The creative process behind Elizabete Balčus’ drawing
The creative process for Elizabete Balčus’ drawing started in October 2017, after an invitation by Giovanni Di Rosa (a student in my drawing class at the University of Salerno) to join him for live drawing sessions at the Godot Art Bistrot of Avellino, Italy.
During those days, I attended a total of four concerts and drew while artists like Mary Ocher, Campos Band, Raoul Vignal and Elizabete Balčus performed on stage. Elizabete, a psychedelic sound artist from Latvia, uses fruits and vegetables in her compositions, creating unique, pumping, alive, and extraterrestrial sounds.
Elizabete Balčus and the creative process
Fruits and vegetables, alive
Elizabete Balčus is an amazing performer, composer, musician and a psychedelic sound artist who has the particularity of using fruits and vegetables for her compositions.
Elizabete’s uniqueness certainly influenced my creative process: the – fruit / cable / synthesiser / mixer / amplifier / speaker /air / ear / brain – connection that she established during her presentation, gave me the beautiful experience of perceiving the life inside every piece of food. I found this fascinating, as every fruit and vegetable will generate a different sound every time… Plus you will never get the same lemons in Berlin than in Amalfi!
I drew during Elizabete’s performance using a 360 drawing structure – in particular, an equirectangular perspective – for then generating a virtual environment out of it. I chose this format motorised by the enthusiasm of discovering 360 drawings, in 2017 I was at the beginning of my research and intuitive explorations about these kind of drawings. In fact, I started my first PhD in immersive drawing only a week after this session (here is my thesis if you want to check it out), and I only wanted to go deeper and deeper on this kind of hybrid – analogical / digital – artwork.
I captured the fruit / Elizabete / music connection playing with plasticity, fluidity, shapes, connecting points, and colours. Within the virtual environment one can follow those links and move along the different elements. This is also a representation of Elizabete’s music, as her compositions have elements and passages joint within different songs, like in a symphony with different acts.
Is it Sabina's bowler hat or...?
And then of course there is also the hat. “Is it Sabina’s bowler hat or…?”, I wrote in Spanish. This sentence has different connotations: on the one hand, it refers to the singer Joaquín Sabina, who likes to wear a bowler hat. That night, for some reason, there was a bowler hat in the stage of the Godot Art Bistrot that called my attention.
However, this sentence also refers to Sabina (Sabine in English), the character from The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. In Kundera’s book, Sabine receives Thomas dressed with nothing but the bowler hat. Sabine and Thomas convert that unusual object that belonged to Sabina’s grandfather into a nonsense icon of their sexual games of provocation and sensuality. They make love in Sabina’s bed, which is alone “as a stage” in the middle of the room. And there she was, Elizabete with her sensuality and her exotic hat in the stage…
Tragame tierra (Swallow me earth)
In my drawings, I like to represent not only what I hear, but also what I feel while I’m doing it.
In that regard, the ground below Elizabete’s drawing is opening, creating a black hole where I want to fall and hide: I beg the earth to eat me, to make me disappear. With this, I appeal to the “Tragame tierra / La tierra se abre / Bajo mis pies” (Swallow me earth / The earth opens up / Beneath my feet), sung by Gustavo Cerati in Bomba de Tiempo to materialise the sensation when I have to break the limits and speak to someone that I desire.
Because yes, that was the sensation that I had that night of October 2017 when I had to gather my courage to speak to a woman that caught my eye… (and no, it didn’t work out).
The VR dimension
Elizabete’s artwork has a special distortion that allows me to create a 360º virtual environment. Take a look (click and drag to navigate around):
If you want to learn more about VR drawings, I recommend you to read this article and check on my academic research, where you will find several state-of-the-art resources for learning about spherical perspectives.
Making a 360º video
The drawing was also used as the base for a 360º video, shared and available on YouTube. Of course, my inexperience editing videos pops very much out, yet for me was an amazing experience for mixing cubical perspective, equirectangular perspectives, visual effects, and Elizabete’s music.
Although naïve, the video is a nice way for showing another possible application of immersive drawings.
Closing
The series of drawings made at the Godot Art Bistrot, like Elizabete: Hat, Fruit or Flute, have been used for creating the above-mentioned 360 VR video, but also for the exhibition “I’m Watching You/Me” and within my research in digital media art, showing some of many creative applications that these compositions can have.
The creative process behind Elizabete Balčus’ artwork shows how I fluctuated between instant personal impressions, the technical precision necessary for creating equirectangular panoramas, and the mixing of the two components with virtual reality.
For you to understand easily the complexity of the composition, I ask you to pay attention to the flat image of the artwork, then go to the VR view and look carefully at the upper part. Can you see Elizabete’s green eye? Wonderful, now go back to the flat drawing and try to find it… That. That is the key point for understanding an equirectangular panorama. You will never find it unless you change your mind: in the flat drawing the green eye is just a horizontal line…