Brian Despain Art

Rise of the Red Star

Rise of the Red Star was more of an experiment really. As an artist I am interested in creating images that evoke a response in a viewer. As such I try to create images that have the suggestion of a story but don’t have any concrete direction, the thought being, the more I direct the process the less a viewer will contribute and thus the less an image will resonate with that viewer’s psyche. When I started Rise of the Red Star I tried to pick elements that were wholly disparate, a grab bag of interesting objects thrown together to form the loosest possible framework for a story. How clever was I? After I had finished I decided, not really. I looked on what I had done compared to all the others that had come before and chalked it up as a failure. I thought at the time that as an image Rise was too disparate, too abstract, too absurd to hold anyone’s attention and as such the connection to the viewer and the results I so desired, image plus viewer equals Art, would never coalesce... How wrong I was. For some reason people really respond to this piece. Maybe it’s the pure abstraction of idea that makes it so malleable as to fit any idiom, maybe it’s just because it’s so strange it stands out from the visual noise and becomes a beacon, drawing people in. Whatever the reason, I’ve gotten more responses from this image than any number of my other pieces combined. In the end it just goes to show you I’m not half as smart of half as clever as I like to give myself credit for...