Well, we been workin’ mighty hard over the past several weeks, crankin’ out one masterpiece after another… almost all of them involving Juliette and her considerable modeling, acting and dancing skills. She worked so hard during the holiday season, all in preparation for the upcoming show in Berlin, that I decided to reward her with a new chopper from MLCC motorcycles. She is one hot mama now, and has a surefire way to get away from the paparazzi quick as a flash. You go, girl. You really, really go.

Visit MLCC in New York City:  http://slurl.com/secondlife/MLCC%2C%20NYC/103/231/21/

In preparation for my show at the Austrian Embassy in Berlin in January, I have now created a number of 3D cubes out of my digital paintings, as mentioned in the previous post. The next phase is to do some figure studies in them, and I began by trying to follow the frenetic dance of Juliette when she is possessed by the spirit of transcendent joy found in tribal dance music. There are now hundreds of photos in this growing figure collection; the next task will be to sort through them and try to find the diamonds. This is one of the recent shots of Juliette and the Spirits.

Click image to see full size.

This is a shot of me standing inside a work in progress. I call it the Origami Box, which only makes sense, since it is a large cube created out of multiple copies of one of my digital paintings, Origami. I decided to make a series of these rooms in order to provide a setting for the photographs I will use in my next series of works, focusing on the human figure. An attempt to capture the humanity, if you will, that radiates from the pixelated figures known as avatars in Second Life. The photo shoots have already begun, and the results of those experiments will be appearing here as the project progresses. What is also interesting to me about this project is that I will be recycling my previous works, which consist of recycled imagery gathered by sifting through the ruins of Western culture. Sustainable art?

OK. This is it. Seems innocent enough; simple enough. Yeah, no biggie. But it is important in several ways. One, it is a digital capture of a digital being, subsequently digitally processed with the full intent of capturing the humanity of this fetching sylph, like Toulouse-Lautrec in the Moulin Rouge. Searching for a soul, the ghost in the machine. The avatar is an artwork in itself, remember, brought to virtual life by human hands, then kneaded, molded and tweaked by its resident, its inhabitant soul. This is the life force in its latest evolutionary incarnation. It is artificial, just like reality. It is real only because we believe.

Oh yeah. It’s also the first ‘serious’ art work I’ve attempted in three years. I was curious to see where I’d land when I jumped back in, having spent a good part of the last year and a half in Second Life, studying the curious pixelated life forms there. Ironically, though, I find myself back at the beginning. I began as a painter in the Post-Pop era in New York, and had a very simple but powerful graphic style back then. So, I return to my roots, and find that they have become virtual.

Click on image to see enlarged version.