Stefan Volatile-Wood | Art and Illustration

I do not know what this is, but it is awesome and I love it

2010-11-09T17:35:00.000-08:00

Check it out.

Some New-ish Stuff

2010-10-13T19:00:00.000-07:00

Here's a new painting that I finished over the summer that I'm pretty proud of.

As It Was In the Hearts of Men, So Shall It Be, 2010. Mixed Media on Board

The strange business at the top of this piece is a lace tablecloth that I stretched/tore/generally ravaged and distressed to make cool three-dimensional texture. It was really successful and is something that I plan on employing and delving deeper into in the future. It also presents a whole new world of headaches on the reproduction end of things. It was excruciatingly difficult to try to do this piece justice in picture form, as the lighting completely changes the look of the entire piece when it moves around, and it is hard to get a sense of that when you are presented with one, static photograph on which to base your impression. I'll let these other experiments tell the story:

Also, I will be another show at the Soo Rye Gallery that runs over the holidays, which is nice. It's called 'Precious', and is centered around small works of art, so I submitted a couple of my strange collage family people. Everyone that I have shown them to in the past has really liked them, so I hope that they are well-received. Then again, 'everyone' in this case is my friends, and my friend's tastes are, in a word, 'unique'.

On a different note, I think that I'm going to start posting general non-artish things that interest me up here occasionally too, so there will be less art-pressure and I actually start stopping by more frequently. Item the first: http://wallbot.net/viewer_full.php?id=1250
Enjoy.

Hey

2010-08-10T17:19:00.000-07:00

If you have the time/means of transportation, you should scoot over to Rye, NH this Friday for what promises to be a pretty swell opening at the Soo Rye Art Gallery. The show is called 'Taking Flight'. I am showing four pieces in it, and from what I have seen of the other artists being featured, there is going to be some pretty cool stuff. Things start up at six and go till eight, hope to see you there, whoever you are!

I leave you with this for now: http://www.swiss-miss.com/2007/08/every-morning-i.html

Lemme tell you

2010-07-22T20:36:00.000-07:00

Working full-time makes it so hard to keep this kind of business up to date. All of the time that I've had off lately I've either already had plans or errands, or I'm simply too worn out to do anything other than sit around and vegetate. At the very least, I've completely finished three new pieces that will be part of a group show at the Soo Rye gallery in New Hampshire next month. I'm pleased with all of them, but one is waaay better than the others. In fact, it might be one of my favorite pieces that I've made in at least the last two or three years... I will post them here in a couple of days when I actually feel up to fiddling around and formatting them in Photoshop.

Some New Stuff

2010-05-29T18:30:00.001-07:00

Here are a couple of new pieces that I just cranked out this week in an attempt to get back into things:

M042010.29.16 (Box), 2010. Acrylic, transfer and collaged street debris on board

M14683.20.7460 (Jack), 2010. Acrylic, transfer and collaged street debris on board

These pieces kind of represent a new direction that I'm beginning to pursue with my artmaking. I get a great enjoyment out of collaging just for the sake of collaging, so I have begun to design these abstract compositions made almost entirely out of found materials, bringing order and meaning to what used to just be garbage. There is a quality to all of these little scraps that I find around that makes it just really fascinating to sit down and play with them until something happens to fit together just right and suddenly make sense.

Well

2010-05-22T13:04:00.000-07:00

It's official: I'm no longer an art student, I'm just an artist.

:O

I think I'm gonna go start planning a big painting or something.

Hi

2010-05-09T14:37:00.000-07:00

Breaking the silence... It was kind of a busy sprint getting to the end of my last semester of the Illustration program, so I have sorely neglected my updating duties here. To get rolling again, I thought I'd put a few before and after images to give some sense of how my sketching and development stages for a piece go. Exhibit One:

This is a self-promotional piece I did recently, part of a series of pieces inspired by lyrics of some of my favorite songs. The song is 'Blue' by A Perfect Circle, which talks about self-denial and the inability to see or accept another's distress or suffering.

This is the sketch after some minor layout-tweaking in photoshop to get the proportions and dimensions just right...

...And this is Leda. Hi Leda. I took a lot of reference shots for this. It was a really complicated, dynamic pose to try to capture, primarily because of the movement and action in both the anatomy and the cloth. I also snapped a load of hand reference photos of myself. Dropping what felt like five thousand of those hands into the sketch made me feel like I was in Human Figure 101 again...

Figure Two: This piece was done on the subject of postpartum depression.

This is the initial sketch. A lot of my sketches can look rather minimal or empty because in the finish I let the texture-building techniques I use (collaging, sanding, transferring, etc) do a lot of compositional work in the background areas.

After a while, I realized that my first sketch was simply too tall/squarish to fit effectively in the horizontal space that I had, so I reworked it to this version.

And here's an example of when the unpredictable nature of my materials gets the better of me. Originally, my plan was to transfer this wallpaper pattern into the back of the piece and feature it fairly prominently because I thought the look of it really went great with the atmosphere. When I put it on, though, I realized that it was simply too delicate to show up well on top of what was already there. If you look close you can see it in areas, but it basically became a secondary element. I did add some graphic elements, however, in the form of the halftone dots I transferred in the shadows. Love those dots.

Hope this was fun... I'll do it again some time maybe. Bye for now.

Hey

2010-02-25T12:26:00.000-08:00

If you get a chance to see, the Portland Phoenix out this week is featuring one of my images on its cover! It's specifically for a story about these gruesome supermax/solitary confinement prisons, particularly ones in Maine. Fun stuff. This was a really fun project that didn't end up taking too long and became another really good texture/space study. A big thanks to Kevin Banks, it was really great working with him again.
Here is the final piece:

And here is a little something I'm currently working on that was inspired by the brainstorming I did for the prison piece:

Images like this really excite me because one of the things that I am pushing myself hard to develop is my ability to paint the underlying concepts/emotions/themes of something rather than a literal translation of text. Sometimes literal translations are simply the best way to go or offer the best artistic opportunity, but the things that I see around that really tend to stick with me are the subtle, surreal compositions of elements that ask you to think and interpret for yourself, to inspire you to feel something rather than try to tell you how to feel. I've been looking at Brad Holland's stuff a lot lately, and he is one of the masters of that sort of thing. Absolutely ridiculous work. Something to shoot for, I suppose.

Lookit, show this Friday!

2010-01-24T11:30:00.000-08:00

I am a part of Space 242's upcoming show 'I...you...We...ROBOT", which is opening this Friday, the 29th of January from 6-8. Come see, it's going to be a good time. Here are my submissions:

Bartender, 2009. Acrylic, collage and transfer on board

Jazz Band, 2009. Acrylic, collage and transfer on board

Thug, 2009. Acrylic, collage and transfer on board

New Work, Part II

2009-12-18T10:09:00.001-08:00

More new stuff, hooray. Most of this stuff is hung up several floors above me getting judged by other people as I currently type. I'm excited to see how my review goes over this time around, because over all, I think that I definitely had one of the most consistent and productive semesters of my whole college experience. We'll see if my professors agree with me in just a few minutes.
/out

Laughing is Good for Your Health, 2009. Mixed media

Untitled, 2009. Acrylic, collage and transfer on board
A little experiment with layering and texture applications.

Shreddin', 2009. Acrylic, collage and transfer on board
This is the piece that the Boston Phoenix chose for the
cover of its annual Ski & Snowboard Guide.

Awesome

2009-12-16T11:56:00.000-08:00

My friend Max just made this video montage of pictures he took at my my birthday get-together a few weeks back. Things like this are the reason why I am friends with Max.

Happy looming holidays

New Work, Part I

2009-12-14T16:25:00.000-08:00

Here's some new and some new-ish pieces that I have been working on as of late. More to come as soon as I get around to posting them.

Snakephone, 2009. Acrylic & collage on board

Under the Dragon, 2009. Acrylic & collage on board

The Holy See, 2009 Acrylic, transfer and collage on board

Robots Leave No Fingerprints

2009-12-12T16:44:00.000-08:00

I'm finished with my degree project. It was a long road getting up to this point, but here's everything as it stands right now.

My series of images is based around a visual marriage of film noir and retro science fiction. I picked the two because they both have strong roots in the post-WWII 1940s and 50s, and they play well off of each other in terms of aesthetic style. The actual look of the pieces is a bit of a departure from my usual work, but it matches the subject material well and it was fun and kind of nostalgic to revisit charcoal for a while. The images are designed to loosely follow some sequence of events which can be left up to the viewer's imagination:

"A single shot rang out in the dark."

"A dead suit in a shady part of town.
Bad news for him, good business for me."

"I may be a detective, but you sure didn't
need one to see that this guy got taken
out with steadier hands than a human's."

"When she looked you over, you
felt like the Sunday paper."

"Guys with pockets this deep always have
more than just safes in their closets."

"I hate being chased by guys
with nicer cars than mine."

"We both knew we were lying to each other,
but for now, none of that mattered."

Wowiee

2009-11-22T10:09:00.000-08:00

So this weekend was pretty successful. The setup and reception for the MassArt students traveling abroad show that I am a part of on Friday went great, and my Abominable Snowman Phoenix Ski & Snowboard guide cover came out! There is a slideshow on the Phoenix website with all of the submissions from my class here.

The description they wrote for my piece is pure awesome. I realize in retrospect that the contrast in the image is a little too high (blame the school monitors), but it looks pretty great in print anyways. Funnnn times.

I draw things that actually exist sometimes

2009-09-03T16:17:00.000-07:00

Here's a 'best of' collection from my spring/summer '09 observational sketchbook. Earlier this year I started using bic pens and prismacolor markers together, and have discovered that they are best bros for quick and non-crappy observation sketching. Cool.

Roooooooooooosh

Jeremiah's distinctive nose, and Jeremiah

Monkeys, Pt. I

Monkeys, Pt. II. I want to be friends with this one.

Apteryx Australis=Kiwi

People doing stuff

Hey, elephant

I can't remember what this bird was

Andrew

My friend, the label maker

Ben, deep in thought

My friends in VT: one awful portrait and one amazing portrait

Christian Science Center: it looks like it's sunny out, but it was actually the middle of the night and so windy I couldn't hold my sketchbook open...

David, looking wistfully towards the horizon, dreaming of a better day

Dave, Pt. IIBPL

All in all, I think this is my best sketchbook series yet, and I'm really satisfied with the style and volume of stuff that I've put into it, especially in such a relatively short time and without any kind of school supervision or prodding. Speaking of which, that starts next week...

Back in Boston

2009-08-27T11:34:00.000-07:00

Vermont was cool, but I'm happy to be back with my apartment, guitar amp and friends. The gallery opening I had was pretty awesome. I got a warm reception from everyone and a lot of positive reactions to my man-climbing-through-mirror piece in particular. Here's the junk that I entered in:

It'd be cool if I sell at least one and make back the cost of framing them all, but I'm not on the edge of my seat waiting. Sketchbook stuff to come soon. Peace.

Summertime

2009-06-29T16:16:00.000-07:00

So, since the family computer here back in Vermont would die a horrible death if I tried to run photoshop on it, this page is going to be boring for a while. I'll fix that later. On the bright side, I'm getting ready to show some of my art in a little gallery in town for a couple of months starting in July. It's my first time actually showing/attempting to sell anything legitimately on my own, so hopefully that goes over well. At the very least, I discovered that framing is like recess for me. I have no life.

Ta da

2009-06-23T11:26:00.000-07:00

I finally made some sort of webpage to post art to. Hooray. Someday I'll post art on it.