Russian Roulette and Ruins Paintings 2024-2020
By Claudia Hart
Russian Roulette Series
Russian Roulette is a series of mixed media paintings based on the mechanics of an unpublished game, Russian Roulette (A Game of Life and Death). Written over the course of a year, this interactive 3D game was never coded because my producing NFT platform did not survive the crypto winter. Like a character in my game, they went bankrupt! My scenario set up the rules for an elaborate game of black magic, combining casino gambling deploying the systems and hierarchies driving ancient divination texts like the I Ching, Tarot and Astrology. Central to the gameplay were my prizes: still-life compositions inverting materialist values. Instead of increasing in price as they evolved in complexity, the most elaborate still lives were the least expensive - a third prize - and the most minimal and simple compositions were the most valuable. I think of this inverted value system as a central metaphor behind my paintings. They are Memento Mori for a lost consumer culture that refuses to learn from its own history, but is instead transfixed by the spinning wheel of economic expansion and technological innovation. So, when my NFT platform failed, I happily painted my prizes instead of minting them, using the 3D computer simulations that I produced for the game as my starting point.
My technique is to start each work by hand-painting mosaic patterns that I take from the historical architecture of failed empires. I appropriated it from a 19th-century pattern book filled with tile patterns, in my library. I then build a still life in a proscribed theatrical set, framed in a shallow game space, by using Maya 3D animation software. In my game space, I "free-hand" paint some of my polygon models by eye, using a water color simulator. I also use photographs that I take using photo lighting and a camera on a tripod of my carefully painted patterns to use as "texture maps" for others. Next I go through a process of sanding and repainting with thin layers of gouache paint to give the works a patina of age. These works seem to move backwards in time and space. I then spray the paintings with thin layers of pure pigment suspended in resin, using a 10-foot UV flatbed-printer, a complex computer-driven airbrush, something like a CNC router that cures the surfaces to make them archival. When I spray paint, I am able to correct and revise the paintings in real time by using a series of perfect mathematical alpha channels, possible to make in the simulated 3D environment. I started developing this technique during the Covid quarantine, working with an expert printer in a Brooklyn lab until I finally mastered the required skills.
The Russian Roulette paintings embody a complex dance between my hardware and me. I improvise because I want to glitch the sterile perfection always engendered by these kinds of refined computer-driven tools. By combining the natural with the artificial, traditional craft with the technologically advanced, I create a strangely uncanny mix. These pictures are weirdly fascinating. I imagine them as existing in the historical space of mind-model paintings like those produced by Durer or Vermeer, or later, Morandi, and also of the more contemporary versions of the other painters who danced with machines, from Rauschenberg to Warhol, Lichtenstein and Harold Cohen.
Ruins Series
The Ruins painting series, my first when I returned to painting after 27 years, was a reflection on the paradigm shift we are also experiencing in the world of art and pictures. We are currently transforming from photographic paradigm to another related but very different concept, that of the virtual. Photographic capture is physical. Photographs are actually an imprint of light, focused by a lens, on a chemically treated film, re-transferred onto chemically treated paper to create a kind of fossil of something that happened in the tangible world. It started in the 19th and then mutated in the 20th-century to its most contemporary version of painting. Virtual imaging simulates reality rather than inscribing it. The virtual eschews physical processes that rely on physical things (like chemicals!). It is instead based on ephemeral, conceptual models and is mathematical. Painting influenced by photography sits on hundreds of years of accumulated data, deploying the history of human scientific knowledge to make mathematical algorithms that model the natural world by using data and mathematics.
Rather than using photographs as a part of process, as realistic painters often do, to produce my paintings, I combine the hand made with computer simulations, a realistic form of computer graphics using data accumulated in the natural sciences to reconstruct a realistic model of the natural world. Scientific information that we have collected over time, concerning phenomenal experience, is used to build a visual that resembles an architectural model as seen through the lens of a digital camera.
Simulations-technologies numerically calculate the impact of physical forces such as gravity or wind, the mathematics of light, gasses or the measured and enumerated properties of real materials such as oak or granite. These calculations are tabulated by some of the most complicated softwares ever made. Mine is called “Maya,” and I use it to make 3D computer images that are visualized in representational form in a mathematical Cartesian space in the same way that scientists and engineers visualize the impact of disease on the body, or stress on a bridge, or the workings of subatomic particles, or the outcome of nuclear war.
My 3D software also graphically simulates the graphical interfaces of a tangible digital camera, in turn derived from a traditional mechanical, analog camera. But instead of capturing the real in an indexical fashion like a photograph, my tool is computational, using measured calculations to simulate computer-generated models of the real. I then use a very precise computer-driven airbrush to spray a transparent picture on a wood panel already built up with other layers of hand painted patterns, washes and sanded over older works. This process can take years or months. The end results are ghost-paintings, where the process of time and history and loss are physically embodied.
Simulation-software is profoundly philosophical. It is epistemological, its graphical design reflecting the canons of scientific knowledge. This type of epistemological software stands on centuries of theoretical and scientific models of the real, and reflects the foundations of Western knowledge. The issues implied by it are made manifest at our own historical juncture where the culture of science and climate-change deniers along with every other version of a fact. now rule America. The manufacturing of fake truth in the form of misinformation and ubiquitous infotainment on social media are obviously epic.