2018 is winding down, and I have some unfinished business. The graphic designer Joe Erceg, a longtime friend, died this past June. From the Oregonian obituary:
David Chelsea is reading: Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys
by Michael Collins
Continue reading Belated RIP, Joe Erceg
This is one of my earliest spherical drawings, from 1995, my last year living in New York. It was drawn (in rapidograph on a styrofoam ball coated with papier-mâché) at Spring Street Studios, a life model drawing space in Soho.
Continue reading Spherical Perspective: Spring Street Studios
This 360° spherical view was painted in acrylics on a world globe I bought at a yard sale. It depicts my son Ben and daughter Rebecca in Rebecca’s room circa 2002. Here is what they and the room look like today:
There’s a new gallery of spherical paintings coming soon to the portfolio section, but in the meantime here’s a post about the first one I ever did:
Years before I wrote my own book about perspective, I was experimenting with pushing its outer limits. I was inspired by seeing Buckminster Fuller’s dymaxion world globe projected onto the sides of a twenty-sided polyhedron to try the equivalent in perspective- an entire 360° visual field as seen from one point in space drawn onto twenty triangles to form a continuous image. I did a couple of early drawings using this method, including a fold-up ornament sent out as a Christmas card in 1993. Eventually I got tired of the difficulties involved- each of the twenty triangles has its own perspective, and it’s extremely difficult getting objects to line up over the gaps- and I figured out that it would be simpler to draw a continuous image on a spherical surface. I got a wooden ball from a crafts store and drew a 360° perspective grid on it- basically a picture of a cube with ruled lines on it, viewed from inside so that six vanishing points each line up with the center of a face. Here is an example of a ball ruled with perspective lines. Over that I did an acrylic painting of the garden on the roof of our loft building in New York and gave the finished piece to Eve as an anniversary present in 1994. This post shows the picture of the ball- as you can tell from nearby objects, it is quite small, only about one inch square. Continue reading Roof Garden On A Tiny Ball