Ray Caesar

It was in a post of Signor Mori’s at cipango that I caught my first glimpse of the digital art of Ray Caesar, and I was further reminded of his work thanks to Cup of Chicha, and The Cartoonist, but I still didn’t get around to checking out Mr Caesar’s site, and the image-galleries therein, until he took the trouble to e-mail me about it yesterday, assuming, rightly, that I would be interested.

My work is entirely digital, from its creation to its method of printing. I create models in a three dimensional modeling software and cover these models with painted and manipulated photographic textures that wrap around them like a map on a globe…

I color the models first in a very simple way, then each surface in the model is wrapped with a texture that may be painted digitally such as a flower petal or from a digital photograph such as a wood surface. I collect textures the way some people collect little silver spoons and I have a story about each texture in my collection…

As my work is printed I am often asked about my original, but it exists only in the computer in a dimensional world of depth, width and height. I am fascinated by the concept that this 3-dimensional space exists much as another reality and even though I turn the computer off, I am haunted by the fact that this space is still there existing in a mathematical probability, and the space that we live in now might not be all that different.

The above is quoted from Mr Caesar’s account of his working methods. If you are likely to be in or near Philadelphia on February 21st, then you really ought to check out Ray’s fascinating work at his debut show, at Tin Man Alley. Click on the images above to see them slightly enlarged: they are reproduced here with the artist’s permission.