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.

Depth

That last post is something I have been thinking about for ten years. Here is the proof, a proposal I made for a cybernetic conference in 1997, on the theme of Neccessity & Metaphor

Here is the relevant bit:

Possible theme of a paper could be the — Necessity and Metaphor. Contrary to popular belief ‘we can not think what we like’, words and metaphors have a power of their own. I would draw on the ideas of Jung and Hillman and relate it to metaphors of cyberspace. An example I am pondering at the moment is the word ‘depth’ — is the medium conducive to depth, or only breadth, and height?

So when I listen to Collings (see previous post) these old ideas are stirred. Perhaps proving that cyberspace doeas have depth, especially when old ideas can surface.

Matthew Collings, deep and shallow

I listened to a podcast today for the second time – Kim Hill interviewing Matthew Collings. I realised I had blogged it before in Thousand Sketches, and there is a link there too – I recommend it.

If this is an age of shallowness then it is sort of deep to be shallow. Kim: “Shallow is the new deep”.

I don’t buy that though. It is an age where we are more conscious than ever and we flee. There are oceans of depth and we flee to the shallow. But not everyone. The “long tail” comes into play. At the top of the zeitgeist it may be shallow, ironical & tabloid, but down the tail it gets more interesting, there are activists, thinkers, and people having real relationships.

Anyway, it was a good listen even for the second time, happened cause I was cleaning up after re-installing a backup.