Digital Painting, Photoshop
2011
Fantastika (Winged Hussars)
What is this Fantastika of hooves and wings and pointed spears, angry men on the cusp of something? To me, Fantastika is the summer of 2011, in the old Lubja ateljee.
The ancient Lubja studio was a house falling apart. The front door was a window you can climb in through, off an electric box. The window was always open and the coolest people kept climbing in.
The studio was many things, a place to crash, a place to dance. My home and workroom. My friend Robert Kurvitz had moved in to finish his novel, surrounded by half finished paintings. Quietly it became the headquarters of ZA/UM, the coolest blog with (almost) a hundred readers, and the birthplace of a hundred failed projects.
The coolest people on the roof of lubja
Emmanuel and the Fear's Jimme's Song was playing non stop, and we didn't wanna do nothing but be in a rock band. For Robert it was literally a rock band, for me it was my studio and making art, and we had had a great revelation about art:
The artist must make Fantasy because it’s the last vital form of art left. Fantastika (Fantasy and sci-fi) is high art, the highest form of art. Tolkien takes a shit on Duchamp, Rothko and Konrad Mägi. Get them hooked with the cool undead Lich, ancient ruins and evocative winter landscapes and then BLAM! concept, philosophy, reflections on life. Bamboozled again! Thought you were gonna escape to some fun world of imagination, see an orphan grow into a badass assassin or something? Instead got arted, rugpulled into culture and philosophy with fireballs.
Equipped with this wisdom we were gonna do so much. Comic books and paintings (make art great again), poetry and music, essays and texts up the wazoo. Fantastika was going to be the music. Robert with Ultramelanhool was gonna record the best summer banger rock album, title it Fantastika, and sing of Winged Hussars on victory laps around the Siegessäule, and other great things. And this was the painting to kick it all off.
Underpainting
Fantastika is a digital painting made in Photoshop. One of my first large scale digital works where I pulled in techniques from Oil painting. Big splashes of color, high energy brush strokes, cuts with the palette knife. Painting ‘on top’ of the image, rather than ‘into’ it.
Already doing some clever things with big temperature contrasts. The cool nerves of pikemen in blue against the hussars burning with red passion. Every brush stroke trembles with the thundering of hooves.
Stole the horses from somewhere.. where? Some ancient fountain maybe. They sure knew how to pose their horses back when.
Fantastika
Well, the painting got made! And a few more pieces of this and that, including a concert poster in this very drop.. and then we failed at the rest, because instead I had to go paint storyboards for lottery advertisements, and Robert to Finland to print logos on ballpoint pens, becase rent was forever due, is forever due, and will be forever due.
And that was the summer of 2011.
The window
Making of Fantastika (Winged Hussars)