Kevin Mack’s Virtual Art Gallery
The “Neurosymphonic Self Reflection” image posted by my pal, Amanda Fletcher, along with some of the other tripped-out images from the Slow Art Gallery is part of Kevin Mack’s burgeoning abstract digital art career. Mack, of course, won an Oscar for his visual effects work on What Dreams May Come (1998), which, if you remember, was itself a very early use of stylized, painterly CG along the lines of his growing roster of “digital paintings.” He’s still part of the Sony Pictures Imageworks’ stable of supervisors, and is also the guy responsible for creating the opening of this year’s Computer Animation Festival.
Basically, his artwork is built around the notion of digital math-based painting via the computer, and some of it, as you saw on this blog and on exhibit at Siggraph this year, is pretty tripped out. It’s a hobby he takes very seriously, as he told me about an hour ago when I bumped into him on the show floor. With “virtual reality” one of the big themes at Siggraph this year, one of Kevin’s big dreams is for the notion of virtual art galleries, where your avatar can actively wander through it, examine his paintings, and perhaps, in some cases, even enter them.
For now, though, he’s doing things the “old fashioned online way”–he has a first-rate gallery of his work on exhibit at his web site, which I urge you to check out: www.kevinmackart.com
–MG
