I.A. - Your animation and modeling is very precise and very refined. What got you interested in commercial design? How do you balance the three different types of design?

T.B. - I originally started as a classic illustrator/painter (with pencils, oil colors and airbrush) and then I studied communication design with an special interest in illustration and with a great bias on light and surfaces. As mentioned before, one of my main motivations is to learn. I personally don't see a difference between commercial and personal work, it's more like a very useful balance to me. Commercial work focus on the end result in a limited time so that you must keep very concentrated. Personal work allows you to experiment and to be more emotional and intuitive. Just like with my abstract work, I like my commercial productions to be very detailed and refined. I want to be able to look at from a very close point of view. So I often tend to model too many details, but as long as I'm fast enough this shouldn't be a problem. : ) Over the years I’ve come to realize that it's often the fine details that make an object seem real. It's not the fact that he can instantly say what it is rather, it's often things like small bevelled edges (nothing is really sharp) and small details in the surface. My artwork is not purely focused on photorealism but rather on some kind of hyperrealism. I just try to focus on the elements or properties that in my opinion define an object.

I.A. - What are your favorite post-production and video tools and your favorite plugins?

T.B. – I work with Photoshop for image and texture and DOFpro for depth of field effects in post. For compositing tasks I mostly use AfterFx. But I have also used Digital Fusion and the FXTree inside XSI for some jobs. But I'm not dedicated to any tools and will use what works best for me.

I.A. – According to you, what can be considered as art in the digital world and why?

T.B. - This is really not easy to answer, because the word art itself can have different meanings for different people. It’s not important to me whether to you use digital or traditional tools. It's the result that matters, the image, animation or whatever; it’s the visual appearance if you want. There are always two persons involved in an image, the one who makes it and the one who looks at it. In my personal opinion, and that's really my opinion, art is images or animations that have some kind of personal power, originality and expression from the viewers point of view. There are a lot of discussions in different forums about the definition of art, particularly in the CGI/digital area, but you can see that there is no real consensus. Art is something you can't set rules for, you can’t say if it's good or bad or if it's art or not. It's always a dialogue between the viewer and the image. And to be honest wouldn't it be very boring if there were any rules?

I.A. - Do you think yours has evolved with time? How?

T.B. - Definitely. I think the more you work on something the more you distance yourself from rules and borders. When you start learning tools you often get addicted to technical issues, but after some time you concentrate more and more and on the creative part. It's a steadily process of creating and learning about borders and then maybe transgressing them to get a step further. The more you acquire freedom from technical issues the more challenging the next step is.

I.A. - Do you have any artistic projects now?

T.B. - I always have a lot of ideas but unfortunately too less time to realize them all. On the other side this is ok. You may be wondering about this statement but I’m talking about ripening. I often have an idea and go “hey this is great I want to do it.” The next day I have another idea and so on. So a lot of ideas are collected inside my head. But some of them survive while others disappear after a while. It’s like a natural selection process. And it's funny, but in my experience the ideas which survive are mostly those which have real power to me. I'm not the one who writes down all these ideas and collects them in a box where I could take a look from time to time. I prefer to let them mature in my head. There is no other way at this point :)
The next step will be to go deeper into abstract animations I think. I already did some experiments in this direction, but I need to take some time to think it over.

I.A. - Anything else?

T.B. - I want to thank you for this interview. Stepping back to the discussion about digital art I just want to mention that I hope that the in future there will be more spots for digital art. Currently it's still a rather new form of artistic expression. Like photography it will take some time to mature and to become accepted. I also hope more people will seize the opportunity to express themselves with this medium and that they will go beyond classical stuff and seek for their own visual language. Thanks to the internet today it's possible to see images from all over the world. When I started painting the images you had access to at the time were mostly rather small pictures in books or those I saw at exhibitions. Suddenly there was the internet and the possibility to see millions of images from all over the world. At first, it was a kind of shock, because suddenly I started comparing my work and finding out about many talented artists that were better than me. But after a while, it became a source of inspiration and a kind of global language without any words. I just want to incite people to go a step further and search for their own way of expression via images. Take a step back and free yourself from expectations. It's may be an interesting adventure...

Links

Comment in the forum : www.itsartmag.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=760

Tim Borgmann's Website : www.bt-3d.de

Interview Published in IT'S ART Vol #08 : store.itsartmag.com

CG Gallery : cggallery.itsartmag.com

See Also Interview with :

Neil Blevins / Philip Straub / Pascal Blanché / Raphaël Lacoste / Nick Harris / Bobby Chiu / Juan Siquier / Meats Meier