Bryan Leister » about

“My work explores the intersection between what is real and what is perceived. I am constantly searching for spaces where this boundary has become visible and through my work I try to examine this border.

I am broadly influenced by the history of depiction and illusionism in painting, stemming from my background as an oil painter. The attempt to breach the physical world and move into a utopian space of perfection and beauty has propelled my work from the beginning. I continue along this path using any medium and format at my disposal, including video, installation and animation. I have found commonality in the role of mathematics, proportion and viewer perception in each piece that I do.

By simultaneously pulling the viewer into a work and pushing the process out into the physical world, through painting, performance or motion, I hope to negotiate a space somewhere in between.”

Bryan Leister works across a broad range of media reflecting his education in design and his career as an illustrator and artist.

His work has been commissioned for the covers of many national and international magazines, including Time, BusinessWeek, Forbes, Der Spiegel and the Atlantic Monthly. He has won over 100 awards from competitions such as Communication Arts, the Art Directors Club of Washington DC, the Illustrators Club of Washington DC, AIGA, Graphis, PRINT and a gold and silver medal from the Society of Illustrators in NYC.

His paintings are in the collections of The Museum of American Art, The District of Columbia Historical society, Kohler, Celestial Seasonings, James River Paper Company, Blue Cross Blue Shields and many private collections.

His installation, animation and video work has been shown at the The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Provisions Gallery, Warehouse Gallery, The Pyramid Atlantic, The Woolly Mammoth Theater and the Arlington Arts Center. Temporal Interference, a collaboration with the Jane Franklin Dance Company, was performed at The Kennedy Center Millenium Stage, Perfomatica in Pueblas, Mexico and at the King Center in Denver, CO.

In 2008, two of his short films, “P.R” and “drop” were screened in festivals throughout the country, including the Altanta Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, New York Underground Film Festival, Brooklyn Arts Film Festival, the Chicago Underground Film Festival. “P.R.” was also awarded a jurors prize in the 27th Black Maria Film Festival.

Leister currently works from his studio in Denver, Colorado and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado Denver where he teaches Digital Design and Transmedia. He received a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and an MFA in Art and Visual Technology from George Mason University.

Published on September 29th, 2009 in discourse • No Comments » Share | Save to delicious | StumbleUpon | ReTweet | Add to Technorati

This series of images is continuing with the exploration of mathematically derived objects and landscapes. There is both order and chaos in the way the images are constructed, repetition and variation on a theme. The landscape is inspired by the landscape I see from where I live, on the edge of a plain that collides with the mountains in the distance.

I am very happy to announce that Indistinct Boundaries Movement 4 and Indistinct Boundaries Movement 2 were both selected for the 34th Atlanta Film Festival. This piece was a collaborative piece created for the Jane Franklin Dance performance Indistinct Boundaries.

From the Atlanta Film Festival web site:

“The Atlanta Film Festival strives to introduce new talent to audiences and has been among the first places to show work by then new filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg, Spike Lee, and Victor Nunez. The Atlanta Film Festival is also a qualifying film festival for the Academy Awards for the Live Action and the Animated Short Film categories, and in 2002 “The Accountant” by director Ray McKinnon won the Oscar in that category after qualifying at the 2001 Atlanta Film Festival.”

The Atlanta Film Festival typically receives over 1700 entries from more than 75 countries, I am very pleased that these two films were selected for screening.

I am very happy to announce that Indistinct Boundaries Movement 2 is an official selection of the 34th Atlanta Film Festival. This piece was a collaborative piece animated by Rassamee Ruangsri and produced for Jane Franklin Dance.

From the Atlanta Film Festival web site:

“The Atlanta Film Festival strives to introduce new talent to audiences and has been among the first places to show work by then new filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg, Spike Lee, and Victor Nunez. The Atlanta Film Festival is also a qualifying film festival for the Academy Awards for the Live Action and the Animated Short Film categories, and in 2002 “The Accountant” by director Ray McKinnon won the Oscar in that category after qualifying at the 2001 Atlanta Film Festival.”

The Atlanta Film Festival typically receives over 1700 entries from more than 75 countries, I am very pleased that our film was chosen for screening.

Thanks to Scott Hull for pointing me to this Fast Company article about what personality type makes the best designer. It seems to be inline with what I would expect, it also makes me wonder (beyond it’s incomprehensible design graphics). To see a trend, I would need to know how other professions would fare with the same criteria. I would think investment bankers would also be good at “intuiting”.

Here’s a funny image someone sent me about pirating movies, what you get versus paying for it:

kindleiphone

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iPad versus Kindle

I asked seven digital design students to take a look at the iPad and Kindle, analyze the major points both good and bad and come to a decision about the product. The specific question is what’s going to happen a year from now. Will the Kindle be overshadowed by the iPad, or will it hold it’s own? Is there a market for both kinds of products, a dedicated e-reader and a new type of device?

Here are the key points they found about each product:

iPad Key qualities

a good company
more functions than advertised
Apps
sleek, slender
open door to touch screen
save money on books for college students
hi-def
Universal access (compared to iPhone)
crappy name
glorified iPhone
do we need this?
Kindle killer or iTouch killer?
expensive, fragile
uncomfortable to hold
why is it better than a laptop
great presentation tool
emailing device
can’t read in the sun
will screen get dirty
10 hour battery life, really?

Kindle Key qualities

Good for reading
Specialized
Holds a lot of books
Slow flipping
Comfortable to hold, as a book
Free 3G internet
Good downloading store (with books)
Not that entertaining of a device
Slow
Hard navigating
Keep wanting to touch the screen
crappy browser for internet
Right handed people only
Retro menus (early 80’s)
Appeals to old people

One year from now:

Kindle will be a has-been: 3 votes
Kindle will still be growing in popularity: 2 votes
Kindle will still be in “the fight”: 2 votes

iPad will be an embarrassment for Apple: 2 votes
iPad will be slow-grower like the iPod: 4 votes
iPad will be a revolutionary device: 0 votes

Director Statement

This piece explores objects created through mathematical rhythm and variation. The same methods are employed in a series of images that I call Visions of Promise. My interest is very similar in this work, to find beauty in nature as interpreted through a system that I have devised. The music is similarly constructed, a looping system of frequency oscillations are layered to create a familiar, but artificial soundscape.

Production Notes

The animation has been created through mathematical variations on spline algorithms. The heading, angle and bank have been altered over time and the motion is from the splines reaction to the changes.

Format

HDTV 16:9
Exact Runtime 00 hr : 05 min : 00 sec
Print Details Color + B/W, Stereo
Film Sound Dolby A Dolby SR Dolby Digital
Aspect Ratios 1.778 (16×9 HDTV)

Media

Digital Animation
Software used : Reason, Cinema4D, After Effects

Visions of Promise

Utopia, perfection and illusion are some of the ideas I wanted to explore with this group of images. I recently stumbled upon the work of Ernst Haeckel and was fascinated by the beauty of his drawings and his obsessive desire to find rational structures in everything he observed. As an artist I have always been interested in creating imaginary spaces that are both real and unreal, these works represent my exploration of that space.

Drawing from Haeckel and from my computer programs I started to create structures that I felt capture a sense of order, beauty and utopian perfection. With each piece, I have started with a structure, repeating and folding that structure upon itself using iterations of change in the underlying mathematical structure of the object. I wanted to create objects that felt both pictorial and physical, to varying degrees in each image. I am interested in blending these different realities as a way of exploring the connections between. I think of my life, living in an urban, controlled space, at once separate from and yet still part of the natural world. Or, of my relationships, people who I see regularly are not necessarily as vivid as online relationships. Friends are closer based not on physical location but on activity.

Through these works I hope to slow down the viewer, draw them in and have them consider issues of perception, reality and the value of the object. Far from being a scientifically accurate artist, Haeckel changed the subject to fit his concept of beauty. He used the guise of science and realism to make his vision believable.

I thought it would be fun to revisit a classic assignment Michael Beirut mentioned in a recent post on DesignObserver.com where he showed his student portfolio. The idea is to simplify an animal to it’s most essential elements and create a logo-like image. It occurred to me that those same skills are exactly what is needed when designing characters for game design, and with the game engine Unity now free we should introduce motion as an element.

Beirut’s logo exercise included putting the logo in motion, his version was pretty cool for the 70’s but nothing like what can be done today. We’re talking true 3D motion that the user can control. I think motion will soon be added as one of the core design principles equal to geometry and color in logo design. A few of these have used motion to create a sense of character like the jellyfish and fast turtle. Others used idle sequences like t-rex to add personality. Punk Penguin has a jump that will crash your browser the first time, but works after that!

Below are the design student experiments created this week (with only a few days of working with Unity):

My favorite microcontroller, the Arduino, has hit the big time – a WSJ feature article! For the uninitiated, the Arduino can be hooked up to sensors to detect presence and then it can send out signals to the computer or to motors, LED lights and a bunch of other stuff. The nice thing about doing interactive design with the Arduino, is that it can be a stand-alone installation without the need for a computer to remain attached.

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discourse

Binary Series

34th Atlanta Film Festival – Indistinct Boundaries Movement 4

34th Atlanta Film Festival – Indistinct Boundaries Movement 2

Designers take the Meyer’s Brigg test

Pirating Movies versus Paying Customers

iPad versus Kindle – a design debate

iPad versus Kindle

iPad Key qualities

Kindle Key qualities

One year from now:

namaste

Director Statement

Production Notes

Format

Media

Related

Visions of Promise

Classic Logo – v. 2.0

Arduino in the Wall Street Journal

Archives

Meta

iPad versus Kindle

iPad Key qualities

Kindle Key qualities

One year from now:

Director Statement

Production Notes

Format

Media

Related

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Archives

Meta