Weird Tales, Volume 51 Read Free Page B

moment when the hidden becomes the apparent and the imagined becomes shockingly real. To Koen, everything contains a hidden nature, everything is constantly changing, and that's what makes his work so grimly fascinating—he sees this inner nature, and he shares his unflinching vision with us.
    Born in Thessaloniki, Greece, Koen holds degrees from the Bezalel Academy of Arts & Design in Jerusalem and from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He's a New Yorker, now, with an astounding litany of awards, exhibits, and high-profile clients.
    His method underscores the transformative motif: his work itself has evolved from classical roots into a hybrid of digital and traditional forms, yielding images at once phantasmagorical and all too believable. It's not immediately apparent how much is real, how much artifice. The question is immaterial; it all must be taken at face value, for what Koen shows us is the very darkness hidden beneath the world's façade.
    Your work is a complicated process, a synthesis of many methods. How do you pull together all of the elements? What are some of the stages an image goes through before it's complete?
    Sometimes I do sketches, sometimes I don't. Sometimes I have something very specific in my mind from the first, and other times I let the image lead the way. As soon as I have the idea, I will compile my photographic references and the raw materials. I usually like to shoot details myself; I like to shoot interesting pieces of equipment, I shoot strange landscapes or sky formations when I see them.
    Most times I shoot without really knowing when and how I will use the photographs, so in any specific project, half of the photographs I use are shots that I have already taken (for no other reason than my visual obsessions), and the other half are things that I specifically need to find and capture. This turns my job to a treasure hunt, but in this city there is one of everything and I will find it when I need it.
    And then I start the painstaking process of cleaning things up. I do a lot of hand-tinting, and then assembling, and when I'm happy with the image and the composition, I start actually fusing the parts together. This fusion gets tricky since everything has been shot under different light conditions, so colors look different and light sources look different. I'm trying to homogenize all of these by hand tinting and lowering colors that are too vibrant so there's a color match between the pieces of the composition. And then, lighting: I like to use dramatic shadowing; that is a residue of projects I did on film noir covers quite a few years ago, and that was a turning point in the way I light and shade my images. I think the secret to a seamless composition is really balancing colors nd shadows.
    You want your work to challenge people's assumptions. In exploring the themes of your work while you research and create it, have you ever found your own assumptions challenged?
    Yes. A lot of information you get on the surface is very different from what you find out after in-depth research. I love to read, I love to research, I'm a history buff, so I will use the turns and twists according to the information I receive in the beginning, and try to incorporate things I learn. Especially in a series, by keeping things loose conceptually in the beginning, you give yourself some time to start putting the initial stages of the image together but also to read and find out if what you're doing is working, and to incorporate changes if need be. Concepts sometimes do change, evolve, take different turns.
    Now if, in the process of one series, I run into something that is very different and unique, I might start a whole new series. I will use something from the research for a previous theme to start something totally new. I may run into something that is very exciting conceptually, and that always comes with the potential to create interesting images. It's sort of like a hydra, a monster . . . you cut