Audio By Carbonatix
James Barnett is a funny guy. The Scottsdale resident’s bio reads: ”
This year, make your gift count –
Invest in local news that matters.
Our work is funded by readers like you who make voluntary gifts because they value our work and want to see it continue. Make a contribution today to help us reach our $30,000 goal!
Where are you from?
New Rochelle, NY, home of Rob and Laura Petrie of the Dick Van Dyke Show. I moved to Scottsdale about four years ago, from San Francisco.
Why spec10?
They asked!
I’d actually been gearing up for another run at local galleries, getting a show’s worth of paintings together, when I got an email from Jonathan from spec10. So most of the show was ready to go; I’ve spent the last couple of weeks making huge-for-me canvases (4 feet by 5 feet) and painting ’em, to have a couple of big showcase pieces. The two largest
ones are portraits, of Alyx from Half-Life 2 and (female) Commander Shepard from Mass Effect 2.
Will you be at the opening?
Of course! I will be rakishly regaling tales of video game conquests. Or drinking and mumbling.
How did you get your idea for these paintings?
I’d just gotten a new video card and was playing Half-Life 2 and the first Call of Duty game and was just struck by the quality of the outdoor light. I was really blown away by how non-plastic things looked; for all the texture work of the walls that game designers had done, they’d never really gotten the light right. It always looked, hmm, thin? Like movie-set lights instead of sunlight.
But in these games, for the first time, I was struck by how much being in-game really felt like walking around outside (albeit with enemies shooting at you).
Which video game systems do you prefer?
I’m strictly a PC gamer, myself, with occasional forays into Nintendo DS games. Of course, if someone wanted to trade an Xbox 360 for a painting …
What are some of the most inspiring video games?
I could paint scenes from Team Fortress 2 and the Half-Life games forever. Fallout 3 has been endlessly fruitful, too.
Will viewers be able to tell by the title which video game the image comes from?
Only if they’ve played the game. I try to make sure the paintings work as paintings, even if you don’t know the location or the character. And if you do, then it’s just a happy little bonus to giggle at.
I sold one painting of the game Team Fortress 2 as a wedding gift, and the buyer asked me to send it to the couple with a note like: “Lisa: please enjoy the painting of a covered bridge. Brad: shhhh.” I thought that was about perfect.
Have you received criticisms of your work?
Last summer, the game blogs Kotaku, Joystiq, Offworld, and others all ran articles about me, which led to a spate of posts in gamer forums. A few were pretty negative, and some of those were about the level of your standard YouTube comments — real knuckle-dragger stuff. Because so much of the attention I was getting was positive, I was able to see the semi-incoherent, profane negative comments as pretty hysterical.
If you could live in a video game, which would it be?
I’m a huge sucker for the post-apocalypse, dating back to the Mad Max movies, I suppose. I probably find the post-apocalyptic games the most fascinating to run around in, but I wouldn’t want to live there.
