Big Chief

Each piece uses one of Max’s original car or truck photos as its shape, color, and texture palette. Reminded of the gargoyle faces found on Medieval architecture, Max coined the term Cargoyles to refer to this new body of work. This is the official NFT Gargoyle series. Enjoy!

Cargoyles Inspriration

After Max retired to Santa Rosa, CA, he began working on illustrations for his own amusement, rather than for corporate clients. He enjoyed shooting photos and manipulating them in Photoshop. He began shooting digital photos of old cars and trucks. Then, using the computer, he would to mine these photographs as source materials for digital collage illustrations, developing a technique inspired by his cut paper collages. He used tools in PhotoShop to colorize, cut, and paste selected elements, moving and morphing them to create bilaterally symmetrical images, which can be vertical (like a butterfly), or horizontal (like a landscape reflected in water).

When used in woodworking, this effect is called book-matching (see George Nakashima’s book, The Soul of a Tree), and results in two slabs of wood that appear to be mirror images of one another. The same effect occurs in series of letters, words, or numbers which repeat the same pattern at the front of a series as at the end, called palindromes (Anna; Madam I’m Adam; 12321), but these move in one direction only. Repeating similar effects over and over again from multiple directions allow the limited elements of the original photographs to become endless riffs on the same theme; we refer to these as palindromic art. In some ways they are like one-dimensional origami, flat images folded in on themselves repeatedly.

Max also likes to imagine that they are photographs of massive metal sculptures which he welded out of dismantled cars (true only on paper, alas). The lines where the images are cut and flopped along one or more axes develop what we call artefacts, or little digital glitches, which when enlarged create fascinating and unexpected crystalline patterns. Playing with his original photographic material of vehicles, and these techniques, eventually led him to create a series of digital illustrations reminiscent of primitive masks and skulls, tikis and totems, space aliens, demons and devils, bugs, fish, and other animal forms.