Flowers, soldiers and Thayer Street isn't a typical combination, but all can be found in a senior art exhibition by Brian Lee '06, which went up Sunday in the first-floor lobby of List Art Center. His work is entirely digital in medium, unlike most of the artwork that has been displayed this year.
The exhibit features 10 24- by-36 inch color prints of Lee's comic-cartoon illustrations, which he creates as vector art. Lee, a visual art and architectural studies concentrator, began to focus his work on vector art after seeing the box artwork of the video game "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas."
Vector art is different from pixel art because "a pixel, simply put, is a block of color," Lee said, "but with vector art, it's a mathematical formula that creates shape, and because it's a formula you can scale it a certain way. It's like geometry." Though Lee dabbled in vector artwork before seeing the video game's box art, he said he was still impressed by it. "GTA looked highly stylized, but realistic because of lighting effects," he said.
Even as a child, Lee's enjoyment of comic books and video games centered around their artistic element. "(I liked) the fact that you could expose an idea with just a picture," Lee said, adding, "there were no words, but you could understand what was going on."
Art has been a long-time interest of Lee's. "I think a big part for me was watching movies like 'Ghostbusters' and 'Big Trouble in Little China,' " Lee said. "I was always interested in special effects but didn't have a camera, so I would draw."
After graduation Lee hopes to work in illustrating, special effects and animation in the movie industry.
Now, the majority of Lee's work originates from photographs, most of which are staged and which he takes himself. Lee transfers the photograph to a computer and uses Adobe Illustrator to trace the image over by hand, creating points that have a determined amount of stress. The amount of stress on each point determines the direction of the vector connecting them to other points.
"You can think of a square as four points connected by lines," Lee explained. In vector art, "You can think of a circle as four points that have stress that causes the lines to curve."
Lee next creates outlines in black and then adds color to the image. The color used in his art consists not only of areas of solid color, but also of gradations, which simulate a transition between two different colors.
Lee said he likes to give a sense of harsh lighting in his work, comparing it to "sunlight at noontime, hard light with hard shadows."
Lee uses dramatic camera angles, taking shots from below rather than at eye-level. In each piece he chooses a particular aspect to focus on, from the glare of a motorcycle to skin tones to the reflective light of a flower.
"What I'm trying to do here is to get people to look at their surroundings differently," Lee said. If he sees something that he doesn't think anyone else will notice, he wants his work to help highlight that element.
Lee's interests outside of art tend to influence his work. Running and weightlifting help him concentrate, provide stress relief and give him an opportunity to think of ideas. He also can often be found listening to stand-up comedy recordings while he works.
Although Lee said he believes titles can sometimes clear up misconceptions or misinterpretations of artwork, he does not title all of his work. "By giving a piece a title, it limits the viewer and influences their thought process too much," Lee said, adding that he aims for his images, rather than the title, to influence the thought process of the viewer.
There will be an opening reception for Lee's show Tuesday at 8 p.m. in the List first-floor lobby. The exhibition runs through Saturday.
