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Introduction

Mind to Eye represents the collective works of Martin van Velsen. Multiple disciplines have a home here and find expression in the areas of digital interactive narrative, digital design, art, performance and science. Common to all these areas is the influence of narrative and storytelling.

Ephemeral Essentialism

Ironically my version of art, which is an expression of humanity in all it's forms, usually goes towards a bare and austere representation. Call it essentialism if you will. Essentialism takes off the trivial and non essential layers of humanity and reveals its basic forms. As an extension it then allows the artist to find potential and future grace and explore ways in which to make otherwise invisible concepts available. An early attempt can be seen to the right in the top imagine. This represents a mask of a future humanity, a possible incarnation of rampant evolution in the abstract.

According to Wikipedia:

In philosophy, essentialism is the view that, for any specific kind of entity, there is a set of characteristics or properties all of which any entity of that kind must possess. Therefore all things can be precisely defined or described. In this view, it follows that terms or words should have a single definition and meaning.

Essentialism garnered a tremendous amount of criticm within philosophy, and rightfully so. However, using essentialism as a tool knowing its imperfections and shortcomings can be extremely useful. Within sculpture, breaking down a face into it's unique features and shapes can be the key to conveying a person's personality. Similarly we can use the key features that define a person's individuality to design a portrait containing one or more essenses of the subject.

I therefore work in terms of ephemeral essentialism, acknowledging that we only show and expose our core values, ingredients and individuality on very brief occasions.

Personal History

Essentialism as presented here stems from two distinct influences. First of all special makeup effects created a predisposition to see the human face in a layered metaphor. Faces and human emotion are multi-layered expressions. We are multiple people, multiple experiences and we have multiple ways of looking at the world. All of this is expressed by changing our features but we are hard pressed to emote multiple sensations at once. At any point in time we are animals, intellectuals, students, parents, and many other beings. While working in special makeup effects a desire to take away layers became important instead of adding more and more layers of clay on a cast of an actor's face. It is impossible to create a mask that takes away from an actors face and we are stuck with distorted features and a poor representation of what the artist had in mind.



Sphinx Mask










Old age sculpture on top of plaster life mask










Current setup for 17th century oil painting





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