... only poetically and by seizing upon what is communicative and magnetic in the principles of all the arts can we, by shapes, sounds, music, and volumes, evoke ... states of an acuteness so intense and so absolute that we sense, beyond the tremors of all music and form, the underlying menace of a chaos as decisive as it is dangerous.
And this essential drama, we come to realize, exists, and in the image of something subtler than Creation itself, something which must be represented as the result of one Will alone—and without conflict.—Antonin Artaud, The Theater and its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 50-51. Italics in the original.
Most recent completed work:
See more of my work on my website at thiebes.org
For a long time, I have approached my work as sculpture. Each piece will start as ten or thirty source images; some of my photography or drawings, some random clipart or photo from the internet, or a random object placed on my scanner. I see things I like, and I add them to the pile. Then layering them, and altering each one so that they fit together. This is actually forming the stone of the sculpture analogy - the layers of images are the stone, and once I piece them together by applying effects, highlighting, rotating, stretching, blurring, sharpening, distorting, pixelating... then I begin to carve by removing the things which interfere with the image. I think of it as carving stone of my own making.
NOTE: All artworks by Joseph Thiebes seen on MySpace, LiveJournal, and on thiebes.org are Copyright © 1994-2007 Joseph Thiebes.
