The Suburban Surrealist: Hayden Clay's Light Alchemy

The Artist Who Said No

Hayden Clay's father is a watercolor painter. Their home was covered with his work. In summer, neighborhood kids would come over for Cartoon Club. Hayden's dad would teach them to draw SpongeBob, Nemo, whatever was popular. Circles in the right spots. The symmetry.

"It made me feel like art was this fun, pure expression of passion," Hayden remembers.

Then his father told him he couldn't be an artist.

"My parents definitely wouldn't let me do art, which is ironic because my dad is an artist. He was like, 'I know how hard and not well-paying it is, so I'm not gonna let my son be an artist like me.'"

Engineer. Doctor. Something serious. Anything but art.

Hayden spent his childhood running around in the woods, exploring, imagining things. Something took root. "A whole lifetime of not doing art. I couldn't escape it, and found my way back to it in my 20s."

Twenty-Five Dollars

He did what he was told at first. Biochemistry major. It sounded smart. It was his fallback. When he graduated and started looking at jobs, they all sucked. Pipetting in a lab all day. He tried other things. Pharmacy technician. Someone spit on him. He went back to school for computer science. Another delay tactic.

During this period, he discovered film photography. He remembers the moment clearly. A website called 8Tracks had cool album covers. One was a double exposure of a girl with flowers.

"I didn't even know you could do that. I was like, 'I need to get a film camera, because I want to do that.'"

He found a Canon AE-1 at a thrift store for twenty-five bucks. He stood there for an hour trying to decide if he should buy it. "I ended up buying it, and I'm so glad I did because that kind of changed my life."

He spent years experimenting with multiple exposures. "I felt like a light alchemist, capturing bottles of light in different places and mixing them together in the way I wanted."

Winter in Maryland. Dead trees. He wasn't interested in the literal world around him. Multiple exposures gave him the ability to create new ones.

Summer Games

The idea came to him as a photographer. A flooded tennis court. Pink and blue. He drove around looking for the right one. They were all cracked and gross. His next thought was to build it practically. Flood an actual court. Then he realized that would be really expensive.

Around this time he was doing 3D tutorials. "I thought, 'I could do this in 3D.' A tennis court is just a couple of rectangles, I can figure out water."

It took a month or two. He was probably doing things in the stupidest way possible. When he finally shared it online, people were baffled. "Where is this? Is this a double exposure?"

"I was a little worried. If you swap mediums overnight, are people gonna still care? But the reaction was very good, and I don't think people even really knew it was 3D art."

The photographer's eye never left. "I actually don't really like the way renders look, so I try very hard to make them not look like renders. I try to make them look somewhere in between a film photograph and a watercolor painting."

He adds grain, depth of field, noise everywhere. Dappled shadows created with noise patterns. "It's the thing that moves it from looking like a render to something more."

The Suburbs, Reconsidered

He moved to New York City. When he'd visit his childhood home, everything looked different. "I noticed how good and clean the air smells, how green the grass is."

As a photographer living there, he'd been uninspired. But after the city, the suburbs felt weird, exciting, colorful, surreal.

This became The Suburbs series. He built a house generator in Houdini. The procedural workflow is perfect for someone like him. Everything is parametric. "What if all the houses were taller? What if they're different colors?" He can explore variations instantly.

Post-production became his favorite part. He renders to massive 32-bit EXR files with separate passes for everything. "There's like three levels of process after the render." AfterEffects, then Lightroom. "When I render it, it looks good. But then in post I make it look even better and it's like, damn, I had no idea this could look that much better."

Do Better, Try Harder

Strange Clouds started because Hayden noticed most 3D artists just use stock cloud models. "I'm always thinking, 'How can I do something that hasn't been done before?'"

It was extremely difficult. But it forced him to level up technically. "You need to just get these skills to do what reality does, so then you can break them in your own ways."

After making ten pieces, he realized he'd only made fourteen artworks all year. So he made a generative collection. Hundreds of unique cloud compositions.

This leads to his manifesto.

"A lot of people like to say that 'there's no such thing as an original idea.' And that is my pet peeve. That's the stupidest thing anyone's ever said."

He calls it a crutch. A lazy excuse for copying. "Do better. Try harder. That's lazy as shit."

He's not against transformative iteration. But outright stealing and then hiding behind "well, nothing's original" is guilt-mitigation for plagiarists.

"We went from the Stone Ages to the Mona Lisa. Do you think that the Mona Lisa was copied from a caveman? There were sequences of original ideas."

The hard part isn't being original. The hard part is making an original idea good. Lots of ideas are untried because they're just bad. It's an artist's duty to push boundaries, no matter how small the push.

"Without that, we're not really going anywhere. And we totally are going places in art."

Clear Boundaries

Stained glass is basically water made solid. Refractive, reflective, magical.

His new series, Clear Boundaries, is the first time he's made multiple pieces under the same title. Nine artworks, all called "Clear Boundaries." All different. All exploring the same idea.

"I feel like stained glass is such a great material and metaphor. It's fragile, it's holy, it's beautiful, it's something to be revered."

A stained glass picket fence. A guardrail. A sidewalk. Each one is something he'd love to see built in reality. Looking five years ahead, he wants to do more physical installations.

"It's something I haven't seen before, and that is really exciting to me because I get to see it. I get to be the first person to make it, and if it turns out I wasn’t, at least I tried."

The obsession goes deeper. Water has always jumped out to him because it's "this living, dimensional portal of light." Wave Race 64, the first game he ever played. All water levels. Final Fantasy X with its famous underwater kiss scene inspired him "to be an artist that explores water." Pool memories. Studio Ghibli films like Howl's Moving Castle and Spirited Away.

All of it feeds into this. Water, clouds, stained glass. Variations on magic made visible.

Finally, he wants people to understand something about artists. "They're just people. They're just normal guys. I'm just a 30-year-old dude. I'm a ridiculous man." He laughs.

He doesn't like the stereotype. The professional, white-glove, Sotheby's type with pipes and mustaches.

"I think we just gotta let artists be weird. There needs to be more understanding that artists are just weird little dudes who just wanna make weird little pictures, you know?"

The Wrap

Hayden shouts out @GuyNorcal ("my father in the space, the Biscuit King"), @funghibull ("a vibe pillar"), and @Blondie23LMD ("almost single-handedly saved the space"). Artists who have inspired him lately: Oelhan (criminally underrated), Sean Mundy (artist's artist), Liv (meeting the machine halfway), and @danielkoeth (creating movie scenes).

What does he wish people understood? The technical difficulty. "The lengths that 3D artists go to are crazy." In the age of AI, craft deserves appreciation.

Also: “Artists don't love when you ask what something is about. What they really want to hear is your take. What do you think it is?”

And let artists be weird.

For future Weekly Dose episodes, Hayden recommends @oelhan_tv, @enigmatriz, @VinnieHager, and @seanmundyphoto. Hayden was recommended by @oliviapedi.