David Sepulveda Photo
Like pop artist Andy Warhol, New Haven digital artist Raheem Nelson plumbs popular culture for faces, places, and fodder for social and political commentary. “Ra,” as he signs his work, recently commandeered The Grove, New Haven’s collaboration workspace on Orange Street, for a one-day exhibit of his latest work.
Ra demonstrates painting process playback.
For the occasion, Ra donned a yellow hazmat suit and gas mask that made perfect sense once you understood the tie-in to his exhibit, “Breaking Bad Season One: An art show by Ra.”
His artist’s reception was held last Saturday, as the nearby Artspace was closing out the popular Figure Eight exhibit. The eyebrow-raising jumpsuit referenced the award-winning AMC drama series Breaking Bad, from which Ra has drawn inspiration for his own illustrated series of 21 cartoon portraits based on the show’s characters.
Three of 21 portraits in the exhibit.
Now in its fifth series, Breaking Bad is the story of high school chemistry teacher Walter White, whose values come into new, but perhaps skewed focus, after he is diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. In a race to secure his family’s financial future before he dies, he turns to a life of crime, making and selling methamphetamine with a former student. The show raises philosophical questions about the nature of free will and moral issues of right and wrong — issues which Ra finds compelling: “In my opinion the show is like a twisted version of the American Dream. I created this body of work because of the theme of change. Over the course of the show, these characters undergo drastic changes. As an artist I wanted to capture that through a series of illustrations and capture their likenesses and motivations.”
Ra’s illustrated cartoon portraits cover season one of the drama. He is on schedule to complete images from all five seasons with the idea of producing a book inclusive of the show’s full run, a project he hopes to get crowd-funded through Kickstarter.
Ra’s images are created entirely on an iPad tablet with an app called Procreate, a medium Ra took up several years ago after “trading in” his traditional art-making materials.
Tablets were in abundance at the exhibit.
Digital drawing and painting provides incalculable design choices with convenient facility and speed. Corrections are made with ease as the program records layers of progress through the entire process of creation. Every mark made can be played back like an animated movie, revealing the artist’s path to completion.
With digital illustration, the artist may not have the full sensory experience of smell and touch experienced with conventional artists’ materials. But Ra will tell you that tablet drawing and painting has its own tactile and sensory experience. While the Procreate program has its slate of digital tools, Ra also draws and paints with a stylus and Nomad brushes not far removed from traditional artists’ tools in appearance. Watching him move the special brush across the iPad’s surface does not look very different from watching an artist with conventional materials.
Black line-work contrasts with color tonalities.
The images created for his Breaking Bad series have a stylistic uniformity of strong black line work laid over modeled, blended coloration that forces a visual interplay between the forward layer of lines and the receding ground of muted tonalities. In this way, the portraits are unlike traditional comic book images, whose colors tend to appear flat, the forms less dimensional.
A graduate of the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, Ra graduated with a B.A. in cartooning. He works as a paraprofessional at Troup Magnet School in New Haven, but also takes occasional graphic design commissions. His illustration work has been featured by Autodesk, Sony, Siggraph, iPad Insight, HugesNet, Snapguide and About.me.
Ra said he cherishes the notion of self-reliance. To that end he has created several self-published books including a comic book entitled Little Robots with a youth edition bearing the same title. A second book, Through The Elm To The Big Apple(http://www.lulu.com/shop/raheem-nelson/through-the-elm-to-the-big-apple/paperback/product-20325899.html) is illustrated in a painterly style. It’s available now as a paperback, hardcover deluxe edition, and iBooks Collector’s Edition.(https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/through-elm-to-big-apple/id552302995?mt=11)
Ra said he did not include any of his illustrations from previous endeavors at the Grove show because he wanted to keep the Breaking Bad series separate from his other projects. Among those in attendance at the reception was Bridgeport’s Leigh Busby, who met Ra on Facebook in a digital arts group and had his own tablet in tow. He said Ra has been teaching him the ropes around the Procreate iPad app. “Ra is a great teacher,” Busby noted as he proudly held up a caricature he had created of his tablet illustration mentor.
Some “Breaking Bad Season One: An art show by Ra” images can be viewed at Ra’s “Eye of the Sun” website.