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"Black Rust" by Chad Michael Ward
Sep. 5th, 2004 01:51 pmBought this art book from Minotaur yesterday.
Chad Michael Ward takes photos, mostly of goth/fetish girls, and manipulates them in Photoshop.
And this reveiw could end right there.
Because you know this style of art. You know the influences: Witkins, McKean, Giger, fetish mags. You know the textures: scratched metal, ink splatters and decay. And you know the nudity.
To be fair, Chad Micheal Ward may be the reason you know this stuff. He's done a lot of CD covers, and his artwork floats around the net.
Black Rust is collection of full page artworks, loosley tied together by some flavour text. The flavour text is the weakest part of this book: post-cyberpunk porno wank about cybernetic fuckdolls and the death of God.
Skip it. Look at the pretty pictures.
Okay. The pictures are also post-cyberpunk porno. Lots of tattoos, perky breasts and belly buttons photoshopped into shaved vaginas. But Ward pushes pixels a whole lot better than he does words. His pictures have the strange, blurry eroticism of a troubled dream. In his introduction, Ward describes this collection as a "worldbook", and there is that consistency to the pieces, like a portrait gallery from somewhere else.
There's also something lacking.
Visually, the compositions are often stiff. And many pieces lack enough fine detail to really hold your eye. It's like they're waiting for an album title or some card-game text to be slapped down over them.
Emotionally, the combination of heavy photoshopping and LA fetish models striking LA fetish model poses robs the works of personality.
But there are some really nice pieces. I like the android empress, her intricate Japanese back tattoo merging up with her cybernetic neck. And the simple photo of a woman's back... except her shoulders are jointed like a dolls.
So... nothing sublime. Just a good, solid collection of gothic eye-candy.
Chad Michael Ward takes photos, mostly of goth/fetish girls, and manipulates them in Photoshop.
And this reveiw could end right there.
Because you know this style of art. You know the influences: Witkins, McKean, Giger, fetish mags. You know the textures: scratched metal, ink splatters and decay. And you know the nudity.
To be fair, Chad Micheal Ward may be the reason you know this stuff. He's done a lot of CD covers, and his artwork floats around the net.
Black Rust is collection of full page artworks, loosley tied together by some flavour text. The flavour text is the weakest part of this book: post-cyberpunk porno wank about cybernetic fuckdolls and the death of God.
Skip it. Look at the pretty pictures.
Okay. The pictures are also post-cyberpunk porno. Lots of tattoos, perky breasts and belly buttons photoshopped into shaved vaginas. But Ward pushes pixels a whole lot better than he does words. His pictures have the strange, blurry eroticism of a troubled dream. In his introduction, Ward describes this collection as a "worldbook", and there is that consistency to the pieces, like a portrait gallery from somewhere else.
There's also something lacking.
Visually, the compositions are often stiff. And many pieces lack enough fine detail to really hold your eye. It's like they're waiting for an album title or some card-game text to be slapped down over them.
Emotionally, the combination of heavy photoshopping and LA fetish models striking LA fetish model poses robs the works of personality.
But there are some really nice pieces. I like the android empress, her intricate Japanese back tattoo merging up with her cybernetic neck. And the simple photo of a woman's back... except her shoulders are jointed like a dolls.
So... nothing sublime. Just a good, solid collection of gothic eye-candy.
