The Archives: Shamus Clisset
Astronaut, 2015
Andrea Blanch: Do you feel your day work informs your artwork?
Shamus Clisset: Not so much. The work I’m doing is very photoshop based; I do the photoshop stuff with my eyes closed. It comes very naturally to me now, because I’ve been doing it for so long. It sets up the perfect scenario for me – I can be doing the work without being emotionally invested in it.
Andrea: Do you think we’re failing or succeeding digitally? Where do you think we are at with that?
Shamus: I think we’re in a very weird place with all of this technology. In the scientific world, it’s making amazing things happen, but on a daily basis there are things that we all hoped we would already have figured out. We don’t have flying cars yet, but we are getting there. Having self-driving cars is going to be amazing. I think, in the mass senses, in our daily lives, we’re now so connected, but at the same time we all feel distanced from each other. So there’s a weird two-edged element.
Andrea: Why would you feel distanced if you don’t talk?
Shamus: Right, exactly. So all of these tools that were meant to bring everyone together are used to spy on everyone. Everyone’s got Facebook, Twitter and you get these little snippets of what’s going on, but you don’t have the real connection.
Fly Ghost, 2015
Andrea: Your pieces are so detailed and complex that they take weeks to render. How does this lengthy finishing process impact your creative process?
Shamus: It’s a natural process and it doesn’t actually hinder anything. All of the work goes into building the scene and the objects, getting materials and the lights right. When I’ve decided it’s done, I just hit render and let my computer do it for a week or two. In the meantime, I can go back and work on something else. If you make the object correct in a real world way, it will split out a picture of it that looks real with all of the correct shading and highlights. The magical process is what sucked me into it.
Bambaataa, 2015
To read the full interview with Shamus click here.
