Boon Vong | Journal

At the moment I’m just a guy that does drawings from my photos and turns them back into photos.  Sometimes one inspires the other, and it is somewhat cyclical, in the manner that I create the art and in turn present and share the art. 

All the drawings are done by me, with their inspiration coming from the various photos that I’ve taken over the years, or obviously had a friend take for me.  This came about with the ease of digital imaging, as well as a nod towards  our culture’s current pulse, as we seem to enjoy “collecting” people, places and memories.  The angle I hope people understand is that snapping a photo in a thousandth of second is vastly differently than the dedication it takes sitting on the floor working for hours on a drawing.  In the time it takes to draw “a pretty girl” there’s ample time to think about yourself and the state of things.

For most of my current artwork, the subject matter of girls is of course evident, but there aren’t too many people that pay attention to the other subtle things.  By that I mean the chiaroscuro that is needed to render the hair on a flat picture plane, or the line weight needed to create visually interesting forms in an ink drawing.  There is also the gestalt that wraps around just a simple drawing, the moments that come before and after the actual drawing takes place.  What I hope makes the art worthwhile is when the person pictured in the portrait smiles and enjoys the work, or random strangers “get it.”

Basically it’s just artwork that is fun for me to do.  Nothing really grand or introspective about it.

I’m sure an art history major could come up with fancier words to describe my work, but it’s really not that complicated.  99% of all the songs out there are about girls or love.  Visual artists often times need a muse or just someone to waste away the days with…

Currently I enjoy using 3 different “styles” to create my artwork.

Pencil

These are my drawings in their simplest forms.

Pen and Ink/CG

These drawings or illustrations begin on paper, and then scanned in sections into the computer.  I then stitch the pieces together and then color each section manually, and hope to come up with an image that is better than the original.  The images, when printed out as various formats ranging from postcards to posters, hopefully have a visual impact that is better than a simple one click filter.  These 3-step drawings take a little while to do, but as a digital artist, one is blessed with the ability to never have to buy paints or mess up your jeans painting. 

Black Charcoal Pencil

Themes

The silly act of taking a picture, or having your picture taken with someone is such a short duration in the scope of our lives, but has a power that most everyone understands. In much of the earlier work in this current theme, you’ll find that most of the subjects are holding or looking at what seem to be small pieces of white paper. The real life thing that has been boiled down to a simple shape are actually my artwork printed out as photographs.

That was the format I considered my artwork to reside in, not the hand drawing on paper, or some piece hanging in a gallery somewhere, but back in the hands of the person that inspired it.

In school we were so caught up in detailing size and the proper way to hang and archive things, but as I got older and a bit more free thinking I realized that it was way more fun to have the work end up in a wallet, purse, or on someone’s refrigerator.

Boon Vong
www.b-vong.com