Fountain
Now:
Unfortunately this is not a piece that has aged well. It has some sentimental value as my first 3d image but the flaws are glaring now. Still it was, at the time, a worthwhile attempt at getting into (and succeeding, in that regard) an art gallery show, still my only participation in a show to this day.
Then:
My college was having a student art exhibition, and I desperately wanted to enter something. Before long, this abstract image came into my mind and I set about using my newly-learned 3D graphics skills to construct it. I almost didn’t finish it in time, and I had enormous difficulty getting it printed, as this was my first introduction to a service bureau and the aspects of digital print, but I turned it in to the judges the morning of the exhibition and they accepted it. Of course it didn’t win anything, but I got to have a piece of my artwork displayed in a juried Milwaukee art show, and that night it was included in the local art society’s gallery tour. So far it’s still my only claim to fame in the art world.
When I made this one, I was just beginning to realize that 3D and raytracing were much closer to the way I envisioned things in my head, and much more intuitive to work with once I had a basic grasp of the software. I used Corel Dream 3D 6, which was a gentle introduction to the 3D raytracing medium, and had a lot of fun with it even though my computer took forever to raytrace anything remotely complicated. Here I used a lot of reflective surfaces, at the time that was one of the things I found most fascinating about raytracing; in fact, for a while that was my idea of what raytracing meant, lots of mirrored surfaces and chrome, everything shiny and reflective.
This image was created in September of 1997.
