Fred Bastide had a classical art education.
At 34, he is a graduate of the ‘Ecole des arts appliqués de Vevey’, and ‘Ecole supérieure d'arts décoratifs de Genève’. Of course, while he was there, he learned the many aspects of drawing, painting, sculpture and photography, but as an autodidact with CG, he had the most fun sitting at home with the very first version of 3ds max.
Fred Bastide lives and works in Montreux, the French-speaking part of Switzerland. He is presently working in a totally unrelated field of work from CG, so has made his name in the field as a freelance CG artist in his spare time.
Many of Bastide’s figures are derived from personal imaginings. ‘My Uncle cthulhu’, is a personal project inspired by the writings of H.P. Lovecraft. “I like to marry realism with a little bit of fantasy or weirdness,“ says Bastide. “A kind of ‘tempered’ surrealism.“
However, Bastide feels there can be too much of one genre in an image. “Too many ‘alien’ elements in a picture can make me feel like a stranger to it,“ he says “so I’m not a big fan of full science fiction imagery. Too much heroic fantasy, I find often puerile and stereotyped.“
Bastide recalls some pieces as milestones in his career. There were two constructions he did in traditional sculpture that will never leave him. A full-scale alligator made during his studies in Geneva, and a 2.5 metre Latex Devil, made in 1992. “The ‘diable rouge’ 3D piece, was made for a French challenge,“ says Bastide. “Even though I’m not particularly proud of in terms of quality, but it’s the first 3D work I finished as planned.“
CGSociety :: Artist Profile Fred Bastide
by Paul Hellard 18 August 2005
Bastide began tinkering with the artistic boundaries of computer-generated art about eight years ago. Although curious, he admits he wasn’t completely convinced of the creative potential of CG, so the first few years of studying the phenomenon were not very intensive. “It was more like a kind of videogame for me,“ he adds. “Just a bit of fun.“
“I made my first organic models pretty laboriously with Metareyes, the Spanish metaball-based plugin,“ Bastide explains. “Metareyes was fun and easy to use but would produce quite chaotic and heavy meshes, very hard to skin, texture or exploit correctly, especially on my low end computer.“
During his attempts at putting some models together with Metareyes, Bastide also experimented with the editable patches of some organic models in 3ds max. It wasn’t until he discovered ‘edge extrusion’ type modeling that he began to realize the full potential of 3D. This was his catalyst to understanding the art of 3D and what spurred him on to begin generating many of the weird and surreal figures we see from Bastide on forums presently. His work is also prominent in Ballistic Publishing's 'Exposé 3' and 'd'artiste: Character Modeling' digital art books.
