enough to make real. At least real enough to look at, which I guess will have to do. For now.
What I think is perhaps the most interesting is seeing the stem cells, as it were, of who I am as an artist. Every artist struggles with finding their “style” and developing it is often a lifelong, ongoing process. There are those moments when you do something and you get what Sammy Hagar calls the “chill factor”—the hair stands up on the back of your neck, your heart skips a beat, and your stomach swarms for a second because you just hit a nerve somewhere connected to your truest self.
Likewise when I go back through old sketchbooks, or high school friends send me scans of stupid doodles I did for them, and in those little time capsules I see glimpses of those nerves. There are themes and subjects and stylistic decisions I was gravitating towards even then. That makes it somehow more gratifying to feel like I’m on a path that honors that inside of me.
So, if you’re interested in the technical aspects of this, here goes:
- The whole piece was done in Photoshop CS5, except for some line art I did in Illustrator CS5 to use as a reference, particularly the ornate bits on the furniture.
- The only stock image is the sky, which I got from a GoMedia pack
- The back and middle grounds used primarily brushes I made myself, except for some bits from Ron Diviney’s “Apocalypse,” “Birds,” and “Magical Snow” brush sets.
- Everything in the foreground was done myself. Low-res tracing references were used for the light, hat, and table, and then painted in once the shapes were blocked in. The chairs and tree were built from scratch.
- Post production layers included adjustment layers, gradient maps, and gradients.
- 16×20, 300dpi, CMYK canvas for printing.
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For what it’s worth, the client was immensely pleased. That makes it a double win, I think.
Have any of you experienced stylistic breakthroughs, large or small? Show me and tell me about it!
faithrivada
Awesome sauce. Thanks for sharing.
maurautius
You’re welcome. Thanks for reading! 😉