Steven Lareau
Steven Lareau -
Unquiet Visions, Hilltop Design
Artist Bio:
I’m Steven Lareau. I was born and raised in Southern California, and lived there until graduating High School in 1975. I packed up and headed to the Chicago area, where I met my future wife. We moved to the Knoxville area to get away from the brutal Midwest winters, as arthritis and cold weather are a bad combination. We’re now living in Clinton Tennessee, and after living in suburbia my entire life, this suits us just fine.
I got into digital art by accident, quite literally. I had a life changing accident at 35 years of age, leaving me disabled and living with chronic pain. I found I was unable to sleep for more than a few hours a day, so I had a lot of free time to kill. I inherited a computer, and I soon figured out how to work with digital graphics. I found that as I worked on my art, I could get lost for hours at a time, which was a great distraction.
A friend gave me a program that could generate Fractals, and that lit my creative fire. I soon immersed myself in fractals, eventually branching out into all things graphics related. I’ve done everything from digital image compositing and manipulations, 3D images and animation, and lately I’ve come full circle- I’m back to working with Fractals.
I use software that many others use, but I like to do things the software was never intended to do. I use a 3D program called Bryce for a lot of my abstract art, even though it was designed to render realistic looking landscapes. Landscapes bored me pretty quickly, so I started experimenting with other ways of using the software, and I was soon creating abstract images. I love creating things that are far removed from what the software was designed to do, that’s the challenge for me.
I’ve spent the last year gearing up to make prints of some of my artwork, and it’s involved a lot more time than I expected. I had to build a computer powerful enough to process the huge amount of data needed to make these Fractals. Creating images for print making takes about a week to render. I’m working with very large files, but once they’re done, I can make fine art Giclée prints 78 inches by 52 inches wide. Since there are many homes and businesses with ceilings that are higher than they used to be, I can make a print at a larger scale. I have Giclée prints on fine art papers and canvas. Fractals are patterns found in nature, and you’ll see the resemblance of flowers, lightning, solar flares, and more in my work. These images are, in essence, organic in form. I’m able to manipulate them to some extent, changing the viewing angle as well as the coloration in each fractal. Seeing them on a computer monitor is one thing, but seeing them in full, glorious color is even better.
My main body of work can be found at Hilltop Design. My artwork is displayed in galleries, which contain thousands of images for visitors to view. Going through my galleries, you’ll see the wide range of my work. I’m never content to find a formula and stay with it, I’m constantly pushing myself to experiment with different ways of manipulating images.
Artist’s Statement
I’m Steven Lareau, a self taught digital artist, working with Flame Fractals, a form of Math Art. I’m an artist who lives with bipolar disorder, one side of it the hellish madness of overwhelming depression and mania, and the other side of it having an overly creative mind. I’m one of those proverbial moody, difficult, highly creative types. I’m constantly driven to explore, to find out just how far I can push an idea. I never sit down with an idea in mind and then set out to create what I envision. Instead, I start with something quite random and fine tune it into something beautiful. It’s more of a process of exploration than creation.
With math art, you need a starting point, so I begin each piece with a series of random numbers which assign parameters like shape, sharpness or fuzziness, color distribution, and repetition of pattern. Once I get a starting point, hours are spent changing the shapes, as well as the colors and the way they’re spread out through the fractal’s form. I spend long hours changing things around until it looks good to my eye.
As I explore the different forms in fractals, I’m constantly fascinated by the familiar patterns I’ve seen in nature. Flower shapes, spiral galaxies, branching trees, forked lightning-these are all nature’s patterns, and fractals are a mathematical description of these very forms. Computer software allows me to reinterpret these patterns, allowing me to present this information in a different, visually pleasing way.
The most difficult part of this process is deciding when a piece is finished. The nature of the artwork I create can never be finished: it can be taken from one point and go off into infinite directions, each minor tweak I make changes the overall look. The challenge is to work up to a certain point that I like, save it, and move on. Most of the time I branch out into many different directions, saving each step along the way. The images I present here are fragments of an incredible journey I’ve taken, a snippet of time from the visions I discover.
There are thousands of images online in my galleries-each piece is a small segment of my explorations. I really enjoy showing people something they’ve never seen before, and something they will never see again. I am like a mad scientist toiling away late into the night, exploring as many directions as I can, and I bear witness to some very beautiful things. I find it sad that the world can’t pull up a chair behind me and watch me work, to see the wondrous things I discover. By making prints of my artwork, I’m making it possible for you to take a fragment of my explorations home with you to enjoy forever. To me, that’s an incredibly cool thing to be able to do, to share a slice of what I am driven to do every day with the world. The organic visions I discover every day are too wonderful not to share. I hope you enjoy viewing these as much as I enjoy sharing them with you.
Steven Lareau
A few samples of his work is in our artist’s gallery.
This web site was created for you by Steven Lareau, a local artist. It's not funded by any company or organization, I'm doing this all by myself, for the art community and the art loving public. If coming to ONE place for info on Knoxville's First Friday events is helpful, I'd really appreciate a little something for the effort, it'll help support my art habit. :)
Thanks- Steve
By the way, you can help sponsor this site at a very reasonable rate. I can place a text ad or a button, on this sidebar, which will be visible on every page of this web site, aside from the image galleries.