Figure was completed largely in one long session in late 1997, with some subsequent additions to the project in early 1998. It began rather spontaneously during a review of images we created in our project Gorge, a Backyard Exploration. Gorge is rooted in a simple chronology of the seasons. In that sense it can be thought of as grounded in a kind of biography, a portrait through time. We developed this idea by creating a video from a morphed sequence whose elements were the final images of each session of Gorge.

The sense of portrait and biography led us to think of incorporating our own images in some way with images derived from Gorge. We began with digital images containing our portraits. Bill's was derived from a photograph of him by Kevin Bubriski (which also contains a portion of one of Bill's sculptures in the background), Frank's cropped from a photograph by John Gregory, both of which were scanned and further digitally altered.

We then created mpeg videos that morphed these altered portraits into images from the Gorge sequences. Bill's was morphed [mpeg, 749k] into the final image from the ice sequence, and Frank's was morphed [mpeg, 748k] into the final image from the leaves sequence. We then selected one frame from each mpeg, at roughly the midpoint of each of the two morphs, as two new still images.

These two images were then combined to form the next image to the left, and its contrast, luminance and color saturation were pushed dramatically to emphasize its structure, as seen in the image to the right.

The image was then rescaled and vertically distorted, and elements of color and line were manipulated throughout to form the final collaborative portrait.

The fire-like iconography that had emerged in the region of the foreheads was rather interesting, and we decided to isolate it, by cropping it from the dual portrait and recreating it as a single image. The small, pixelated form was then floated on a dark background and smoothed in structure while maintaining its vivid color.

This was so suggestive of a fire opal we deformed the image to an oval shape, and pushed the saturation of color to what seemed to us a completed state.