June Spotlight - Cyrus Fire

Morningstar

Drawing his inspiration from a plethora of pop culture influences and his own unique sense of self, the work of this month’s artist is created using a stream of consciousness Freestyle technique. Meaning that they are executed with no preconceived ideas, rather they are birthed spontaneously, once he captures the germ of the piece it is refined and perfected.
This impetus to create was initially fueled by the confines of a sickly and often bed ridden childhood. When his mother brought him paper and pens home from her work he enlisted them in the service of his increasingly powerful imagination. An imagination which he fed with a steady diet of comic books, music, movies, and Mark Kistler’s PBS children’s art instruction series The Secret City.
A fiercely undiluted palette which blazes boldly across the canvas and burns the imagery into the viewers mind like mental pyrography, is one of the quintessential hallmarks of his work. His adept sense of color is complimented and accentuated by the fluidity of his draftsmanship, creating a style which is uniquely his own. We proudly present to you our June Spotlight artist: Cyrus Fire.

Frequency

Diego Phantasma

Cyrus Fire

Uzomani

Cyrus Fire
My work is very much based on improvisation and allowing myself to be free in the moment of creation.  Anything that I can do to remain present in the moment and connected to how I feel seems to translate into the piece that I am working on at the time.  I have found that it makes the piece more authentic, not just for myself but also the viewer.  A part of my process begins with exploring the world around me and finding the things that make me feel genuine emotion.  That could be music, movies, art, relationships, weather, food, almost anything basically. If I can actually find that thing then I want to create a piece that lets my viewer also experience it. 
 
That leads into the color pallet and composition.  Sometimes I instantly know what colors I would like to use in order to complete a piece and other times I have no idea what I am creating.  In those moments there is just a need to make a piece in order to fill some empty space in my soul. 
If that is the mode I am in, then I just focus on covering the canvas with paint from edge to edge.  I may just make one piece, or I may work on several all at once.  Weather it is just a flat color or something that looks tie-dyed, this part of the process is more about communicating the raw emotion of that instant than it is about creating any actual subject matter. 
 
After I have covered a few pieces of canvas with paint I begin a competition of sorts to see which piece I enjoy the most.  If I prefer one over the rest then that is the one I work on.  Once that piece has been brought up to a certain level of completion I then look for the next piece that most catches my eye.  I then judge them against each other and try to make the lesser piece better than the one that I previously favored.  I repeat this process until at least 3 or more pieces seem equal to each other in terms of quality and the amount of effort put into them. 
 
The next phase is deciding what type of figure/figures belong in the piece.  Maybe it begins with just taking a solid color that works well with the background and making a stroke with the paint that takes up a dominant section of the canvas.  Maybe it begins with taking black paint and carving out the shape of a head and only working in silhouette until I have what I want and move onto creating the body.  The beginning stages are all very fluid and open to outside influence until I know what the piece is supposed to be.
 
Once I have a grasp on the direction that the piece needs to go in then everything is more about the details.  What can I do to make everything that I am thinking or feeling more clear to the viewer?  How can I make the piece more fun or eye catching?  I have found that if I can add things that keep me engaged in creating the piece then the viewer can be equally engaged while observing it.  
 
When I am in the final stages of a piece I have more than likely been thinking about the meaning of it for a while and also the emotions behind it.  This leads me into choosing a title for the piece.  This part of the process is definitely more cerebral and satisfies all my nerdy bits.  I may choose a word from the dictionary that I enjoy but would not have a chance to use in everyday conversation.  I may choose a foreign word or phrase that speaks about the piece but that I couldn't actually pronounce.  I like this part of the process because hopefully it leads the viewer to do some type of research.  I love enigmatic things!  I have always enjoyed mysteries and detective stories.  Watching the human mind digest information in order to come to a conclusion and solve a problem is wonderful and keeps us sharp. I want to create intrigue in a person and make them want to know why a thing is what it is. Hopefully if a person enjoys my work enough then they will not mind doing a bit of research to get the answers that they are looking for.   

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Visit Cyrus Fire's Official Website at: 
cyrusfire.com