“Remembering Christina Grimmie” in Digital Portraits

This date marks eight years and seven months since the tragic (and, in my opinion, heroic) death of Christina Grimmie. These four portraits are “works in progress,” I suppose. They have their origin in screenshots I took from Christina’s YouTube channel, but they have been imaginatively reconceived in many ways (using various tools of digital media).

Graphics media continue to explode with dizzying new possibilities (too many!). I have been working with crafting photographs into “digital art” since 2013. I don’t understand the technological manipulations that make this work possible (anymore than I understand the science behind photography). The introduction and increase of so-called “artificial intelligence” into graphics widens the scope of what can be done with existing images, but still in the manner of a blunt hammer that opens up paths to pursue but also creates new problems. I have little use for “word to image” gimmicks, which don’t work very well except for some small corrections.

My experience remains that of an artist, a photographer who works with new tools that expand the plasticity of photo images so that they can be “sculpted” in ways that correspond to the inspiration and “intuition” that guides what I’m trying to do. Powerful “preset” physical alterations can distract from this inspiration and “take over”—distracting the process as resulting in a sculpted image that is not only mediocre but also dissatisfying to the artist.

I am betting that—along with so much new image saturation that is merely functional (nothing wrong with that), or else flippant, fantastic-for-its-own-sake, cheap and homogenized, ugly, or violent—a new art form may be emerging. Perhaps it’s an extension of photography, which was struggling to find its own proper creative possibilities a century ago. Later on, cinema and television would struggle in analogous ways under the condescending and skeptical eyes of dramatic artists who used “traditional [stage] media.” Improvisational music also struggled—first as the misunderstood marvel of jazz, and then with the addition of electronic amplification and tonal manipulation, the “popular music” that is heard everywhere today, mostly in mediocre and forgettable ways, but occasionally borne up to astonishing heights of beauty (analogously) by extraordinary, gifted, and hard-working musical artists.

Christina Grimmie was one of those artists, and many other things too.

Critics inevitably have many legitimate points, but they must be not simply dismissive but also attentive. The realm of beauty is as extensive and analogous as the realm of being itself. Artistic creativity is a human activity, which requires more than just the happy accidents of algorithmic associations. It requires a person who uses these resources to craft an object that “incarnates” a real creative intuition of the luminosity of being (and digital bytes are material, for all their complexity, so they can ultimately be crafted into a material thing under the vision and intention of the artist).

I may never rise above the level of mediocrity, but I am trying. I have spent many hours, much laborious attention, and a decisive amount of “hands-on” work on my digital landscapes (from my own photographs) and—more recently—on portraiture that concentrates on a handful of frequently photographed and interesting faces of celebrities that I have some sort of connection with (because portraiture that arises from insight into the beauty of a person has a higher and more sustaining “aim” for the artist). 

Sometimes, a portrait veers off the features of the original model and becomes a “different face” and I think that can be very interesting too. But I begin with a few faces. I have worked on Lionel Messi’s odd-shaped, funny, generous face. He remains my favorite soccer player. I was so glad that he finally won the World Cup. He has huge ears, that add “color” to his expressions of determination and joy. Then, of course, there’s Avril Lavigne, with 23 years of faces from ages 17-40 — Avril’s generational “iconic” face, an exquisite face full of a multitude of often hilarious expressions, volumes of hair in various colors, and always the “overdone” black eyeliner. Efforts to do portraits of her are quite challenging (and rarely successful), but I care about her—the Lyme disease odyssey, her big (albeit wild) heart, and the touch of greatness in that inimitable first album—and I pray for her. I also work on Ed Sheeran, who has a big, open, endearingly “ugly” face of an English pub lad, topped off with funky hairstyles. I’m not particularly a fan of his music, but I know that—with all the fame—he’s had a hard road, and he’s very open about his struggles to develop his musical craft. I pray for him too. Another is Norwegian singer-songwriter Sigrid Raabe (“Sigrid”), who makes great Scandi-pop music, has lots of informal pics and videos on her social media, usually wears little makeup, and has a classic cheerful Norwegian face with fair skin and a big smile with an endearingly distinctive slightly-crooked front tooth. She’s has a natural bearing and seems like a lovely person. 

There are a few others too; you get the idea. These faces I work with are the faces of persons, and their inner qualities—the more-than-meets-the-eye facets of personality revealed in their faces—stirs up vision and motivation to “present them” afresh

But above all, there’s Christina Grimmie. I’ve written so much about why she is my chief inspiration and “muse” in this artistic adventure. She had a strength and beauty of soul, a light that shined from the inside outwards to generate a welcoming environment for others. In her art and in her life, she was willing to take risks, not recklessly but boldly in the service of love. She shed light on the path of how to live in the world of today, how to surrender one’s self to the will of Christ in everything—including the Hollywood celebrity world, and how to die—with arms wide open, in utter vulnerability, welcoming a stranger at an open meet-and-greet (because Christina wanted to meet everyone).

I have much to learn from her example. Meanwhile, I’m not afraid to risk pushing forward a little in the uncharted territory of digital art. That’s what she would want me to do. I may never get it “right,” but I will struggle to do my best.