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About Ray Yeargin |
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Ray Yeargin is a self-taught abstract artist who has been creating art and developing his techniques and tools for over twenty years. Starting as an expert programmer with a flair for algorithm design, he performed hit-and-run graffiti attacks of performance art on unattended computers. Ranging from infinitely-varied Christmas trees to constantly changing abstract art scenes, some of those programs were left running, untouched, for weeks.
Later, he developed ever more elaborate code to create, color, and manipulate a large variety of objects and shapes. Eventually, he reduced that list to the three simple and favorite shapes that he mostly uses today; circles, triangles, and smoothly-curved crosses.
When he began developing the early versions of what was to become his current software, rendering a basic, four by five inch image took twenty-four hours. Now, most images are created at the much more usable size of approx. 40 by 40 inches, before being cropped, colored and variously manipulated into their final forms. After setting up code to create a scene, the first step of rendering one of these large raw images requires several hours on a modern computer.
Much of this phase of Ray's work is done in that most non-graphical of computer environments, the text editor. Code, written in the C language, is tailored to precisely control a virtual paintball gun which paints each object one pixel at a time. Often, many iterations of code modification and rendering are required before the intended scene reveals itself.
More conventional methods of image development are used once the raw scene is rendered in a usable state. Color changes, object editing, and other enhancements are done directly with image painting and editing software to finish the scene.
The resulting style of this round-about process is unlike any other. Ray's images contain smooth gradations of color, fine lines and curves, and unique background textures--sometimes fragmented and broken to reveal other layers below.
Ray lives with his family in the Tallahassee area of north Florida. |
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| | mail this link | -Ray Yeargin, December 30, 2011 |
© 2012, Ray Yeargin
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