Gil Bruvel pushes 21st Century technology into his world of fine art with the application of computer modeling methods to create his hyper-refined and detailed bronze sculptures.

Bruvel is a Computer Artist Who Transforms Mental Ideation to Virtual and Actual Reality

Bruvel has adopted the computer as a creative assistant in ways that few others have. Like a hybrid centaur, part civilized sophisticated man, part instinctive natural beast, he uses a tool and medium of science-- a PC platform computer is equipped with Microsoft 2000 Professional operating system and Maya 5.0 software--meshed seamlessly with his intuitive artistic skills, knowledge, and innate creative sensibilities--to transform ideas from virtual to actual states of reality. He concurs with philosopher and artist Timothy Binkley (1988) in that he sees the computer as a creative assistant. Bruvel believes that his creative partnership with the computer allows him limitless possibilities to explore artistic expression and consciousness.

*** TECHNOLOGY UPDATE ***

Gil is proud to announce that in September 2003 he acquired a ZCorp. 310 printer which he is using exclusively for the rapid prototyping portion for the creation of his 3D sculptures. 
 
To better understand this process please go to: www.zcorp.com  

 

It is fascinating to see the step-by-step process Bruvel uses to create his artwork. One can see the multiple levels of his capabilities at work: as an artist of classical training, as a thinker and explorer of many fields, as a creator effortlessly enmeshed in the creative process to skillfully produce fluent, flexible, original, and elaborate solutions in art, and as a skillful computer artist who seamlessly transforms ideas from virtual to actual reality to take shape in material form.

Artist of Classical Training

As an artist apprenticed as a restorer at The Restoration Workshop in the south of France, Bruvel brings to his work a 500-year tradition of classical training in the skills and processes that have their genesis in the Renaissance. He received training in such basic skills and knowledge for artists as human anatomy and proportion, and how to visually convey human emotions through facial expressions and body positions depicted in drawing, painting, or sculpture. He studied the patterns of structure and growth in nature, and the physical properties of light and chemical properties of pigment that collectively produce our sensation and perception of color. Bruvel learned the technical skills for preparing different grounds in wood, canvas, or plaster, to receive pigment for paintings or wall murals, and how to mix different water or oil-based pigments to apply to these surfaces. For drawing and painting, he learned how to suggest the illusion of three-dimensional (3D) form on a flat two-dimensional (2D) picture plane's surface by suggesting with graphite or pigment the effects of light and shadow that alter line edges and color intensity and tone. To suggest the illusion of 3D space on a flat 2D surface, he mastered the principles of aerial perspective for diluting the intensity of colors used to depict distant objects, and linear perspective for bringing diagonal lines to converge on a horizon line in the distance. For sculpture, he studied how to model form by using different processes. In subtractive sculpture, he learned to carve away layers of solid plaster or stone to reveal a form in three dimensions. In additive sculpture, he learned to add pieces of soft malleable material such as clay or wax in successively built-up layers to create a form "in the round", convincing when viewed from any direction. He studied and learned how to emulate the various styles of artists through five centuries who had mastered all of these techniques, so that their work could be successfully restored.

Thinker and Explorer of Many Fields

Bruvel, a man of considerable intellectual curiosity who ranges wide in his reading and thinking, plumbs a world of ideas found in philosophy, psychology, anthropology, and ancient cultures, mythology, and literature to find inspiration for his work. As a thinker, he always has been a seeker to discover the answers to the mystery of the transformative process of growth and metamorphosis in the world of human experience, consciousness, and spirit. As an artist, he seeks to give visual expression to these concepts.

Creator Effortlessly Engaged in the Creative Process

Bruvel is unique as an artist in that he can discern and is interested in explicating how the conscious and unconscious mind work in tandem throughout the creative process he experiences. Graham Wallas (1926) identified the creative process as occurring in four stages: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. The most important stage of the creative process--incubation--occurs in the unconscious. Verification is where the solution arrived at in the unconscious becomes manifest to the conscious awareness, and when the artist thereupon paints or constructs the image s/he discovered "there". In newer creativity studies, Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi (1996) characterizes the experience of functioning in the creative state as one of being "in the flow". Successful engagement by artists in the creative process yields what Joy Guilford (1956) identified as divergent ideas and forms characterized by fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration. Bruvel can articulate how he arrives at his artistic solutions throughout these stages of the creative process, and his work reflects the hallmarks of creativity realized in artistic form that can be seen in his drawings, paintings, and sculpture.

Back to the top | Bruvel interview with writer Holle Humphries

In response to several questions put to him about the virtual sculptural process he uses, Bruvel described some of his thoughts on how he thinks his creative partnership with the computer enhances his artistic thinking, creativity and human consciousness.

Many artists note that a mental idea always precedes the manipulation of material, and the whole artistic process is undertaken thereafter in order to give the idea material form. Other artists speak about deriving inspiration for forms and ideas from simply manipulating material, randomly. A shape that accidentally takes form in their hands then triggers mental associations for it, giving rise to the impetus for seeking further elaboration. The following question was asked to see if Bruvel perceives any difference in his approach to the artistic process when using the computer as his tool and medium to assist as a catalyst in the creative process.

H: In your sculpture, "The Passage," which came first; the chicken or the egg?  Did the inspiration and idea for "The Passage" emerge first, and then you set about to realize it as a sculptural form? Or, did you find yourself manipulating virtual material which then assumed the shape of a boat, which gave rise to the idea of doing an analogy to the story of Psyche and Cupid, with Psyche conceived of as the Vessel of Consciousness and Cupid as the Oarsman or Unconscious who guides her?"


< The Passage

B: Well in this case because I am in a phase where I like to explore the ideas that we are multifaceted and that our perception of our identity is directly proportional to our level of denial or awareness, reading about Psyche was at the time a pretext good enough to do a sculpture.

H. Were you simply playing with the computer tools one day and started manipulating (extruding the cube form) -- and *then* the form you ended up with (that looked like a boat) started to give rise to the idea for the theme of the sculpture--?

B: The computer sculpting tools are very useful to clear the way at least psychologically of having the too common feeling of limitation about a concept "Great! I have an idea I want to explore, how I am going to do that?" And I end up thinking in terms of materials available, time, feasibility). In this case I already knew I didn't have to worry about the levels of complexity of the composition and knew I could experiment as much as I wanted with different versions, sizes, proportions, unlimited amounts of redo. Until the final renderings I can contemplate and continue to meditate on and still make changes, to get closer to the original concept. Then decide if it is worth it to materialize.

It's as if in the first stages of the creative process, the computer becomes an extension of his consciousness -- his conscious awareness of manipulating the tools and medium of its hardware and software conjoined with his artistic skills, dexterity and training.

And then, without his becoming aware of it, somewhere in the creative process, in the incubation stage, a shift occurs, and the computer becomes conjoined to his unconscious -- where the mind is engaged in what Kant called, "free play and imagination".

Watching Bruvel engage his computer system during the process of artistic creation is like watching a cybernetic centaur in action: a half man, half computer beast at work. In his seamless ability to manipulate the tools of the computer hardware and software, it's as if he becomes at one with the machine. The computer's capabilities enhance his creative process throughout the evolution of an idea as it is transformed into final material form.

It can be seen in the step-by-step process Bruvel used to transform a mental idea into a final sculpture cast in bronze, how an idea first lurking in the unconscious emerged into the conscious. What started out as a memory of the story of Psyche and Cupid, metamorphosized in Bruvel's unconscious mind to an idea for converting the story into an analogy for the conscious identity guided by the unconscious. In the challenge of transforming an idea into a final visual form cast in bronze, it can be seen that as an artist, Bruvel was aided by a computer every step of the way. With the computer as a creative partner, Bruvel's inspiration and idea for his art evolved in stages from mental ideation to virtual and then actual reality. The computer's capabilities therefore can be seen to become an extension of artistic consciousness--and by corollary--unconsciousness.

Although scholars generally agree that the creative process can be characterized by a sequence of stages known as preparation, incubation, verification, and elaboration, it is often difficult to separate out where one stage in this mental thought process begins and the other ends. It is generally agreed that the stages may not occur necessarily in linear progression or in separation from another, as one stage may inform, overlap, or become repeated in the genesis of another. And when the computer and its capabilities become conjoined with the artist capabilities while engaged in the "the flow" of creative thinking, it is even harder to separate out where the carbon-based form of human thought can be separated out from the silicon-based tools and media that aid and abet it in the act of creation.

Bruvel asserts that although there are many similarities, there are essential differences in working with virtual material. He finds that there is a degree of freedom in manipulating concepts in the medium of virtual material in the effort to give them visual form. Unlike working with physical material, he is not constrained by time, money, the availability of supplies, tools, or concerns that such material is expensive, will run out, or disintegrate once exposed to certain elements such as drying air or ultraviolet sunlight.

But is the technical process involved a drawback? Does he find them intrusive or an interruption to creativity?

H. Many artists would quail at the idea of mastering all the digital technology and media processes you have in order to bring one of your ideas to fruition as a material form. Do these interfere with the fluidity of your engagement in "the flow" of the creative process in any way?

B: These descriptions of the technical process don't necessarily make it as tedious like it may sound. It is rather simplistic and retreats easily in the background, which allows me to focus my energy solely on the creative process. It's a very important point to emphasize. I can fine-tune my shapes and forms indefinitely [in virtual material] without considerable labor and without having to redo them from scratch as it is with a traditional process.

What Bruvel finds most interesting, is that the technical processes involved provide him with a sense of freedom--not restriction.

B: Visualization and formation of concepts become increasingly detached from the physical contact with clay or marble or metal or wood or whatever.

In addition, he finds the seamless fluency and flexibility afforded by working with virtual material in a virtual space to bring concepts to materialization without the constraints posed by the physical limitations of manipulating physical material, actually allows his artistic capabilities to flow more effortlessly directly from the genesis of his own mental ideation.

B: I believe this [the use of the computer] will somewhat force artists to change their idea of what creation is in general, to where it's not really about the material they use any longer. Instead, what they're expressing is an ever closer reflection of themselves.

Bruvel believes that digital technology and media provide a virtual reality where artists can effortlessly create and bring forth new forms into material reality without the constraints and restrictions imposed by more traditional processes and physical material.

In many respects, by analogy, artistic creation abetted by virtual mediation is akin to morphology, because it permits creation and the evolution of an idea to take place completely and organically within the artist's mind, with the computer used simply conceived of as an adjunct mental space where the manipulation takes place as a seamless extension of his or her mental capabilities.

For example, in his work with primitives, where Bruvel starts with a simple primitive, a cube, and then extrudes it to add to it more and more complex with each manipulation, this "extrusion from a cube" process can be compared by analogy to morphology--to the general pattern of growth processes found in the development of embryos of animals. In morphology, what starts out as a simple sphere--a fertilized ovum--gradually through different stages of cell division and hence addition, becomes more complex and more differentiated form in its features.

A conversation with Bruvel pointed out the similarity between what he does in computer modeling and the sequence of morphology:

H. I see what you do in computer modeling as somewhat similar to the process of morphology, as described by Hay Bruce Reid (2002) for his biology class:

Figure 2

• As with the very simple cube seen in Step 1 of [Figure 2], in morphology you start with just a rounded sphere. The sphere consists of an ovum (egg) that has been fertilized (by a sperm). It is called a zygote.

• Then, it begins to multiply through successive cell divisions into number of little spheres. This is similar by analogy to the way the cube you use seems to have been multiplied in its facets (sides), as seen in Step 2. In the embryo, eventually, the cells have multiplied and divided to eventually consist of a cluster of many cells. Eventually, the cells arrange themselves to form a ball around a central cavity. This spherical form with a central cavity is called a blastula, or a hollow sphere.

• Looking at Step 3, this is what this form has seemed to do--it has opened up as though creating an inner tunnel or space, and become hollow.

• Then in the morphology of the embryo, the hollow ball starts to fold in on itself. It fuses along a longitudinal edge to create an inner tunnel. At this point, the blastula has become a gastrula: it creates an inner tube within its hollow space. This inner tunnel subsequently becomes the alimentary canal of the digestive system.

• The embryo now consists of two walls: an outside wall called the ectoderm; and an inside wall called the endoderm. A third layer of cells arises between the two and is called the mesoderm. The cells of these three layers start to differentiate and become increasingly more complex as distinctive tissue and organ systems, becoming: the brain, spinal cord and nerve system; the heart and lungs; and the digestive organs.

• This by analogy can be compared to Step 4., where the little protuberances on the form have become more defined and differentiated in their shape.

The only difference, is that in morphology, the outcome is already pre-programmed into the fertilized ovum--at least for the short term. But in the longer history of evolution, over millions of years in time, mutations have given rise to different forms, just as artists like you have created new and original forms from software despite the fact it has been pre-programmed by a software developer in terms of how it should be used.

In this analogy, manipulation of virtual material is as effortless and organic an act as the constantly differentiating tissues of the embryonic life form, undergoing metamorphosis. The creation of life, many believe, is closely attuned to a spiritual process because it is an analogy on a small scale to the birth of the entire universe. Similarly, each individual artist's act is an act of creation, and therefore can be compared by analogy to a spiritual process. And Bruvel, like Kandinsky, sees just that:

B: Because of technology, the creative act is becoming increasingly closer to an emotional act--even a spiritual act--where the materiality of the act itself becomes very tenuous.