Take a Human(me)
add a Robot (my 3d Printer named "Bones") 
combine a digital CAD design (a pixel frame) 
with paper and pigment (painting) 
then surround it by a printed PLA Frame
=Poof! Kodama Bebop Artwork
 

The first work is a Framed Painting for refrigerators, which hopes to bring some beauty into your life, every time you go for mango or cold pizza.

The Art

I believe that there are 4 things in our universe we can't create or destroy; time, space, matter, and energy. Death and birth are just a conversation from matter to energy. Whereas we might be 99 percent matter (our noses and butts) and 1 percent energy (electricity in our nerves and brains) I believe there could exist our opposite, made up of 99 percent energy and 1 percent matter (maybe a shadow just out of peripheral view?).

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Maybe that border between worlds is a mirror of water and art is our attempts of dipping our hands in and bringing something back.

These paintings are my attempt to capture a polaroid of that special world of energy that we find in dreams and inspired madness. They are like baby pictures along the way. It's a snapshot into the universe of my reality and I'd like to share that with others. 

The Frame

3D printing is to the second coming Renessaince, what the pencil and printing press were to the first one, quite a few Thursdays ago. 3D printing compared to traditional mold manufacturing is like carpentry to construction work.

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Imagine a strand of plastic (like fishing line) that's almost 23 feet long, compact and melted into a Painting Frame. That's 3d printing!

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Unlike traditional mold manufacturing, these frames didn't come out of some oven with thousands of replicas. The digital file may be the same family tree, but each physical Frame is one of a kind, with its own tiny details and personality.

 

The paper is watercolor and I use airbrush paints, spray paints, acrylic and whatever else I find.

After fine-tuning 20 prototypes, the first Frame sits at

207 mm x 188 x 7.3 mm

or 8 in x 7.4 in x 0.29 in

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To reduce the environmental footprint, each frame is made with ONLY 10 percent infill material. That means that 90 percent of the frame is literally empty space, which is why it's so light yet very strong. 

 

If you hold it up to the light, you can see the inner structures and empty space within.

The Process

 

Alex Vervoordt said it best.
 

"When I see an object, I don't think it's just the beauty because when it's just only beautiful, I find it a bit superficial. I think the spirit of the object attracts me more." ​- A.V.
 

To give the painting its own special identity and soul, firstly I play music through a speaker so that the frequencies of the music converges with the frame at ground zero where and when it goes from a liquid to solid-state. Maybe some of that gets frozen.

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Next, I play drums to give it a heartbeat, then piano to give it a harmonic heart, followed by guitar/voice (mostly covers I love) to give it breath.

Bio & Name

3D Printing goes back to Hideo Kodama, who was the first to really get it going, but his patent application didn't work out, and 3 years later Charles Hull got history going.

 

"Kodama" also means "Forest Spirit" and are the heavily referenced unnamed creatures from Studio Ghibli's Princess Mononoke (the little guys in the trees) and are a sign of health. They represent what I believe to be the world of Muses, Inspiration, and artwork, that world of energy, one painting at a time. 

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Though the pronoun "I" has been used sporadically, I don't feel that I, the artist, is as important as the artwork and though in the future I might add more information, all that I'll say for now is that I live in North Texas with my chunky cattle dog Bebop. She's also the inspiration behind the Kodama Bebop crossbones.

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-KB July 2019