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Kenneth A. Huff
Kenneth A. Huff is an independent fine artist working primarily in digital/new media. His body of organically-inspired work includes prints, sculptures, time-based projects and interactive installations. In just over seven years, his work has been included in over 330 public showings and been recognized with over 110 visual arts awards. Alias named Ken a Maya Master in 2002 and he created the Maya 6 signature image in 2004. His body of work is documented at www.kennethahuff.com.
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| The Area:
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We have so much to talk about! You use so many styles, colors and forms in your artwork. It's mind-blowing how you can create images so distinctly different from each other, given the extensive body of work you've built up over the years.
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| Huff:
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I will agree with you that I use a range of colors and forms, but I think the style of my work has been consistent from the beginning, with just the occasional anomaly. There has been evolution, of course. For example, my pieces are now fifty times bigger in scale than my earliest works. And their geometric complexity is dramatically greater. What has been consistent all along for me is the level of detail I put into my work and the organic inspiration behind it.
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| The Area:
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What is your background - traditional arts, or computer graphics?
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| Huff:
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I haven't had any formal art or computer graphics training. It's something I learned on my own. I started with Alias Sketch! in 1994, moved to Alias Animator within months and started using Maya as soon as it was released in 1998. Prior to being an independent artist, I worked as a graphic designer and prepress manager for a commercial printing company.
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| The Area:
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How would you compare your work with traditional art prints?
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| Huff:
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With most traditional printmaking processes, there is an inherent degradation or wearing of the physical materials used to produce the print - the matrix, the stone, the plate, etc. Eventually these wear down or fill in. This degradation means that the last print pulled off has different visual characteristics than the first print. Inherent degradation is not an aspect of my work, because there is no physical original. However, I have chosen to offer my works as limited editions, even if there is no technical reason for me to do it. Unlike traditional processes where the prints are physically the same, for my editions each print may be different in some way. For example, I decided to limit a recent work to a maximum of ten prints. The image can be up to 60 by 90 inches (the maximum size I can produce using the chromogenic printing process), but I may choose to print a smaller version if a patron commissions it. Or I may use a different printing process. Regardless of size or print technique, each physical manifestation of the image counts toward the limit of ten in the edition. That is far from a traditional take on how to limit art editions.
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Have any artists or photographers influenced your work?
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| Huff:
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There are many artists whose work I admire - Paul Klee, Andy Goldsworthy, Louise Nevelson, Judy Phaff, Jim Campell, Albert Paley, Richard Serra. But I can't say that I am influenced by their work. There's no one artist whose work inspired me to create my body of work or whose style I am trying to emulate.
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| The Area:
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Not too many visual artists use 3D graphics yet. What inspired you to become such a pioneer?
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| Huff:
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I did not set out to become a 3D pioneer. I started using 3D around the time when digital characters were first appearing in motion pictures. It really captured my imagination that this new technology was providing the means to experience something that was impossible to experience any other way - living with dinosaurs, for example! The ideas for my work were floating around my head for years. 3D graphics just provided a way for me to get them out and into the world. Initially, I created my art for my own satisfaction, and didn't show it publicly for a few years. I quickly came to the conclusion that this creative process was the most fulfilling thing I had ever done, and decided to pursue it full-time in October, 1997. Only then did I decide to show my work.
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Graphic artists using 3D software usually try to re-create the physical world. They strive for realism. You have a very different approach, focusing on a world of - microscopic abstraction, can we call it?
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| Huff:
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It's an easy leap to think of my creations as microcosms, but I actually try to create my work with a purposeful ambiguity of scale. One of my recent pieces is 60 by 100 inches (1.5 by 2.5 meters). If you saw that piece, your impression that my work is microscopic might very well change! You are right, however, in pointing out that I am creating abstractions. My work is seldom a literal reconstruction of things found in the physical world. Rather, I combine elements from a number of sources. This recombination applies not only to the forms themselves, but also to the materials from which those forms are created. Each of us brings a lifetime of experience to our interpretation of art. If the subject matter, materials, or scale are ambiguous, it forces us to reconcile the work in front of us with the totality of our life experiences. Because what we see does not fit into any existing mental model, we need to form new mental connections. This is how the artist provides the viewer the opportunity to discover something new.
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What is the inspiration for your unique, abstract and organic forms?
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| Huff:
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Naturally occurring patterns and forms are the inspiration for all my work. It might be the arches, loops and whorls of a fingerprint, or the seashore rhythms of the tide's ebb and flow. I am particularly fascinated with patterns (and I use that term very loosely) that are manifest in many ways throughout nature. For example, the concentric, undulating whorls of a fingerprint remind us of the growth rings of trees, or geological strata, or the merging ripples on the surface of a pond.
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| The Area:
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Do you decide in advance on your color palettes, or do you choose color spontaneously?
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| Huff:
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Usually my color palettes are inspired by what I've seen in nature. I definitely go through phases. Last year was the year of deep reds and oranges. Recently, I've started using lighter, cooler colors. When I start a piece, I have a palette in mind, but how those colors (and materials) are applied changes until I find a combination that intuitively feels right.
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Can you describe your process from conception to the final touches?
Do you see the final image in your mind before you start, or does it form itself as you work?
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| Huff:
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The vast majority of my work starts with paper sketches. I let my mind wander using the pages of my sketchbook, but then keep things tightly focused when I get on the computer. I might have a sketch of the final composition, or I might stitch together ideas from the past ten years, but I always start out with a definite idea in mind. From that idea, I go through a quick pre-visualization stage, working with simple materials, lighting and geometry to make sure the idea translates well from the 2D sketch to the 3D virtual construction and back to a 2D print. At this point, the composition of the image is mostly finalized and the camera for the final rendering is locked into place. Next, I start fleshing out the geometry. This stage often requires custom software tools I have developed, or it may even necessitate the development of new tools. By the time maybe half of the geometry is in place, I've already started working with color, material and light. Then it becomes a very iterative process of constructing forms, tweaking materials and test rendering.
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What's your process for creating materials?
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| Huff:
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Over the years, I have built up a library of materials that work well with my ideas. For a new piece, I typically start by pulling materials from past projects to use as a starting point.
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What are your favorite shaders?
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| Huff:
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If you did a shader census, Blinns would dominate by a wide margin. Even for Lambert-like matte materials, I use Blinn shaders. But the Phongs have been catching up with the Blinns recently, as I've been experimenting with wet metallic materials.
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| The Area:
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There's such nice consistent lighting in all of your pieces. What is your typical lighting setup?
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| Huff:
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Mostly the light comes from two big spotlights, with a wee bit of ambient light thrown in to bring out details in the darkest areas. I usually position one of the spots, the brightest, directly overhead pointing down. Think about where most of the light comes from in our day-to-day experience - from above. I use another dimmer spotlight to act as a fill light.
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Which renderer do you use?
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| Huff:
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I used the Maya software renderer until mid-2003, when I switched over to the mental ray renderer. I don't currently use rendering features such as global illumination or final gather.
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How much time do you spend on the final rendering?
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| Huff:
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Rendering time for the final piece easily averages a month. One month seems to be Huff's Constant, because as computers get more powerful, I am tempted to increase the complexity or scale of my work.
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How do you create prints at such a high resolution?
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| Huff:
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I render the prints on the primary workstation in my studio. I use single-pass renderings tiled into sections, and size each section so it takes about 24 hours to render. That way, if there is a power failure or other problem, I've only lost a day. I then use Adobe Photoshop to combine the sections into a full-size rendering. Sometimes, I use Adobe Photoshop for gamma adjustments, usually very slight. I am very careful in the preparation of my work before I start to render, so I rarely have any issues at the end other than the overall lightness or darkness of the final image. I want people to be able to examine my work up close, to within a couple of inches, so I'm always taking advantage of the increased capabilities of print production processes. Depending on the size constraints of the chromogenic printing process, I use resolutions anywhere from 12,000 by 12,000 pixels, up to 12,000 by 20,000 pixels. I use 200 pixels per inch as my standard, so 12,000 pixels gives an image 60 inches in height, about the tallest a picture can be hanging on the wall and still be examined closely by the average viewer.
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What machine do you work on currently?
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| Huff:
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I currently use an Apple Power Macintosh G5 dual-processor machine as my primary workstation and an Apple PowerBook G4 when traveling. Even though its screen space is very cramped, the PowerBook is many times more powerful than the Silicon Graphics Indy workstation on which I started. I used that Indy well past its prime, finally switching to the Macintosh platform with Maya's first Mac release. I've recently started to complement my print works with 20- to 40-minute animations that range from Standard Definition (SD) to High Definition (HD). Most of these animations are rendered through the generous support of the Film and Digital Media School at Savannah College of Art and Design.
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What type of geometry do you use for modeling - NURBS, polygons, subdivisions?
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| Huff:
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Whatever gets the job done. For example, I created a series of rapid-prototype sculptures recently at the General Motors Design Center which involved converting the models into NURBS, polygons, subdivisions, and then back to NURBS! I've used NURBS and polygonal models for more recent print works. In the beginning, I used NURBS exclusively because of their resolution independence (one of the main reasons I started using Alias software in the first place). The fact that I could work interactively with a fairly light-weight model, but have very fine tessellation for rendering was fundamental to my work.
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| The Area:
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Your pieces "2002.1" and "2002.7" use thousands of individual stripes and rectangles. You can't manipulate that many objects by hand. How did you do it?
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| Huff:
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These two pieces are prime examples of how I need to create custom tools to realize my ideas. By creating a tool to procedurally model thousands of forms, I can step back from the construction of each individual form and spend my creative time working on the overall composition. I call the tool I used for these pieces "SurfacePlater." I developed this tool in MEL. It covers one or both sides of a NURBS surface with rectangular forms, which I call "plates." I use parameters to control the thickness and proportions of these plates and their density on the surface. In some of my works, the base NURBS surfaces are still visible. In others, I remove them and only the plates remain. I was inspired to invent SurfacePlater when a researcher at Pennsylvania State University showed me electron micrographs of sintered ceramic powders. Since 2001, I've used the tool for over thirty works, including the ring in the image for Maya 6. The SurfacePlater tool evolves every time I use it. In my mind, MEL was one of the most exciting Maya features ever announced. With MEL, I've been able to create the custom tools that are now fundamental to my creative process.
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| The Area:
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There is a sense of rhythm and movement to your pieces. Is this something you are aware of when you work on a piece?
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| Huff:
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I can always look back on a piece after it's finished and analyze aspects such as perceived movement. But during the creative process, I deal with such things entirely on an intuitive, instinctual level. There is an unabashed joy for me in my creative process. Over-analysis is a sure way to squash that joy and derail a work, oftentimes permanently.
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| The Area:
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Do you try to communicate a narrative with your images?
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| Huff:
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As an example, I could say that any of the works with plates were inspired by the electron micrographs I saw at Penn State, but that would be an oversimplification. There are a number of themes woven into my body of work. Each piece is a gathering of those threads and is related to any number of ideas and inspirations. That said, I try hard to keep my work ambiguous. I don't want it to be a re-creation of any one thing in particular. People who view my work should be able to bring their own experience to the work and make their own connections. This is the reason I do not use descriptive titles for any of my pieces. I do not want to constrict the rich connections and interpretations that my audience will make on their own.
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| Posted by rbralynski on Sep 14, 2008 at 03:36 PM
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| I thought his work was good, but when I started to look real close up, the amount of detail he puts in as amazing. I absolutely love his work.
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| Posted by cafer on Aug 27, 2008 at 12:36 PM
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| oww great . very different a genre
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