Digital Renderings of “Rocks and Light,” Inspired by Mono-ha

Plenty of designers — and design editors, ahem — are obsessed with the Japanese art movement Mono-ha, whose practitioners created contextual, minimalist sculptures using a mix of natural and man-made materials. But when the emerging Swedish art director Anders Brasch-Willumsen looked closer at the movement, he noticed one thing in particular he could personally relate to: the ephemeral nature of its works. “The works that came out of Mono-ha would often exist only in photographs,” he says. “I felt connected to this idea because creating digital sculptures is similar: they only exist in images.” Inspired by that realization, Brasch-Willumsen — whose entirely 3-D–rendered portfolio includes everything from flowers to abstract compositions to set designs for actual products — decided to create “Rocks and Light,” a new series of digital artworks that reference the materials used in Mono-ha, as well as California Light and Space. The works, pictured below, combine the colorful slickness typical of digital artwork with a twist: “I found that using age-old, raw materials like stone completely changes your perception of the image,” he says. “I wanted to create a space for this grey zone, somewhere between the pre-historic and the futuristic — between the real and the virtual.”
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