Shaped by Our Optic Nerves

LEVL9 welcomes you to the Departure Lounge. That’s the name of our blog and upcoming publications. This website is dedicated to exploring digital art - but that’s just one of the inspirations the Lounge wants to offer you.

Let’s talk about art that has influenced us.

We’ve all had the experience of revisiting a beloved children’s book and realizing how carefully our younger selves studied the illustrations. Or an old comic book.

Think about the murals you drive by, the upholstery fabrics at your grandparents’ house, the colors you wanted to wear to school.

“CHOOSE YOUR INFLUENCES BEFORE THEY CHOOSE YOU.”

These were the wise words of Flora Natapoff, my favorite painting teacher. What did she mean? I’d translate that as an acknowledgement that we are porous, constantly taking in sights that affect us and how we see the world, and that we should be careful what we feed our eyes— not take in too much aesthetic junk food.

I’ll go first, but I’d love to hear from you too. I really liked dark and somber art as a kid. Weird, huh? I loved Bosch and Breugel, Degas, Velazquez, Manet and painters who used a lot of black and shadowy tones. Later I went crazy over Japanese woodblock prints, typography/calligraphy, expressionism, brutalism and mid-century modernism. I still love constructivism and early twentieth-century Soviet arts. (In a later post I might talk about totalitarianism and design.) Maybe my biggest love is Cubism.

I’ve spent decades painting, printmaking, drawing, making mosaics and assemblages and doing “applied arts” like sign painting, graphics and publications as my “day jobs.”

And now I got all excited about digital art and the possibilities it offers to create imagery that still touches on all those other influences.

Am I done being influenced? No. Are you? I hope not. More later, friends.

LEVL9 in Santa Fe, NM, USA, Planet Earth.