Concentration Q&A
Why did you choose to show yourself in that position?
The position I’m in is the service position in tennis. I’ve played tennis basically my entire life, and it’s through practice that I learned how to serve. It is the one shot in the game that depends entirely on your practice, because no one is moving, and you control every aspect of it. The toss, the stance, and the swing of a tennis can all be fine tuned so that you can get the most out of your service. Further, that position marks the beginning of a point. The specific point in time, where the tennis ball is at its highest, my tennis racquet is back, legs bent and arm extended, there is a moment of complete inaction. Of complete potential. From that point on, anything may happen. I can hit the ball into the net, hit an ace, or miss the ball altogether. This aspect is what inspired me to do the rest of my pieces.
What made you choose those backgrounds?
Originally, there was suppose to be 5 pieces. The background for the war piece was from the movie 300. It huge destruction of war. Plus it was an awesome movie. More importantly, this specific scene was a picture of the aftermath of battle. The potential for huge carnage could be shown through this. For the structural destruction, it was a concept from the Dark Knight movie where the very foundation of buildings were corroding. The backgrounds themselves were simply skyscrapers that I meshed together and put on to photoshop then edited endlessly. For the Mind destruction, it was actually a piece I put together myself using photos from the Hubble telescope of outerspace, computer generated photos of the human brain and head, and a neat combination of smudging on photoshop.
Why use those pictures of those superheroes?
After I used the scene from 300 in the War Destruction piece, Mr. Harrison thought maybe I should use that theme throughout the rest of the series. This encouraged me to use the concept from Dark Knight for structural destruction and use other shots from movies that helped portray what I was trying to express. In the mind destruction, Spiderman is being crushed by Doctor Octopus’ metal arms. Fear, sets on you like iron bars, crushing and restricting you till you can’t take it anymore. That is why I chose that specific one, and the others all revolve around fear.
This piece is based on a childhood dream of being a superhero character. There’s some elements based on some superhero characters I grew up watching. The composition is a combination of a hand sketched figure which was scanned and then edited via Adobe Illustrator. Then transferred to Adobe Photoshop for further editing.
