If there is one person who may have the ability to look into our future, it may be artist Gilles Tran. Forget gravity, heck, forget everything your teachers ever taught you and you'll find Gilles's strange world – a world that's a bit colder but a lot more interesting. It may surprise you that although he's been painting and drawing his whole life, he doesn't create these fantastic 3D images full-time. He's actually an engineer working for the animal feed industry. Why? Because he likes the personal freedom. As he explains, “The great thing about being a hobbyist, though, is that I'm free to do what I want. I've done commercial work before and while I liked the experience – working for a client etc. – there was the nagging feeling that the time spent could have been used on personal projects.” Where does Gilles get his inspiration from? (You may have guessed this.) “From a technical point of view, movies are certainly my main source of inspiration: lighting, framing etc. When I'm doing a picture, I often have a particular movie shot in mind. Traditional painters like Vermeer or Edward Hopper are also references I keep coming back. The conceptual aspect of the images come from the fact that while I love photorealism and the sensuality of light, pure photo-realism is often too dry and rather uninteresting from an artistic point of view, so the trick (or gimmick) is to add something there that throws it off kilter, in a more or less subtle way. There's this very realistic environment and then people see this weird thingie in the middle that gives it a completely different meaning.”
Blowing in the Wind
Aggressive shopping
The apartment: bathroom
catching large water drops
drowning cars More at Oyonale Interview with Gilles Tran
