By Dan Conklin
 Bang, bang, bang! I knocked on
the door for the fourth time in the last 20 minutes. I was knocking a bit
harder now, frustrated at getting no answer. "Well, maybe I've been
stood up. No, he wouldn't do that. Maybe he just took a walk..."
OK, I had been a little late, but I didn't think
my lapse in promptness was sufficient reason for Allen Toney to dog me.
After 30 minutes I decided to leave a note and go home. I pulled out a card
and wrote on the back: "I was here five minutes late. Sorry 1..."
Then the door opened. He looked surprised. "How
long have you been here?" I was about to write you a note. I've been
here a little..."
"Sorry about that, I didn't hear you knock.
It's hard to hear anything when I'm in the room with my computer."
I followed him through the door. I had been communicating with Allen Toney
for about a month already, so I knew he lived in a one-bedroom apartment
in Miami Beach. Still, I was surprised at the bareness. I glanced around.
Not much here. There was a bicycle, a medium-size futon ...that was all.
Nothing on the walls. No curtains. No collection of mystical junk. No rubber
padding....
Allen Toney calls himself a "Professional
Lunatic." That's the title of his biography page on the World Wide
Web. He doesn't seem crazy, unless, of course, you consider that many lunatics
are withdrawn into a world of their own. The difference with Toney is that
he's found a way out: through his artwork, with which he makes his living-"such
as it is," he says.
"People think I do crazy stuff," he
says of his title. "It's kind of a given...some thing to get their
attention." But even without that title on his biography, people would
be interested. They might even come up with the same title for him themselves.
Some of his art work literally howls out with a particular anguish. But
the artist explains that "it's just a way of purging my state [of mind]
at the moment. That's the way it began, and it still is mainly that, and
if it so happens that it coincides with what people want, so much the better."
And people do like what they see. He gets enthusiastic
responses on his "Guest Response" page on the Web, and he's been
recognized by galleries and in competitions. The 911 Gallery in Boston,
where his surreal, "neo-renaissance" Iris prints were exhibited
recently, called him a world-renowned digital artist. His work was first
published in Computer Artist in the April/May 1993 issue and has since been
featured in Leonardo and Wired. Last year, he was grand-prize winner of
both the Fractal Design International Juried Competition and the International
Bit Movie competition in Rome.
Maybe people are drawn to his work because they
can identify (yikes!) with his vision, or maybe there's a different reason.
"I build all kinds of emotions and things, and eventually it has to
be released somehow," he told me. I, for one, am glad he chooses to
re lease them in this way.
How he works.
As he led me from the "living' room into
the "back" room, the feeling of emptiness remained. Here was his
work space. It contains a large, semicircular computer desk, a plastic lawn
chair, an other small futon, and some kind of small wooden box with legs-probably
a sub-woofer for a stereo system.
"I'm sorry I don't have another chair for
you to sit on. He put a pillow on the wooden box. "You can sit on this
if that's OK."
No problem. I didn't feel like sitting anyway,
because I wanted to get a good look at his equipment. I recognized the Macintosh
8100, the flatbed scanner, the inkjet printer, the modem, and a couple of
disc drives capable of holding many hundreds of megabytes of information.
Graphics take up a lot of storage space on the computer. This is especially
true of Toney's work because of the immense detail, resolution, and color
he's working with.
"You ever use one of these?" he asked.
He pulled out a large, flat thing that looked like one of those fancy range
tops with no visible heating coils. It was the drawing tablet for the computer.
Together with a pen, it's the physical tie between the artist's bio-matter
and the machine.
Toney primarily uses two software packages to
create his images. The one he uses most is Fractal Design's Painter, with
its vast array of Painterly" tools. He also uses Adobe Photoshop, especially
for its "smudge" feature.
"It's sort of like finger painting,"
he says. "You just kind of stick your finger in and move the image
around how ever you want."
Pressed for a fuller description of how he creates
his images, Toney responds in some detail: "I consciously build an
underlying structure or armature of very basic, rudimentary shapes and geometric
forms..., then I build up a huge color field. I rake this color field onto
this basic structure that I developed.... This is a very conscious working
out of the flows and rhythms, and I pull these color fields along the directional
lines of force. It becomes just a huge mesh of colors and unrelated forms
aligned along some basic pattern, and then after that, I just sit and stare
at the thing. At that stage it looks like just alot of random colors. It's
very similar to looking at clouds. If you sit and stare at clouds, you start
to see pictures and faces and things in the clouds, all these fantastic
forms. I do that with these things: I sit and stare and eventually I will
begin to see pictures and faces and fantastic shapes...and that's when the
real drawing begins."
With words like "armature," rhythmic,
"rake, and pull," you might think this is a physical exercise
in artwork. In reality (of an altered sort), most of Toney's best paintings
are produced while he is in a trance or dream-like state.
"In Huntington [West Virginia], he says,
I had this chair that would recline, and I would actually lie down and draw.
It's easier to get into the mood when you're like that."
There are times, he says, when he will be in such
a transcendent state, that he will wake up after hours have gone by and
see before him a fantastic, detailed drawing that he cannot re member doing.
He sometimes describes it as a "super-conscious" state, and sometimes
simply as sleeping." The result is an artistic expression that arises
from his subconscious mind.
"It's the way I think. One image gives rise
to another-they're interrelated and linked together, just the way thoughts
ramble on. It's the same thing: a solidification of the thought process."
How he got here.
Before Allen Toney started doing digital art,
he taught himself to draw with pencil and paper. He was able to gain some
competency as a draftsman, but then he dropped out of the visual arts for
about six years and concentrated on producing "experimental electronic
music." During this time, he experienced his first awakening to the
possibilities of the computer as a creative tool."
In 1988, Toney once again became interested in
the visual arts, so he began studying traditional painting at Mar shall
University in Huntington, West Virginia. Marshall University had no computers
for art at that time.
"So, I transformed my Amiga from a MIDI sequencer
to a visual art tool," Toney explains. "It took me about 12 seconds
to realize that the computer was a vastly superior tool for the creation
of art. Since 1990, the artist has worked exclusively with digital tools
for painting.
Nonetheless, the artist says the images he now
produces on computer are much like his early drawings. Noting that a lot
of computer artists turn out collages and other image combinations, Toney
says that "my art doesn't really look like that [because] it's based
on a lot of the drawings techniques I developed long before I touched a
computer."
Why not stick with the traditional tools, then?
"I feel the change comes from the computer's allowing me to enter a
state of lucid unknowing, where [subconscious] factors come more quickly
into play," he says.
His time at Marshall University was also when
he began to enter shows. "Right off the bat," he says, he began
to win prizes. Later, he started selling prints. His work has appeared on
covers of various music CDs, advertisements (primarily for the products
he uses), and in a number of magazines, but his most accessible-and to some
extent most successful-venue has been the Internet.
At http://www.marshall.edu/~jtoney, you can see
his past work, view his current projects, and look at works in progress.
You can also view a catalog of the artist's limited-edition Iris prints.
Since being named "Cool Site of the Day in
September 1995 (three weeks after posting the site), Toney has enjoyed lots
of traffic on his Web pages. Perhaps his greatest success, however, has
been his "Surreal Makeover Gallery," where fans send in images
of themselves. I've had around 40 people a day e-mailing their pictures
for me to make over. It's really gotten to be overwhelming."
Toney's main thrust is still in the area of fine
art. He continues to solicit commercial work, but the richness of his work
is most impressive when viewed in person at one of his fine-art shows. Among
the galleries where you'll find his work in the near future are Scitex Corporate
Headquarters in Herzlia, Israel; 621 Gallery in Tallahassee, Florida; the
Boar man Arts Center in Martinsburg, West Virginia, and Fractal Design's
1996 Art Contest, which will be displayed at trade shows and other venues.
There you will have an opportunity to gaze into
the mind of Allen Toney. What you see may at first seem some how familiar,
then it may shock you, scare you, or you may find yourself strangely involved
in what you see. You are beginning to understand. As he told me recently,
his ultimate goal is "to concentrate on making large-scale, computer-derived
oil paintings that have such a ferocious presence that they not only depict
psychotic, mystical, hallucinogenic states but actually produce these states
in the viewer."
FIN
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