“Pardon this,” Baton Rouge artist Brad Bourgoyne says, walking under a thin rope strung across the length of his University Acres living room.
“The kids and I were making tents last night.”
With his trimmed salt-and-pepper beard and thin frame beneath a green shirt tucked neatly into faded jeans, Bourgoyne looks every bit the cross-pollination of artist and engineer as he walks out back. To his right is a large swingset. Ahead is his workshop, and next to that, a scale prototype for Ascending Path, the award-winning sculpture he designed with Aaron Hussey. The finished piece stands at the flashpoint of the Trail of Tears in Chattanooga, Tenn. It is a gorgeous memorial to the Choctaw, Cherokee and other Native Americans forced violently out of the Deep South in the 1830s.
Ascending Path is perhaps the most somber of Bourgoyne’s reflections on movement, but what eccentric photography pioneer Edward Muybridge studied in staccato with revolutionary and successive still images of a horse galloping or a nude model ascending a staircase in the 19th century, Bourgoyne renders fluid, surreal and beautiful with cast bronze sculptures of all shapes and sizes. His is the worship of motion, a devotion to the details and the minutiae of movement, and much of it would not be possible without his trusty 3D printer and scanner.
Inside the shop, Bourgoyne clicks his mouse a few times, and the machine comes alive. Essentially, it is an inkjet printer, he explains, only it uses plaster powder instead of paper and ink. In 24 hours, what looks like a thick slab of salt now will have become an intricately detailed, physical replica of an image created on his computer. The printer lays down cross-sections .04 inches thick as the runoff of excess liquid binder pools in a plastic container like tobacco and saliva landing in a spittoon.
“They’re not far away from developing things like, if you want a pair of sunglasses, just print them out,” Bourgoyne says.
Once a piece is printed, the artist lets it dry overnight in the printer. Next, it goes into an oven for further drying before Bourgoyne coats it with a protective liquid plastic binding. Upon removal, each is delicate for sure, but Bourgoyne is incredibly protective, too, handling each as if it were his very first one. In a way, each is his baby and the printer’s baby, too.
This tension between creativity and technology is never lost on Bourgoyne. His professional sculpture career began in his 20s when his father’s engineering firm hired him to illustrate concepts of well blowouts and other subterranean phenomena the mechanically-minded engineers working on the surface had no way of visualizing, much less explaining to attorneys, judges and jurors.
He was a young buck then, frustrated with relatively primitive engineering software that couldn’t seem to keep up with his ideas. Now, he is a veteran artist who still loves getting his hands dirty and wrestles with the idea of creating digital art completely divorced from materials.
“I bridge art and technology,” Bourgoyne says. “My concerns are making things with my hands and manipulating form. Technology allows me to do that in a lot of ways more effectively, but has disadvantages, too. I get to play with it and use it to its strengths, but as soon as it hampers me I quickly go back.”
More than anything, 3D printing saves him time. While Bourgoyne’s more traditional sculptures and paintings often show at Ann Connelly Fine Art, he makes a living doing work for other artists by creating larger versions of small sculptures or architectural models. With his scanner and printer, his human subjects only have to sit for 30 minutes, then again briefly for the finish work, instead of the traditional 80-plus hours for a detailed sculpture. Large-scale versions of small, handcrafted models are completed in mere days.
He does this with 10-year-old technology. Everything is second-hand.
“What they have now is light years better,” Bourgoyne says. “But what I can do with it is what I need to do.”
What may be the latest and highest-resolution 3D printer in all of Louisiana is just across town at Composite Effects, the fast-growing prop, mask and make-up company fueling film projects and eerily realistic Halloween costumes across the globe. Earlier this year, Composite Effects owners Ken Decker and Wes Branton invested $90,000 in a ProJet HD 3000, the same machine that manufactured Robert Downey Jr.’s suit for Iron Man 2. This printer allows Composite Effects to create rapid prototypes for the medical, architectural and engineering fields they had never worked in before. One recent job was creating a model kneecap replacement for a surgeon.
Here, giant ram horns affixed to the head of a beastly monster mask begin life as a tiny, penny-sized crescent, identical to the mask’s horns in every way but size. The surface of each model resembles the fine ridges on fingertips, and each layer of photo-catalyzed acrylic is half of the thickness of one human hair.
Yet just like Bourgoyne, Decker, Branton and their 18 full-time employees never rely on a 3D printer to do all their detailed work for them. It is only a tool and one step in an extensive creative process.
“I don’t miss working with my hands, because we still do it all the time,” Branton says. “Even with the most expensive machines, they can’t replace handwork. There are always things you still need your eye for and that you need to put your hands on.”
Things like the visceral lacerations on a frightful monster mask, or the delicate curves of a memorial sculpture, or a tent for the kids pitched in the middle of the living room.
