Art corner

I am a 4th year DKO (i.e. part-time) student at the Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Ghent (Academy for Visual Arts), in the painting section under supervision of Annique Mahieu.

Note that these are low quality pictures. If you would be interested in one of them, please don't hesitate to send me a note!

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What's been going on recently

• 20 jul 2016 :: My 4th and final year of the 1st cycle in painting at the Academy of Visual Arts has ended, and there were the evaluations again. This time, we were grilled by an external jury as well, which consisted of a gentle former teacher of the Academy, and visual artist Tatjana Gerhard. They appreciated the cross talk between the visual arts and the exact sciences that is ubiquitous in my work.

  Here is a fraction of my presentation shown at the annual doors open (under suboptimal bad lightning conditions)

  

  The rightmost group of four are inspired by the sputnik satellite. I chose to contrast the iconic geometric beauty and simplicity with a simple connected graph that is void of any reference to the pioneering feats in space exploration technology, although they are intricately related. Here is a close up in my improvised studio

  

  The lower right work is a hommage to the simplicity of the electronic circuit that was on board of the sputnik. Cell phones nowadays require much more silicon.

  The final (orange/yellow) work came to be as quickly as an underwater rocket launch.

  

  Two other pieces include an evenening impression of an encapsulated monument on my way home

  

  and a close-up of some texting zombies I came to stumble across

  

• 27 feb 2016 :: And then came the mid-term evaluations again. This semester, I have put in a bit more spatial aspects into my work. It started with a study of delauney triangulation and quickly wandered off ...

  Here's a myopic overview of my presentation

  

  and here it is again with the right prescription, broken up in sections.

  

  The left most work is an interpretation of item 174 of the HAKMEM by Bill Gosper (nicely explained on p14 of this). It gives you the next integer with the same number of 1 bits in its bit representation. The right-most works comment on the impact of computers on modern-day life.

  

  Here are the delauney triangulations

  

  This is what happens when the last scrape of latex paint is drying out ...

  

  and mene mene tekel, upharsin!

• 09 aug 2015 :: So we had the end-of-term evaluations again at the ABK. In contrast to other evaluations, my portfolio contained a broader spectrum of subjects. I experimented with the visuals of periodic analog signals and special orthonormal functions,

  

  the perspective of angles,

  

  and the visual representation of science and technology.

  

  The last panel was inspired by universe 25, a behavioural science experiment by John B. Calhoun, and described in an article in the proceedings of the royal society of medicine. The experiment was conducted on a colony of mice, examining its growth and decline as overpopulation took its lethal toll on society.

  The jury was taken with my presentation, and offered me a rerun at the annual open house

  

  The academy is closed over summer recess, so I put up my easel at kunsthart for the third consecutive year, where I am currently working on a contribution for Esbergssons weerloos project. Stay tuned!

• 27 may 2015 :: The end-of-term evaluations are approaching fast again at the the ABK, so here are two pieces I put up last time.

  • The first one was started at kunsthart over the summer recess, and was a gift for my (now) 1y old godson. What better advice than to tell a kid to follow Alice all the way down into the rabbit hole?

    

    Of course, this was heavily inspired by Tim Burton's Alice (albeit a little less caffeinated) :-).

  • The second one has been an exercise on colors, and their interaction. I discovered that if you combine phtalo and scarlet, you get a beautiful purple. Admittedly, I have been scared of phtalo for a very long time, as I found it way to powerful as a color.

    

    This little painting prompted one of my teachers/jurees to state that science is here to stay as a source of inspiration for me (I think he meant enthomology). Also, one of my fellow students whispered to me that I should check out Jeremy Mann (Sure 'Nuff 'n Yes I Do)

    In case you are wondering about the process, here was the very first layer (the drawing, as to say)

    

• 30 jun 2014 :: The annual opendeurdag (open house) of the ABK was held last weekend. Our most objective (and objecting...) critic Elisa still prefers art from a more dynamical nature, so our visit to the open house was a bit of a quickie. If you want to rejoy this annual celebration of hobbyist artists, this is the place to go, unless you only wanted to see my little paintings :-p. These were inspired by Ghent's iconic book tower (left) and the Girih tilings (right). My sketch book was also included in the exhibition, but did not make it in the photo series.

  

  This picture was scrupulously stolen.

• 05 mar 2014 :: And this is how the rabot looked like last week

  

  And another close-ups: some self-similarity has been added

  

  Symmetry gets another meaning if you put it next to mondriaan

  

• 27 feb 2014:: The "dag van het dko" was fun, as you can see

• 20 feb 2014:: Next Saturday, we have the dag van het dko. The theme is "Boven Water", which is loosely translated as "Above the Water", but can also be translated as "resurface". Anyway, with our experimental painting group at Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten, we will be making a group painting on a 5m by 10m canvas, inspired by the pending destruction of the Rabot buildings in Ghent. Everyone is invited to come in and join us on feb 22nd, but of course, we have been doing some prep stuff. My contribution will consist of some 5-fold symmetric girih strapwork, based on the tesselation proposed in this paper by Lu and Steinhardt. Exciting stuff for a painting physicist!

  Here's a picture of the "making of", my girih's are found right from the right towers, right?

  

  And here's a close up

  

• 28 nov 2013 :: This month, I had my very first group exhibition, organised by the Koninklijke Bond van het Personeel of UGent and UZ Gent. There was a lot of nice stuff to be seen, including my small oils on MDF