Masha Falkov - Art and Glasswork

These pieces are primarily digital painting, digital photomontage, and (one in particular) ink with digital color.

Ever since I was a kid, I marveled at the intricacy of circuit boards and silicon wafers.  It was clear to me that man was making objects that competed with some aspects of nature for lovely detail and complexity of function.  What would we be making by the time I reached adulthood?  Could we create life?

Some would say that the last question is a heresy of sorts.  It’s a reflection of man’s hubris to even suggest that we could create something to rival the natural world.  But I don’t see technology and nature as polar opposites of each other.  Rather, I see them as different ends of a spectrum of life.  After all, what are we but aspects of nature?  Isn’t our technology nature, extended – a reflection of the non-man-made world in tool form?

Kevin Kelly coined the concept of the technium in his book, What Technology Wants, how all of technology could be interpreted as a sort of symbiotic organism which relies on the human mind to be created and to evolve.  This could be both something beautiful and something horrifying.  It’s up to us to evolve not just our technology, but our own minds – and then we can steer the technium into being a mutualistic relationship, rather than a parasitic one.

Mandelbulbs are 3D fractals, part of an entire larger world one can explore. There are dozens of formulas that can be recombined in an infinite number of ways, always revealing surprising forms that are often so organic-looking you can scarcely believe they were created with pure math.  I create them using the program Mandelbulb 3D, and then combine those dizzying landscapes with digital painting and digital photomontage from original photography. 

These are digital paintings I made using little or no Photoshop trickery.  I'm still very new to digital painting in traditional style techniques, so my attempts may look a bit clumsy.  I'm trying to spend as much time as possible practicing this art.  Some of the pieces are made using the program Hexels, which lets you draw with pixels of any shape.  This is great, especially if you either wish to just play with color and form, or make an 8-bit look!

I use pen & ink, prismacolor markers, and watercolors.  Recently I’ve started using ink with digital color.  Ink is my favorite medium for many years, because I can get a lot of detail into a single page with a fine nib.  My drawings are my mental wunderkammers of all the lovely things I learned the world contains – diatoms, mythological masks, fossils and bones, and giant heavy waves ridden by crazy surfers.  From the Weaver who weaves the substance of the universe from itself, to the Enchantress of Numbers, I hope that they’ll set your imagination aflame.

These are older ink drawings I did from 2004-2008.  Lively wunderkammers on paper displaying everything I had seen or learned about that I wanted to save for posterity.  None of these had preliminary sketches and were drawn with ink straight on paper with no pencil below.  

The Gossamer Web is a graphic novel of 3 parts which I started in 2008 and finally printed in 2015.  It's about a trader named Spectra who hasn't seen anyone else of her kind, and who can't remember her childhood.  She's in the middle of a long journey to find her origins when she encounters the mystic Azarel, someone whom she has only met in her dreams, in person - and he presents her with the first clue that her origins may be completely off-world.  

In the Gossamer Web you'll find: interdimensional wars with giant sentient spiders, hidden underground cities, tantric initiation rituals, nebulous beings with galaxies for eyes and the kind of homesickness that makes you do stupid things.   

The 3-part book is just over 100 pages long with some of the most detailed illustrations you'll ever see in a graphic novel.  Nearly everything is drawn by hand with pen and ink using the finest tipped pens in existence.