Category: Art Talk

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Gallery Update

I have tweaked the Gallery considerably. It now has my current draft Bio and My Art statement. (comments on that welcome as I am about to use those more in various places!)

I am working on adding links from the images ion the gallery to their original appearance in a blog post. It is in the blog post that there is more info about the context and where there may be discussion about the image.

I use a flash plugin: SimpleViewer. Great for ease of use. I think I may need to get the pro version… anyone familiar with that? I’ve manually entered what I want in the first three images in the Flax page in the Gallery.

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Painting day – a question about acrylic technique.

I worked hard today painting in acrylics. Not much to show for it, nothing to post here in real media, (still waiting for my camera, it arrived from Hong Kong but its at the airport till Monday, but there is nothing to photograph anyway.) I was trying to translate a #0736 Trees from the Thousand Sketches and it was hard. This sort of digital to physical is a challenge.

One thing I did, in a moment of frustration with real paint, was a new digital. It just flew out. It is like the one I was using for a reference, with a subtly different feel.

Bush
Larger Image.

It is now obvious why I found it hard. The mottled effect is done digitally by setting the paper to very rough on those layers. The light spots are pits in the “paper”. Maybe I need to forget about being too true to my digital version & go with the medium? Or maybe persist?

How would you do this in acrylic?

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Limited Editions – in the digital world

Question:
In a Limited Edition of digital prints can some be landscape and others square? Is it wrong to meddle with the original file if it is still used to print more in that edition?

Answer:
There is no right or wrong here, who would decide? I have two principles I adhere to:

1. Relationship!

The purchaser has a say. If I have a square one and a landscape version, there is a choice. A purchaser may also have a choice about the size, why not? It is not all democracy. Some prints I just like one way, and I won’t sign what I am not happy to sign.

Now here is an hypothetical situation, one that is possible. Someone owns a print of mine from say a year or two ago, and sees it on my site in a form that they like better… relationship! Talk to me. I may print another one, or replace the old one.

2. Trust.
Editions are what they say they are: usually limited to 25. I stick to that. I will never sell a print below the price of the last one sold in the edition. Prints in the editions may vary a little, one from the other. For one, I sign them on the date I print them, to honour the fact that each print is an actual work, the file is just a file.

You may also be interested in my copyright notice

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Square

I have heard that traditionally the square format is meant to be hard to compose. Maybe. I am working on my new Gallery, and for some reason I want all images to be square. Not just in the Gallery, I think it began with the prints. I wonder how long this itch will take to scratch?

The Gallery has images from Thousand Sketches and also new ones. Wherever they have been shown before, in whatever format, now they are also square.

What do you think?

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International Klein Blue

 

 

 

I thought that Yves Klein’s Blue must have been the purest blue #0000ff, all the blues and nothing else.

But not so. I discovered that IKB is in fact #002FA7

I have just made all the un-clicked links on this blog IKB. The visited ones are light blue.

  #0000ff – Mathematially pure blue?
  #002FA7 – International Klein Blue
  #8B8BFF – mid-point light blue      

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Layers upon layers

This image is all mouse. The Tablet PC is down.

Layers and layers
Larger Image.

I was thinking today about layers. There are heaps of layers in this image, as in most of what I do. The Earth Crosses are also to do with depth. The “vertical” line goes up and down. The life line in that direction is vastly different from that in the horizontal line. A line that goes “across” like that invariably is seen as the horizon, the earth edge.

In my work as a psychotherapist I always think “deep”. I want the work with my clients to go deep. But what is deep? My son once said, while pondering this with his fresh mind, it is “wide on its side”, nice! But it is not so. In the case of wide one end is equivalent qualitatively to the other. With the vertical line that is not so.

Deep means going into origins, not the past per se, though origins are usually in the past. Perhaps the future can draw us, and thus origins could be seen in the future as well.

Maori have a word: Whakapapa which is tied the notion of a layer, papa. Ah, a quote, from here, that expresses the exact idea I was looking for:

“Papa” is anything broad, flat and hard such as a flat rock, a slab or a board. “Whakapapa” is to place in layers, lay one upon another. Hence the term Whakapapa is used to describe both the recitation in proper order of genealogies, and also to name the genealogies. The visualisation is of building layer by layer upon the past towards the present, and on into the future. The whakapapa include not just the genealogies but the many spiritual, mythological and human stories that flesh out the genealogical backbone.

The layers of a painting give it its dept, they cover its origins, they influence the next layer, and the final layer is a relationship with a viewer. My Earth Crosses, flat and hung vertically I think of as a more transverse section with the top being the ether and the lower reaches the depths. The vertical line however is the yang to the yin of the earth. it is something only humans do, see into the depths of the soul and reach for the spirits of the sky.

Here is another Another version of this Earth Cross:

Layers and layers
Larger Image.

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