Selected F.W. Paintings

With an eclectic range of influences including 70s sci-fi films, and Detroit House music, this series became the foundation for the two-page spreads found in FREAKOPHONE WORLD (Inside the Castle, 2021).

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Each object in the frame (which includes the frame itself) was painted by hand with watercolor on cardstock. Since I wanted to gesture towards a world glimpsed in infrared, and because it’s difficult to pull lighter colors over the dark in watercolor, I had to paint in the inverse, and then digitally invert them.

 

Inspired by early experiments with the artist’s book, like Leon Battista Alberti’s ‘tunnel book’, and William Kentridge's video installation, Preparing the Flute (2005), I constructed a virtual diorama—drawing attention to the surface, and to the medium—each image-object reinserted as flat cut-out planes into some open-source 3D rendering software.

 

That software also housed a number of built-in lighting effects and a sophisticated virtual smoke machine, so I became interested in the material tensions between the smooth digital components and the granularity of the watercolor paper.

 

I wanted the spreads to feel like magic—that’s what I was after—so I borrowed Nathalie Djurberg’s impossible lens flare, and her instinct to render language in the same materials with which she constructed her plasticine world.