Impressions

“It’s a surreal piece, spanning many landscapes and environments— bringing in everything from a factory manufacturing Buddha statues to colonies of germs spewed from a "McSludgewich" box.”
— Portland Mercury

“This just blew my mind. Seamless stacked hand drawn illustrations that go on, well, forever.”
— skirrrtalert

“Wow. That looks like an illustration of the craziest dream ever.”
— phroxen

“I clicked on a facebook ad... and it blew my mind. Imagine what you‘d get if you handed Salvador Dali a pen and an endless roll of paper... then you started feeding him acid.”
— Little.org

What is it?

Vance Feldman’s ForeverScape began on September 26, 2009 and has continued to grow ever since. The illustration is primarily ink, marker and now color pencil. Eventually other physical media will be incorporated. Spanning nearly 500 seamlessly linked pages, the ’scape extends about 60 feet longer than a football field. The combined weight of all 8.5x11" paper sheets is about 13 lbs. The past several hundred pages not only connect left-to-right. When squeezed down into a five-column format, it connects to form a continuous vertical image that tiles endlessly in any direction. It is an immense puzzle wrapped lovingly with satire, social commentary and savage irony—it is a psychedelic existential crisis.

“It goes until I do...”

Vance Feldman has pledged to continue expanding the ForeverScape until death or other unfortunate circumstance. Unwavering dedication presents several challenges. First of all, it is inconceivable to partition the works individually. Selling them one-by-one would be a travesty. In essence, Vance can’t sell his work like most artists. When he works on other art, he feels like he is cheating on a spouse and therefore does so only under rare circumstances and with great remorse. Commissions are turned down on a regular basis. “There is no escape from the ForeverScape,” it haunts his dreams. He has spoken of waking up blinded by hundreds of pages hung on the wall that he has not yet drawn. The ’scape’s past, future and present are like voiceless incarnations emerging from darkness, pulling Vance’s already cold and calculated mind into a world of self-deluded insanity, much to our delight. ■

Artist Statement

As the creator of the ForeverScape, I find it hard to speak to its meaning. I don’t feel like I am the most qualified person to make such judgements. Yes, I do make narratives. Often people ask if it is a graphic novel or a comic book. It is not. That’s not to imply there are no stories or plot arcs. I spend a great deal of time pondering the story—I have a general idea of where I want to be in one-hundred pages, five-hundred pages and I even have specific ideas about where characters, motifs and style will be after the next thousand pages. I won’t tell you though, it would spoil the surprise.

I can say that I foresee no point at which I will become bored with the project. I have a few “Break-in-case-of-emergency” ideas in my back pocket in case I ever have a meltdown. Extra dimensions anyone? After the first couple months, I feared that I would be bored after a year. The exact opposite was true, I was even more passionate. After the first year, I thought there’s no way this could keep up, but once again my worries have no merit, over two years later.

Process

I almost never work in the studio. People often imagine that my workspace must be enormous with a big drawing table at the heart of it. In fact, the exact opposite is true. I almost exclusively work at the local pub or coffee shop. I very rarely work on more than four panels at a time because of this constraint. There’s something about the white noise of human socialisation that provides the perfect backdrop to the repeated gestures of drawing. Since I work in public, I am constantly bombarded with questions about my art while I work it... Sometimes the distraction is well, distracting, but most of the time enjoy the direct insight of the casual observer. A second pair of eyes can illuminate something that was there all along.

The earlier parts were much easier to work with physically. It only required butting two pages together and I used only black ink with no sketching ahead of time. Now, with the vertical dimension, I often have to deal with four-corner intersections and color complicates things to no end. I used to only carry a pen, now I lug around a bag stuffed with 128 markers and pencils.

Wrapping around the fifth column is also tricky, and leads to difficulty in keeping every page in order. I try to do as little pencil sketching ahead of time, but sometimes it is required to assemble some of the more complex scenes. Plus, if you draw something in pencil first, you have to re-draw it, only slowing down progression. I’m very particular about line and form, but I roll with mistakes— I never throw out a “Mess-Up” page, at least I have not so far.

On Art History

I have done a great deal of research both personal and academic into artists and movements. But honestly, I have no enthusiasm for what art historians might make up about my work. I’ve studied 13th-17th century Chinese porcelain and scrutinized medieval illuminated manuscripts, post-modernism, modernism, psychedelia and the surrealist movement and even French Romanticism with a bit of ancient Greek architecture and Chinese handscrolls tossed in. Granted, it takes some skill to fluently piece together influences, connections and even individual pieces of art into the grand scheme of things, they are only secondary to the art. Some would argue that the institutional historians can influence the direction of art by calcifying public perceptions of acceptable art, I say it is a whole load of hogwash. The art is what I remember. Theories in Art History cannot be repeated and tested.

If you had asked me ten years ago, my go-to influences would have been the standard contemporary surrealist’s response: Magritte, Paul Rosenquist, Heironymous Bosch, Escher, Max Ernst. Some people have pointed at portions of the scape, saying it resembles Alex Gray. Well, art historians, I’m making it easy with the scape. Every single piece is in chronological order, so stringing together a narrative between periods should be easy, right? As of 2011, I’ve only read one graphic novel, and I’ve only seen two drawings by R. Crumb, who by the way is a sissy: it took 10 years to draw 200 pages of Genisis. ■

Biography

Vance Feldman emerged into the world in December of 1982. Even in his youth, he exhibited a dire passion for art and held several exhibitions of works in oil prior to attending university as an International Baccalaureate. Vance declined nearly full-ride merit scholarships to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the San Fransisco Art Institute. He chose to pursue a more rounded liberal arts education. He earned his B.A. in Studio Art from Reed College with a thesis in Digital Animation. Vance has resided in Portland, Oregon for the last decade and is an accomplished interactive developer and animator. He has exhibited his art throughout the Northwest and his shows are met with capacity attendance. Vance was the Sustainable Seattle artist in residence for 2011. He has shown the scape in Portland, Denver, Eugene and at the Seattle Center (Space Needle).

Vance has worked with many world-renowned creative directors in the entertainment industry. In his early professional career he created interactive animation for the Beastie Boys Mix It Up Tour and designed 3D sets for NFL Special Events. He has worked on numerous interactive projects from an 18-foot long media wall at the Library of Congress to a permanent installation at the Portland Art Museum. Currently, Vance works as a full-time software developer and adds to the world-famous ForeverScape every moment he can find.

Other Work & Professional

Vance ‘s professional portfolio can be found at VANCEMEDIA.COM

Other Experimental Art

TAXIDERMY RECORDS - Directed/animated the underground music video Beyond Belief. Two weeks, no budget.

Holy Strokes! Golf 'n Fun - Just plain wrong. Nobody should be subjected to this, ever.

Youth & Early Work

Since a very early age, Vance had been labeled odd and peculiar. In grade-school he would find respite by keeping a pen or pencil to paper at almost all times. Having an hour long bus commute everyday, in each direction and for many years, the drawings kept piling up. Robots, birds, sky scrapers, castles in grassy meadows. It was smooth sailing for a while, the fanciful worlds he created were full of mazes and fantasy. Everything changed when at the age of 10, his father was diagnosed with an incurable cancer. With only a 10% chance of surviving a bone marrow transplant, his father Ron decided to proceed, and even climbed a 14,000 foot mountain on Chemotherapy.

Vance drew a brand new picture for him nearly every day of his 92 day hospital stay. They weren’t just little doodles, but animals copied with great detail in pencil from an array of nature books. Before he knew it, his father was in a coma being eaten alive by fungus since he had no immune system. He watched his wheelchair bound 90-year-old great grandmother hold hands and weep at her grandson’s deathbed. That moment, peering through the narrow diagonal wire-infused window is his most vivid memory; he has often sketched and animated this instant, as if to get a musical tune off the mind. This perhaps explains the medical themes found in both his early and contemporary work.

The next year was spent almost in complete solitude outside of going to school. Vance had discovered an aged pallet of watercolor in the attic, as well as a box of oils. The game was on. During that lonesome time he filled up blank spaces with detailed forms. Most of his early work used thinly-painted layered oils, producing surrealistic architectural forms with great attention to texture and depth. He decided to pursue all avenues of visual art and began to teach himself visually oriented programming and 3D animation. While pure creativity provided escapism, he had a yearning for the analytical, and algorithms provided that.

By the end of high school he had produced about 60 detailed oil paintings of all sizes and won a national award for his documentary work. He was a street performer juggling glowing orbs for tips on the cold streets of Denver. From there, he entered shady underworlds, balancing his studies with hallucinogen fueled space exploration. One day, Vance and his cohort were ejected a third time from the Taste of Colorado festival. They did not have a $500 vendors permit. While getting dragged out, a punk-rock anarchist youth handed him a pamphlet. When Vance turned to his horoscope it simply said, “Oregon is your only hope.”

Within the first year of his new Portland life, a fellow juggler and Reed dropout pointed out that given the last couple thousand years of painting, everything that could be done with paint, has already been done. At first this made sense, and perhaps it is what pushed Vance to study digital animation. But after countless hours programming and animating for the next seven years, his artistic development has come full circle. He missed the reality of the unchanging, physical object. He needed something real. ■

Story of the ForeverScape

Freshly out of a job in a cold world of technology directors, principles and project managers, I plopped down on a tattered bar stool. I decided to do something I had not done since I was a kid. I picked up a ballpoint. I was drawing, and it was late. The whiskey was running low again and the space on the page followed suit. What did I have? Rolling hills and a road to nowhere? An unexplained letter on a dirty roof? It was all over too soon, the grime and mystery of the world were just starting to take form. The edge of the sheet was like a razor against my fingers. Suddenly, I remembered.

I had more paper.

But could I do it? Wouldn’t a second sheet beget a third, a fourth? Where would it end? Not only did I have another sheet of paper, I had an entire ream. I had not planned this. Had fate intervened in the form of a paper-store clerk? I sipped another well whiskey and soda from a tiny straw.

After several nights of the same restless drawing, I felt the swing of it. If my hands had hips, they’d be my wrist doing the Tango. The pace of filling up a page, the excitement of unveiling a fresh dead tree patty from my red notebook sheath. After about a week of re-living my childhood, I saw no reason to stop. By the second week I was already trying to come up with a name for it. Was it a landscape? Perhaps. It‘s only been ten pages. I knew that it would always be a landscape at heart. But I knew myself better than that. I can‘t stay on solid earth for long. Maybe just Scape. I could live with that. Longscape? Nah, sounds like a gardening tool. Endless Drawing implies you want it to end. Wait, ForeverScape. Got a nice ring to it.

But could I commit myself to it for life? Them are big words, fella.

I mighta whooped somebody ‘s ass when I found out there was a Runescape adventure RPG game server with the same name. No matter. Within a month, the first iteration of the website was live. I gotsta admit, Vinny, opening my world up to the public like that—having 60 anonymous eyes peering over my shoulder each month drove me a little faster than I might have pushed on my own. Now, thousands of visits later, 30 people a month may not seem like very much, but I knew it was just the beginning. It is still, just the beginning. ■

A statement made in 2010:

As the first page ran out of room, the logical thing to do was to connect another sheet of paper, and then another, and then another... Soon, the drawing became an obsession; locked away in a metal case, the drawings follow me wherever I go. The psychedelic landscape employs roving vanishing points and vanishing realities. It is an expression of my feelings at the moment I make each segment. Each panel is a link to a memory, a place, a sight and a discomfort.
— The Denver Egotist