About

Bio

Rochester, NY based artist Daniel DeLuna creates work that merges the digital and analog. He works both with paint and pixels employing an abstract visual language developed over many years. He is currently associate professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology in the School of Design.

Artist Statement

My work sits at the intersection of art and technology. The computer is as integral a tool in the development of my paintings as traditional brushes are. I aim to create a rich visual experience feeding on the practice of creating paintings, drawings, animations, and composing electronic music.

When developing the paintings, I often think in musical and temporal terms–rhythm, texture, the timbre of the brushstrokes, the displaced fractured structure, and the layered paint imply the passage of time. The surface facture or the interaction between the smooth, painterly and geometric is a key component of the work.

Work Statement

With the current body of work, compositions are arrived at with the aid of a computer. Using a framework that employs a degree of controlled randomness, I define a color palette and draw a single geometric shape fed into a system that divides and offsets the resulting pieces while applying color based on various parameters. I can generate hundreds of different designs within a few minutes. For each series of related works, I produce one hundred and eighty variations from which I choose only a handful to turn into actual physical paintings.

Technical Statement

In developing compositions for paintings on the computer, I mainly use Adobe Illustrator and Cinema 4d, two popular commercial graphics applications. Illustrator is a 2d imaging program that allows one to create precise geometric shapes. Cinema 4d is a modeling and animation program typically used to produce 3d models. I use Illustrator to create the base shape. This profile is manipulated further in Cinema 4d by dividing it into several pieces. Color is applied based on a system I created that employs a certain degree of randomness. I control how directed, or conversely, how random the manipulation of the base shape is. For the submitted samples, the main changes are adjusting the color, offsetting the resulting fragments on the horizontal axis, and randomly removing pieces. This procedure generates hundreds of variations within a matter of minutes. I choose a few to serve as the basis of actual physical paintings.

The resulting structure is output as a vector graphic defined by a series of mathematical lines. I cut stencils of this file using a low tack adhesive contact paper with a commercial-grade die-cut machine.