Category: Art Talk

Posted on

Landscapes

North Canterbury

A new project. Landscapes. Unsure as ever but need to follow this. As in the Earth Crosses the starting point is Thousand Sketches. One or two are coming straight over as part of the new series, but mostly I am redoing old ones and making new ones. I want to find about a dozen I like.

Some new aspects I am noticing. The calligraphic lines, all of them in this series. while digital, will have this, I am pursuing this. The other new thing is that I will use these sketches to make oils. I will post them as I do them but on the whole I’d like to present a selected set of them, digital images and corresponding oils.

What I like is that via the blog the unity of the work is maintained. These images can “phone home”.

I wrote this to a friend who commented on my work:

“The whole cyberspace side of it is important to me, I think it will impact art more and more. The objects, even when one off and in paint etc, can have a ‘virtual life’ as well, they can forever be linked to the artists words and to other items in the project or series… books & letters did it occasionally, but it was complex, hit and miss. I think it is a significant step in this era. So I am glad you noticed that aspect of the work.”

Posted on

Pentimento, nice word

Pentimento – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A pentimento (plural pentimenti) is an alteration in a painting, evidenced by traces of previous work, showing that the artist has changed his mind as to the composition during the process of painting. The word derives from the Italian pentirsi, meaning to repent.

Mine don’t show the traces but I repent, repent, repent.

Here is one I like and just tweaked:

What follows is the previous saved version.

Continue reading “Pentimento, nice word”

Posted on

Hand Made

I listen occasionally to Brooks Jensen’s short podcasts on photography, they often apply to all art and creativity, he is a thoughtful man. The Lenswork publication is beautiful. The website is beautiful. He has a great piece about printing images, all of which I fully concur with.

Here is the full archive: LensWork Recent Podcasts

I just listened to this one: LW0405: Considering Content, Considering Medium

It talks about the presence of the hand of the artist. So that is right on topic with the stuff I was looking at re Walter Benjamin recently. The useful point he makes is that some art is more hand-dependent than others, I am not sure if that is his word or not. Painting is at one extreme, and photography on the other.

Which makes images that are made by hand, but digital an interesting case in point. The hand is more there in the file, but when it comes to reproduction it is much like a photo.

My sketches work quite well if they are just printed on some machine in a store, but they loose a lot. The prints I make are another whole story, it has taken me a long time to perfect my technique, and there are rejects as I learn. I have found better paper, and I now have better mastery over the software, ie the colour.

So when I sign a print it means I am satisfied it is as good as I can do it.

The great masters of the darkroom probably have a strong hand in the work as well. Look at this by Sally Mann for instance.

There are a few twists to this reflection…

One is that my printing of the images influences what I make when I make digital images. In some deep way where medium is the muse, but I will tweak an image to make it work well as a print, and then the final version is posted on the net. This means it works well on my combination of screen, software, hardware paper & ink. That will be hard to replicate ever again! (I can’t always do it!)

When I do sign something that is 100% hand-dependent.

The other thought I had is that somewhere, sometime, someone and they may have already done it for all I know one of my images is presented in a way that is just wonderful. My hand, their craft.

Posted on

Earth Crosses Series Complete

I am really satisfied with my Earth Crosses series. It includes some from the Thousand Sketches and some I did since. If you have been reading my blog you will have seen most of them, but they look best together. It is this series I am working on exhibiting.

 

Here is the last one in the series.

Golden Cross

Posted on

Wired Picks Its 10 Favorite 2007 Illustrations

Wired Picks Its 10 Favorite 2007 Illustrations

They look ok, but I can’t tell anymore, I am drowning in images. This one stands out.

Riccardo Vecchio captures this context exquisitely in his rich illustration of gene therapy pioneer French Anderson: It looks both modern and traditional, at once.

I am interested in their phrase: “modern and traditional” it looks as if the digital touch makes it modern.

Riccardo Vecchio

Image follows

Continue reading “Wired Picks Its 10 Favorite 2007 Illustrations”

Posted on

In this moment – perverted

In this moment… Perverted
Larger Image.

Long Views » Blog Archive » Jon Ippolito and Joline Blais, “At the Edge of Art”

Art, like the antibodies in our immune system, creates alien forces in service of the whole. It anticipates threats and models them. It is a diversity agent.

Two forms of that process were explained and shown by Ippolito and Blais: perversion, and execution.

Here is an image of this blog, In this moment… perverted by shredder… It really is of the moment, I’ll do another some time later.

They are saying some interesting things here, diversity agent is a nice phrase, they point to what art can do, but there is more to it, of course. I want to point to the way art reveals the invisible. Their examples show that but they use a biological analogy. I prefer a psychological one, say “royal road” … which takes us beyond the social, functions of art more quickly.

Posted on

Art sites

I have just added a small portfolio to an art site: “The Art Weblog” the-artists.org, it is a rich site.

I also have some work on FELT some of it won’t come up for a day or so. This is a rather lovely New Zealand online gallery. One of the most tastefully designed place on the net! What makes it hard is to put my stuff on sites that are ugly, complex.

I have some on the Saachi site, which is not so pretty but highly functional!

Posted on

Now

One month ago I completed the Thousand Sketches project. That bought to a close a life changing year. A Thousand Sketches in one year on a Tablet PC,  it took a few weeks longer than a year and it led me to give up my day job in psychotherapy for 4 months, travel to the USA and New York. It took over my life.

I will continue to add to the Thousand Sketches blog as the story continues as the project has its life. Life as there are exhibitions of one sort or another, news items and more ways in which the digital images find physical form. New insights, and new projects might also stem from that foundation year.

I’ll continue to write in my longstanding Psyberspace blog. I have been popping the odd post-thousand-sketches sketch in there, but the focus of that blog is where psyche &cyberspace meet. I envisage that as a very broad realm, and am happy to journal away in there about most things, but today I wanted a new blog.

This is a journal about my art. Nothing but art, artists, art talk, art history, art philosophy, pictures and projects. This is the first post, and fittingly begins with reference to the last art project, and the last of the 1000 sketches. I have no current art project but will write about one moment to the next. Coming up is my workshop with Jane Zusters in January and an art history course at Canterbury.

Posted on

Easter Saturday 2000 recycled

I was looking for something in the old EditThisPage weblog I kept and was struck by a lovely (if I say so myself) sequence of posts, I have reproduced them here more or less as they were there. I like to keep a series of great pix going in the links. I did that even in the old links pages. I’d never post one I do not like. Aesthetics count and I like to keep tweaking the look. The photo from the Chester Street garden is nostalgic, we moved out last November!

www.oreilly.com — Animal Magnetism: Making O’Reilly Animals

pelican

”From start to finish, an O’Reilly animal requires anywhere from 8 to 20 hours of manual labor. And for reasons no one can fully explain, hand-drawn animals on high-tech computer books became a wild success.”

I think it is because computers were never about the thing itself… the fetish is about the living and organic thing they do. I feel an affinity with the O’Reilly images as I have used the William Morris tapestry in as a logo for years, I see a similarity… the same idea, something, in this case, hand crafted, beautiful and symbolic of the Psybernet work… (tree of) life work contained in the (circle) groups.

With that in mind I kept looking. How is this for something Psybernet, more Morris stuff, the harvesting of our work?

TalkAboutTheNews.com
(Note: the site has since gone)

“Welcome to the first test MP3 audio webcast from TalkAboutTheNews.com.

This is a recording of interviews and conversations at the Mobilization for Global Justice in Washington DC.
Please subscribe to our newsletter for updates and how you can create your own MP3 news/talk webcasts in the near future. TalkAboutTheNews.com will be providing free webspace, discussion boards, polls, and a whole lot more! Stay in touch! Listen to the unedited MP3 WebCast streamed by Live365.com “

Well if this was a test it worked beautifully and it seems great to be able to get the feel from people on the spot… as it is right there. What a contrast the sounds of a demonstration are with my autumn shot in the garden today.

Autumn2000

Proudly powered by WordPress