R&D Collab Breaks Fine Art Rules Using Cinema 4D image

R&D Collab Breaks Fine Art Rules Using Cinema 4D The Cinema 4D Tech Behind Diane Rosenblum and Joe Doyle's Abstract, Large-scale Artworks.

In their latest collaboration, R&D, artist Diane Rosenblum and painter Joe Doyle (R&D), rely on Cinema 4D technology and photography techniques to create large-scale artworks that push the aesthetics of painting and photography into exciting new territory.

R&D's most recent exhibition entitled, "New Formalism in Painting and Photography," comprises a monumental photo installation and a series of organic abstract paintings, and is currently on view at the Saint Mary's College Museum of Art, in Moraga, California. (Read press release here.)

A centerpiece of the exhibition, the 5 x 70 foot photographic installation of Idaho artist Judith Kindler in her home and studio, explores concepts of space and time. The image is based on photographs initially taken and then collaged into a scroll-like mural by Rosenblum that are then manipulated digitally by Doyle in Cinema 4D to reconstruct the picture plane. It stretches along all four walls of one of the two gallery spaces that comprise this show. The other is filled with paintings made from Rosenblum's vector and photographic files, which are then manipulated in Cinema 4D by Doyle.

"Beyond being big, fresh and fun, our new paintings and photographs open conversations about photography and tech, artists and invention, and new ways of seeing," says Rosenblum. "We play with time in our photographs and mess with space". Doyle adds, "We throw off 100 years of dogma that states fine art had to be flat."

Here we speak to Rosenblum and Doyle about the influence of Cinema 4D on their work and tips for aspiring visual storytellers.

Rosenblum: This show contains one 70-foot long photograph that stretches around the four walls of a gallery. The monumental piece "Judith Kindler in the Studio" shows the Idaho artist, her work, and her living space. It tells the story of a visit to Judith Kindler's studio, and gives viewers a strong sense of what it is like to be with her in her space. The work pushes on the boundaries of photography, dealing with non-sequential time and also expanding the image forwards and back into space through Cinema 4D. The software reiterates our underlying position that the computer has permanently altered the way we see and understand the world.

Doyle: What you're seeing is 70 years of combined art experience between Diane and myself enhanced by digital technology. We use Cinema 4D as part of the creative process. This is not a postproduction deal.

Rosenblum: Our photographic works start with high resolution files from my shoots in artists studios. I develop them in Photoshop and sometimes collage them into multi-image sequences. Our abstract paintings mostly begin with one of my vector files, but sometimes come from my photographs or Joe's files.

Doyle: After preproduction Diane passes along the files and I drop them into Cinema 4D and create a texture map and put it on a 3D object. I work on the images and then we have conversations about what we like and don't like. In the end the piece is a collaboration between two aesthetic senses.

We used Cinema 4D R19 on this project relying on the wonderful lighting and materials effects and displacement and distortion features to achieve the graphic qualities of the shadows we were after with great detail, finesse and authenticity.

Rosenblum: The compiling of photographic sequences in our work references pioneer Eadweard Muybridge's photographic advances in perceiving motion and time. R&D expand upon these, incorporating Cinema 4D to animate a comprehensive non-cyclical image with two realities - the original camera view documenting the artist's studio, and the composed view shifting the geometric blocks forward and backward from the conventional picture plane.

Doyle: As a painter trained in traditional arts, I've always been concerned about surfaces and contours of surfaces, how they look under light and dark. When I first created the multimedia department at Berkeley City College in 1998 I could see that there was this thing called 3D animation on the horizon. I heard about Cinema 4D and when I saw what it could do it just blew my mind as it gives artists a way of seeing into the diffuse texture of surfaces which is what gives us an idea of what the actual objects are. I was fascinated with the aesthetics of the program and what I could learn about spatial relationships and diffused light.

Speed is incredibly important in the creative process because it's often just a flicker across your mind and you want to get on it before you lose it. Cinema 4D allows me to conceptualize at light speed. I can change and rotate models, change the camera view, texture, adjust the lighting and coloring, and more, until I get what I want very quickly.

Doyle: The college is affiliated with Maxon's educational license program so we can keep up-to-date teaching the latest version of Cinema 4D to the next generation of artists. What I tell my students is look around you - look at the ads, look at the movies. 3D is going to eat you alive if you don't know how to do it. Just forget it and look for a different occupation. But if you're a graphic or web artist or video person and you think you'll want to work in a visual field that's going to be presented to people, you have to know 3D, without a doubt.

Doyle: Diane and I are not sure what we will be doing next, but it's likely we will create similar work that is abstract in nature, and Cinema 4D will play a principal role.


R&D Image Information:
Additional R&D imagery is available for viewing, as follows:
dianerosenblum.com/r-and-d-photography/
dianerosenblum.com/r-and-d-stripe-painting/