It's Engineering, It's Art

I was hired by Solidworks to create an art piece with their software. The piece was a gift for one of their retiring executives. I learned about his career through his team and went to work creating a theme for the piece. It seemed fitting to use vertical gold ribbon-like glass to represent the teams and people he traveled with on his professional journey. The glass spheres represent projects and milestones intermingled along the way. I built an array of lights in the assembly, to illustrate the growth he had obtained, and that this wisdom is reflected through the people and projects in his evolution.

When this piece was rendered, we used a 32 core rendering machine. It required 11-1/2 days to render to a fine art quality resolution. As I recall, the light trace count was somewhere near 39 million. We printed the piece on a gesso panel, and I built a contemporary "gallery wrap" frame that I painted semi-gloss black.

As an artist, I am drawn to abstract form and patterns. Translating these resonant points into meaningful works is both challenging and rewarding. As a working medium, Solidworks software provides wonderful tools, and at the same time, challenges many skill sets to arrive at these abstract visions. It thrills me to turn the process inside out. As engineers, we are often tasked with taking abstract ideas and making them as concrete as possible. I am inverting this, by using tools meant to go from abstract to concrete, and instead, driving the tools towards a more abstract result.

Shane McKenna - Artist, Engineer, Inventor, Visionary