If you’ve been reading through these posts, you’re well aware that up till today I haven’t been able to import or export images with the Quest. This is on account of it’s programming being configured for Windows, and my Macbook no longer has the strength to run the likes of Parallels, where you can boot back and forth between the lands of Gates and Jobs. Tried though I might through the annals of Reddit, I came up short for a solution. I’d forgotten about Android for Mac though – something I had used for uploading photos from my phone. I’d done it that year I’d switched to Samsung Galaxy from the iPhone cult I’ve belonged to before and since. It was my wonderful Thesis Advisor Emma Westecott who made the suggestion, and a bit of scrambling later (I tried three different Android File Transfer app downloads before finding one that worked), I was able to finally access the sketches and screenshots I’d been stockpiling in the Quest’s memory. Achievement #1. But the real glory was successfully loading an image into Tilt Brush. I know it may not seem like much. But I have been around since the early (possibly the earliest days) of loading images from the real world into graphics programs, and thus consider it the designer’s answer to “Hello, World”.
Since the file path told me it was probably going to work, I took a few minutes to choose the image I wanted to use before testing it out (that’s part of the glory when it does actually load). The image in question was a simple floral sketch by a celebrated Canadian artist by the name of Lorne Wagman, and yes, there is a story. Of course. It’s part of the overarching theme of my personal 2020, about love and loss.
On a Monday morning in the end of April, I was looking up sinks online as a plumber named Joe meandered about, babbling to me from my bathroom. I was trying to charm Joe into installing a new sink for me as a side job outside of what my landlord was actually paying him for – fixing a leak in my bathtub (he did not succeed). The phone rang, and it was one of those, just like that, where your life changes forever. I couldn’t get Joe out of there fast enough, though he wasn’t getting it. It’s been a slow drip of a new reality ever since. Later edit: pun was somehow unintended.
Grief is a fog with the lights out. Eventually you start to make sense of shapes as your eyes start to adjust to the darkness. The fear of falling off a cliff subsides bit by bit with each morning that you wake up and still find yourself here. I know there’s no cliff now, and I still have bad days, but just like I was told, they’re more manageable (gotta be good to yourself). But the good days are getting better and better. And all of that is happening in mostly isolation in the countryside. I’m still in shock, almost in a way that it feels like rather than the shock ever subsiding, I’ll just get used to the shock itself, like a buzzer that just keeps coming. It’s like Groundhog Day in there, where I keep having to realize the news many times a day, and three months later it still doesn’t feel real.
He – who is no longer with us – had always had a giant Wagman painting in his bedroom. Actually when we were younger it had originally sat in the living room of his mother’s house, before he took it as his own. He’d loved it, and so had I. It had always looked to me like a painted manifestation of him, a Fantasia of muted yet wild colours, an abstract, figurative jumble of friendly forest creatures that could potentially be menacing if the need presented itself, but were an otherwise adorable gang of Scooby Doos. It was the kind of painting that as a kid you could crawl into, and as an adult, like Sugar Mountain, made you wish you still could. After his passing, I went to his room to stand before the Wagman painting once more. Knowing I would likely never see it again, I took a picture. I didn’t know what I would do with it yet, only that I wasn’t ready to let it go too.
A little while later, an artist friend of his family shed some light on who Lorne Wagman was. He told me he resided in Flesherton, and as soon as I heard this, a new light came through the mist of the fog. Flesherton, of all places, is the last town I drive through before turning down the country roads that lead to my farm. It’s a name I’ve known since I was a kid, when you think of it more for the icky ‘flesh’ part rather than for the artisanal cheese or art galleries that have since put it on the map. I spun a plot together of my tracking him down, knocking on his door and introducing myself. I didn’t yet know how he’d fit into the thesis project, but figuring out a place for his artwork and my connection to him became my first motivation in getting started on the proposal.
I haven’t made it that far yet; knocking on his door. I want to have some clear sense of direction before doing that. I’ve since discovered that he’s more famous than I’d realized. When in mentioning this story to a friend, he immediately recognized the name as one among his own mother’s admirable collection of paintings. When he sent me images of the Wagman paintings in her living room, my thought was “This guy paints like Van Gogh.” That makes knocking on his door a little more daunting.
Wagman paints nature. I recognize the patterns in the foliage in his work as being from this area and it’s no mystery why he would situate his studio here. I imagined his busy, whimsical scenery coming to life in a VR landscape before I even grasped the potential that this new virtual art world had in store. I didn’t know, for instance, about what could be done with height and depth until watching Goodbye Angelica. It was Wagman’s work that inspired the idea of selecting a few artists whose styles I could study, render and ultimately teach in VR.
This sketch tonight was the start. It was fairly simple and I went about reproducing it out of intuition rather than planning. On the first pass it’s sometimes better to let all the mistakes present themselves rather than trying to avoid them with strategy. I just blew the image up canvas size and, using a variation of the marker brushes in Tilt, began to trace. I didn’t know what the outcome was going to be, but I discovered some pretty useful information along the way:
– Layers, are they a thing? I need them to exist because otherwise I’m not sure how to go about filling a shape in with colour. By shape, I mean the brush-stroke outline. And without a colour fill, the shapes are mere lines – still pretty – but not much you can do with them in a larger context of a scene. If they don’t exist in Tilt Brush I may have to move over to Quill sooner than later. I do like to work with outlines.
– If there is a fill colour – in this case I painted it in manually – then the imagery can only be viewed from one side (the side I was painting on). This makes sense, and it’s how the work was presented in Goodbye Angelica, with a fixed view. So maybe that’s okay.
– Sketching out the fluidity of the thinner strokes was tricky business with the controller in hand serving as a brush. The dexterity was lost beyond a certain size. This a crucial detail as I’m eager to find out whether its something that can be improved with regular training of the motor skills and muscle reflex. I’m in fairly good shape – I exercise regularly and I’m no stranger to strength training but I feel this is something yoga would help with. Only in part in order to better steady the machine that is my arm moving in free-floating space, but also to compensate for what a brush tip would have that the controller is lacking: a controlled release. It’s likely something that will improve in further iterations of both Tilt Brush and the Quest. In the meantime, I have to make due.
– There is something to be said for situating a VR piece in terms of spatial composition. What amount of space will it take up? Where will the viewer be situated? How much movement will they be permitted to have? How much depth will be in this scene? If these decisions were planned prior to starting a sketch, it would help dictate the size of the stroke for distance placement. This is something I discovered with my tests the other day. Thin strokes fade in a virtual setting just as they do in real life, when more distance is inserted between the canvas and the viewer’s eye. That might seem like a given, but when it comes to the programming behind graphics applications, I’ve learned not to make any assumptions.
All in all, apart from the fill-colour business (which is an assumption I’ll venture to make, that it will also be an available option a version or two from now), I was pretty satisfied with how it turned out. I could group the leaf objects together easily enough and move them around in space to create some depth in the Tilt sketch instead of merely conveying a sense of depth, as I would in traditional 2D drawing.
As I positioned the controller to take a snapshot, I was struck by the fact that the date on Wagman’s sketch was exactly today’s date. It’s every grieving person’s right to find the signs and significance in these coincidences… Twenty-Eight was the age we were when I learned that all the love in the world couldn’t change or save a person, and the year I could no longer crawl into the painting to find him there. Twenty-Eight years ago today, Lorne Wagman drew the sketch I picked arbitrarily out of a sea of his work. We the bereaved hang on to these things, because even if they’re little things, enough of them leads to a lot. And slowly my story continues, my wheels moving at such a slow pace that the distance covered can only be observed by the many treads in the mud.
