The Place Where Two Roads Met

The original collage came from a sketchbook I carry around and fill to entertain myself at slow moments. This started with a picture I cut out of an art catalog. From there I added a crayon drawing that I printed out. I then added red marker to make color blocking, as well as stickers.

I don't mean "doodling" as a small word. I think of it the way musicians think of noodling — sound doodling, jazz improvisation — which is a high form of art. A sketchbook makes that possible for a painter. The barrier to a new idea is short: pick the book up, cut something out, draw on it. The Isaac piece begins there, and almost everything in this document is a downstream consequence of that one moment in a notebook.

These 3D heads' back, front, and side views are adapted from the original image.

Getting from a flat collage to a sculpture that can stand up in a room is a few different jobs stitched together. The first job is keeping faith with what Holly already drew. I use computer-vision tools to lock on to the exact shapes she put down, and a written description — built up over months — of the materials and gestures in her other work, so the machine has the right ingredients in front of it. The second job is sculpting. I bring the result into ZBrush and Blender and rework it until it is something a physical object could actually be. The third job is breaking it apart...

We did a small 3D print run of 11 pieces. From there we enlarged the small pieces to large ones so that we could make a large 3D sculpted head, 360 degrees round. We will have to find manufacturers to do the process.

A sculpture this size will not fit on a desktop 3D printer in one piece, so it has to be cut. I could not find an existing tool that did this well for very large sculptures, so I wrote one — a Blender add-on that slices a single model into pieces sized for my printer and adds the pegs and notches that let those pieces click back into the right alignment afterward. The eleven plates on this page are the result. Each one fits on the print bed, and each one carries part of the seam that will become the surface of the finished sculpture. To produce a full-scale, gallery-size version we will need a manufacturing partner with a larger machine, but the segmentation logic is critical for what we have access to right now.   

This is the assembled 3D print. On this piece you see seams, and from this we can go on to testing textures, color, materials, and finishes. We will have to find manufacturers to do the final product.

This is a current state of the project, not the end of it. The pieces here were aligned by eye and joined with a solvent that briefly melts the plastic on each side of the seam and then re-hardens, so what looks like a glue line is actually a fused bond — usually stronger than the printed layers themselves. The version of the alignment software I am developing now will create physical click-in pegs to reduce the visibility of the seams. We've also been trying out various finishes for the final surface.

The collage of Only Rainbows was a fantasy piece. It was built from magazine cuts. The premise was a new-world dream — a world way out in the ocean that exists as fairytale peace, a place one can travel to and walk through, made up of rainbows and the sky and where oceans flow together.

Only Rainbows is the piece that opened the door for everything that came after Isaac. Isaac is a sculpture problem — one head, one form, one finish — Only Rainbows is a collage, and being confined to two dimensions has inspired us to go in every direction the source material led us. Generative tools give us a way to marry the foundational composition and the entire library of Holly's work . What follows are four of those explorations.

A variation worked out in a miniature space — color breakdown and reimagining of surface quality.

This first variation is the simplest test of the idea: take Holly's collage, start with the original and reimagine the surface without losing and of the structural form. The composition is held. The palette has been broken down into a different vocabulary of color than the original used, and the surface reads as a different material than magazine cuts.

Enlarged detail of breakdown of color spaces as a mosaic.

Every one of these images is built to a very high resolution — large enough to print at sizes well past what the original notebook page could ever be. That is intentional. Working bigger is awe-inspiring in a way that working at sketchbook scale is not, and it also changes what the work can do: a piece that is the size of a wall has to reward viewers at three different distances. From across a room, at conversation distance, and at inches away. The mosaic reading of this detail is what shows up at the closest distance — the same image breaks into discrete color tiles you would never see in the thumbnail.

Thumbnail sketch — closer to the original collage. Here we have brought the viewer inside, viewing out onto the fantasy. The viewer is now looking out on a landscape of a stormy summer day, fading light at twilight.

Enlarged portion of the left-hand side of the walled city. Here the coloration is very soft, appearing more like a somber watercolor.

The softness here is a function of the description, "watercolor — pigment carried by water, bleeding into adjacent regions, edges that are not really edges." When that entry is weighted heavily, the same composition that produced the thumbnail comes back looking like a watercolor study — the architecture of the walled city is still there, but the surface has been re-narrated in a wetter, slower medium.

This next thumbnail is fractured color-block spaces that resemble an ink drawing.

Variation 3 is the same source material asked to behave like a different medium again. Where variation 2 went toward watercolor, this one goes toward pen and ink — flat color zones with a hard line on top of them.

In this enlarged full resolution of a portion of the collage, one sees a beautiful ink drawing with watercolored fluid areas. This detailed resolution is only a piece of the full image, but it stands alone as a beautiful abstract.

One of the things I have always loved is paintings that demand to be looked at from different distances — at close range, a section of a larger composition stops being a section and starts being a complete image. Every variation is large enough that interesting independent compositions live inside it.

A divided dark interior. The two windows on the right-hand side view out on morning light. On the left side there is a bed in the background and a shadowed reflection on the wall behind the bed. A large sculpture of an ancient city is in the foreground.

This is the most narrative of the four variations and the one that feels most like a still from a film. The new world is still present — it is the morning light through the windows — but it has been re-imagined as a room. The ancient city in the foreground is doing two jobs at once: it is both sculptural and cutout patterns.

This variation shows a total destruction left behind what was originally a palace.

At full resolution the same scene becomes a ruin. We started with what palaces look like in Holly's other work; also what destruction looks like. Letting both descriptions run together is how a single original collage ends up containing its own collapse. We keep this variation in the set because it is the strongest argument we have for what this process is actually doing — it is not stylizing a single image, it is letting Holly's whole body of work re-narrate any one piece of it.