Molds of Introspection

by Devin Swick

Art by Devin Swick.

I am an artist of dual­ity. My pas­sions include cul­ture and love; dreams and night­mares; death and fear. My work, Oriental Intension, is an image of imi­ta­tion and appre­ci­a­tion of Japanese art. When I begin work­ing on some­thing, I usu­ally don’t know what the final result will be. I watch the col­ors and shapes in my sub­con­scious spring to life what I think needs to be said about myself. The rest of the world does not exist in these moments — I have to drag it in with me — and we become wit­nesses of cre­ation, within isolation.

I started with a blank, white back­drop, and exper­i­mented with the col­ors of my mood at the time. I can­not say that blue equals sad­ness and that yel­low equals hap­pi­ness, it is just a color that feels right, and it’s never the same. Next, I stroked my dig­i­tal brush to fill the spaces I felt needed to be filled, guid­ing it with emo­tion and maybe even psy­cho­log­i­cal need. I brushed in one direc­tion, copied it, and repeated the process. There was a col­lec­tion of these before I was done, which I lay­ered together in dif­fer­ing opacities.

What was left was a raw mold of intro­spec­tive design. Trimming what needed to be trimmed, arrang­ing what needed to be arranged, I came out with a shape resem­bling noth­ing less than a kanji sym­bol. I took a step back and con­sid­ered how best to rep­re­sent this rev­e­la­tion. Between con­tem­po­rary sim­plic­ity and a love for ancient design, I had many choices. I decided with some­thing much less cur­rent and had to then decide how to go about it. This was my first time doing any­thing like this, ever.

At a low opac­ity, I burned my way through areas of the back­drop, and, using Retouch, smudged col­ors together to cre­ate an illu­sion of paint and age. I placed an illu­mi­na­tion of a sun to give a stronger pres­ence of Japan in the image, and then wrapped it up in a sepia tone to fur­ther empha­size aging. After, I painted a line down the image to con­trast over the yel­low sun, in which I feel was suc­cess­ful. Now, I needed detail.

The rest of the world does not exist in these moments — I have to drag it in with me — and we become wit­nesses of cre­ation, within isolation.

Smudging the black line to give the impres­sion of “run­ning paint” gave less bal­ance over the con­sis­tency of detail in the image, so I looked online for tex­ture and found one that felt appro­pri­ate. It was an aged paper tex­ture with some inel­i­gi­ble writ­ing on it. Then I cre­ated an over­lay layer that blan­keted over the entire image, and low­ered the opac­ity quite a bit to fit it snugly into the back­drop. The inten­tion was to give the illu­sion of a paint­ing on aged paper. After lay­er­ing a Gaussian blur and adjust­ing the con­trast (for dra­matic effect), before I knew it, I was finished.

What I enjoy about the piece is that while it is not pre­sump­tu­ous or pre­ten­tious, I can believe in it. Some have even had to ask me if it were dig­i­tal or painted on can­vas. To an aspir­ing artist like me, it has made me feel proud, and in some way, val­i­dated, over what peo­ple may think of when their eyes explore my work, and in essence, explore who I am: an iso­lated per­son being dis­cov­ered — drag­ging the world with them.

About the Author

Devin Swick is an artist cur­rently liv­ing in Arizona. You can view more of his spec­tac­u­lar dig­i­tal paint­ings in DeviantArt.