Zeitgeist – a swing to art, beauty & truth?

Zeitgeist. Time ghost. Spirit of the times. What is going on?

I was in tune with the Zeitgeist while going on marches in 1968-9. I was in tune with the Zeitgeist in 1969-70 when I was going into communal living and alternative schools. And again with personal growth all through the 80s. Psychodrama groups, and psychotherapy. And in the very early 90s setting up Psybernet as an online enterprise, I could see the dot.com era looming, (sadly I was out of sync with monetising my insight) I have loved being experientially involved in a world changing era.

I am curious about my current interested in art & creativity?

Am I sniffing something that is in the air?

I am curious… what do you think, is it time for a reaction against the pragmatic, quick, efficient, functional business like era we have been in? Is there a swing to art, beauty & truth?

They say that the … genius is always ahead of his time. True, but
only because he’s so thoroughly of his time.

Henry Miller, Preface to The Subterraneans,
by Jack kerouac, 1959

We don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t the fish.

The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.

The poet, the artist, the sleuth – whoever sharpens our perception tends to be anti-social; rarely “well-adjusted”, he cannot go along with currents and trends. A strange bond often exists among anti-social types in their power to see environments as they really are.

What we call art would seem to be specialist artifacts for enhancing human perception.

Marshall McLuhan

Windows 7 to get integrated touch features?

Windows 7 might be a while off, and Apple might beat them to it, but it looks as if the future will mean more images, more sketches.

Windows 7 to get integrated touch features? – Engadget

Regardless of how Tablet PCs have actually done in the marketplace, Microsoft has always been a staunch proponent of touch interfaces, and it looks like the next version of Windows, currently under the codename Windows 7, will bundle in multi-touch features like those found in the iPhone and Microsoft’s own Surface.

My New Art Blog

I have just set up a new art blog. In this Moment. That means this psyberspace space can return to its slow reflection & exploration of the psyche in cyberspace in all its forms, not just the visual.

The Michael Leunig Website

While looking over the ditch…

The Michael Leunig Website

Leunig

Picasso and the Bull.

The life of the artist is torn between the need to communicate and the desire to flee.

Artist, leave the world of art,
Pack your goodies on a cart,
Duck out through some tiny hole,
Get away and save your soul.
Leave no footprints, don’t look back,
Take the dark and dirty track;
Cross the border, cross your heart;
Freedom from the world of art.

There is a lot more on the site about Picasso Exhibit that was in Melbourne a while back.

Warhol in Brisbane

Now I want to go to Brisbane.

Link

Exclusive to Brisbane, Australia’s first major Andy Warhol retrospective brings together more than 300 works spanning all areas of his practice from the 1950’s until his death in 1987 – paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, films, videos and installations.

The future is not what it used to be


I am (still) reading Walter Benjamin’s Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction I enjoy the quote that opens it by Paul Valerey. Sounds like Mcluhan, but he is talking (Benjamin too) about shifts due to mechanical development – reproduction, now this needs updating with an essay about art in the age of electronic production.

More Paul Valery quotes follow, including the bit I have paraphrased above from the Benjamin essay.

Continue reading “The future is not what it used to be”

Light

Post 2/2 (this follows from the previous post)

Wayne Thibaud in a recent rather interesting talk spoke about the magic of having a flat sheet of paper and being able to create the sense of space on that sheet. In other words use 2D to create 3D effect.

In a book I just finished about Australian art, it mentions somewhere that the great break through that the moderns made last century was to realise that canvases were flat, and no illusions of depth were needed.

Contrasting values here, but to my mind not contradictory. Postmodern we have the choice. It is ok to be flat, ok to be fake, it is all ok.

So here, now looking accidentally like a Wayne Thibaud food picture is the sketch I made in the last post, with depth added. Note however that it is the depth of the world that I fake here. I am not using the computer to fake the depth of the paint.

To my mind, if there is anything aesthetic at all about any of these doodles, it is that flat (the last one in the last post) one with no light & no fake anything that has the most appeal, whatever that is.

Light on, light off?

I have used Corel Paint, Photoshop, Deep Paint and may other programs but the most innovative and surprising is ArtRage 2. Just updated it today with an update and learnt about a new feature, or perhaps it was always there? I wish I knew about it when I was doing my Thousand Sketches . F5 turns the light on or off. I am not really blogging a feature. It is the concept behind the feature that interests me.

Have a look at this one from here :

Salvaged

#310 Salvaged
Click for larger image.

This was done in Deep Paint, one of the best to achieve that 3d effect. That is what “Light on” does it creates a computer generated effect lighting up the brush strokes as if they had thickness.

Sometimes that is fun, but is it fake!

I think the use of 2D is just fine. It is 2D. Light of for authenticity.

Here is a quick go with light on and off, spot the difference?

More thoughts on space & 3d coming up.