The Story of the Hands
The story of the Hands started in a small room with red chair in Harlem. I had moved form the Silicon Valley, where I was working as a video game Star Wars artist, having given up my six figure salary and most of my possessions in order to move to New York city.
Living in a fairly small room with everything I owned and an air shaft window, I turned my attention to my intimate space, science defines it as 1.5 meters in diameter. I started looking at and drawing my hands, paying attention to the “hands theater” and the doings of the hands. A realization that a simple act of peeling apples actually is an extraordinary act on micro-level, where electric storms of electrons introduce ordinary changes in reality. This "hands theater" is in essence a violent act, not in the way of doing harm but an epic battle to make change, to rupture.
Hands became the building blocks of most drawings, and since, most of the installations. The hand is the place where the ideal world of ideas and thoughts could become an object in the material world. My own hands serve as the models and main building elements of my work because they are always present and available, constantly gesturing, traversing and dominating my personal space.
Drawing in pen and ink, and brown washes
I have been drawing since I was four, my grandfather was a painter and a drawer so I used to draw in chalk on my grandparent’s patio and also copied his paintings in pastels. When I moved to America I discovered 3d art and spent a decade drawing digitally for entertainment companies like Lucasfilm.
Having come from almost entirely digital background, I one day went to the Morgan library and museum in New York and there I saw Albrecht Dürer’s preparatory drawing for his famous engraving Adam and Ave. I found the pen and brown ink drawing so beautiful that I have been drawing in dip pen and ink ever since, and often use brown and sepia washes and inks from Germany. I also use dip pen which makes the drawings appear three dimensional and more like an etching, because the pen scratches the surface of the paper and thus embeds the pigment crystals in tiny grooves.
It is my secret but unlike Durer who cut up and joined pieces of paper - I plan my drawings digitally in terms of composition but then once I establish the space - I draw off the top of my head and the drawings sometimes become literally maps of my brain synapses.
Geometry
Geometry has always been in my mind as the more pleasant and visual side of mathematics, I want to mathematical high school because of parental pressure and geometry was my most pleasurable subject, something I could relate to visually.
Geometry is the symbol of Western thought, of philosophy, of the mind, of abstraction and ideas, I call geometry poetry for strings. In geometric bodies are encoded the songs of the universe. Geometric solids also are the symbols of simplicity and elegance.
This hand drawn excerpt represents a relationship between the material and the ideal world.
The cover and back pages have soft solids drawn on them, these are geometric solids which have been digitally sculpted into softer forms, and then drawn using the very old technique of dip pen and ink. They represent the symbiosis between man and the machine.
