This is the first piece showcasing an aesthetic I've developed called "Meta-Naturalism." It has been an undergoing process for many years, and went through several trials to figure out how the ideas work together.
This is also a development on a modeling technique "Post Low-Poly" modeling since "Lions, Tigers, and Bears". It tries to simulate paper behavior like folds and complex geometry, surfaces are generally disjoint, and it demands a higher poly-count compared to boxy low-poly looks. Such models have high fidelity to what they're depicting while still being technically low-polygonal.
Since the surfaces are disjoint and peculiar edge extrusions make it hard to unwrap, it would require unpredictable auto-unwrapping algorithms. The UVs are not human-readable, but this style would have minimal texturing anyway. Object-space and tri-planar projections work well with this technique.
Meta-Naturalism is a combination of several early 20th century preoccupations: the beauty of movement & speed by Italian Futurism, the finitude of life & extinction in Franz Marc's German expressionist animal art, and figurative abstraction inspired by origami and non-Western cultures. These historical, artistic endeavors together provide a unique perspective regarding the representation of organic life.
The prefix "meta-" is based on a philosophical observation under Plato's theory of forms. Accordingly, the art of meta-naturalism could be considered three copies removed from Plato's perfect and true form of "nature." This distance between the archetype form of "nature" and the imitating world, the imitating world to imitative art, and thus the imitative art with a copy of itself, implies an absolute self-awareness of its artificiality.
The principal subject in a meta-naturalist work would appear to be the animal figure, but the underlying mechanism is "nature's play." Such play is manifested as physical, causal forces and their effects, evolution, and the projection of human-centric meaning (e.g. the question of "violence", the concept of force, knowledge from the senses, etc.). The ultimate goal for meta-naturalism is to depict such various aspects associated with nature's play with the utmost creativity and intensity.
Events of nature's play take place in a spatial "neighborhood" of specific contextual relationships between the aspects of play as mentioned. The manifold of these relationships are understood as a "neighborhood game" since the depiction of these spaces have its own implied set of rules, being based on a common understanding of these aspects. Where a neighborhood game expresses the picture as a whole, a playing field expresses the referential details of a picture in part.
The prefix "meta-" is based on a philosophical observation under Plato's theory of forms. Accordingly, the art of meta-naturalism could be considered three copies removed from Plato's perfect and true form of "nature." This distance between the archetype form of "nature" and the imitating world, the imitating world to imitative art, and thus the imitative art with a copy of itself, implies an absolute self-awareness of its artificiality.
The principal subject in a meta-naturalist work would appear to be the animal figure, but the underlying mechanism is "nature's play." Such play is manifested as physical, causal forces and their effects, evolution, and the projection of human-centric meaning (e.g. the question of "violence", the concept of force, knowledge from the senses, etc.). The ultimate goal for meta-naturalism is to depict such various aspects associated with nature's play with the utmost creativity and intensity.
Events of nature's play take place in a spatial "neighborhood" of specific contextual relationships between the aspects of play as mentioned. The manifold of these relationships are understood as a "neighborhood game" since the depiction of these spaces have its own implied set of rules, being based on a common understanding of these aspects. Where a neighborhood game expresses the picture as a whole, a playing field expresses the referential details of a picture in part.
Thank you!
