What I have done so far is to block in the water in glazes of phthalo blue, sap greep and burnt umber. The style and technique so far remind me of Tina Mammoser's work (BTW she also likes sap green which is one of my favorite colors) although what I am looking for in the finished work will be more in the direction of a Monet water-lilly piece.

Sorry no images yet. I tried photographing it this morning in a hurry and it was hard to do justice to the saturation of the colors with the little time I had. Maybe tomorrow I'll be able to get you something. You'll have to take my word for it - the water looks deep and watery and the colors are looking beautiful.

Edouard Manet - Edgar Degas - El Greco - Paul Cezanne - The Power of pictures: creating pathways to literacy through art, grade K-6 - Pattern & texture - I spy colors in art - The Usborene art treasury - Primary art: it's the process not the product

We have many more art and art related books, for all grade levels, in our library.

Link to our catalogue

The bottom line as far as I'm concerned is deciding what I want to do and sticking with it. Goal orientation. They call it "Dveikut BaMesima" (adhering to the task) in Hebrew. I will give tips further on but first I think that in order to answer the question well I should put it in perspective. Here are some random facts that will help the reader:

• I am Orthodox Jewish so I don't paint on Shabbat (Saturdays).
• I have five children aged 3.5 to 15.
• I work a nine hour day in hi-tech which plus commutes makes near on 11 hours out of the house.

So how does a normal day look?

• 06:00 - Get up, get ready, coffee and then out to morning service "Shaharit". (luckily the synagogue is just across the street).
• 07:00 - Breakfast with the children, nagging and cajoling them to get ready, washing the dishes. If I'm lucky a bit of spare time.
• 08:00 - Out of the house on foot with children 4+5, drop them at kindergarten and school and wait for my ride to work. Open the laptop and do updates on the website, search for a wireless network someone carelessly left open and do email and surfing, read.
• 09:00-18:00 - At work. Sorry, my employer wouldn't want me to tell about my work and I would want them to read anything not work connected that I do in this time ;-).
• 19:00 - Get home, dinner with family, put children to bed, wash dishes etc.
• 20:00 - Small children in bed. Start of my discretionary time :-)...
• 23:00 - Bed

So as you see that 20:00-23:00 slot is where it all gets done, although normally it's nearer 21:00 till I can get started and that's apart from supermarket evening, ironing, school meetings and everything else.

The tips

• Remember: if you want time, you will find it. There is a saying that if you want domething done, then ask a busy person. It's true, busy people know how to find time. Be a busy person.
• Set yourself action items and timetables to get them done - "this week I will finish this picture".
• Set yearly goals. This will help you keep focussed on where you're going, but also it will give you the satisfaction of being able to chalk up another goal achieved when you get there. Remember, unwritten (and unshared) goals are not goals. Write them down and share them or you won't be committed.
• Schedule your week - Sunday painting, Monday shopping, Tuesday iron 1/2 hour then paint, etc. Then stick to it - it works.
• Watch out what you do with your time. Don't watch television, or surf idly. I don't have a TV and I read on Saturdays when I can't paint or write or work on the computer.
• Use dead time for doing things. I read and work on my website on my way to and from work. That's an hour and a half that would otherwise go wasted every day - like the total waking hours of 22 days!
• Be mean with external commitments. If you are a busy and goal-oriented person, the chances are that you will get approached to serve on school commitees or that you will feel strongly about cleaning up your city or... Don't do it, unless you have loads of time apart from your painting time... and I certainly don't.
• However... take time to be with your family. You may be wasting painting time, but time with your children will never return.

Good luck!

Some years ago the Phillips Collection in Washington held an exhibit of the works of Pierre Bonnard, and I gratefully went to see it.  Prior to that exhibit, I knew Bonnard's paintings chiefly from books.  But here was a chance to study his ravishing color and his crazy drawing face to face. 

On one of my several visits, I took my notebook and some oil pastels and made this drawing of the orange jug of Bonnard's 1930 painting The Dining Room overlooking the Garden from MOMA (Museum of Modern Art, New York).

Making this drawing was like being able to take a part of the painting home.

[Top of the post:  Study of an Orange Jug after Bonnard by Aletha Kuschan]

What I wonder is what passers by thought of this and especially when you see them playing in the middle of a zebra crossing (crosswalk for the Americans).....

Another cool art opportunity afforded by the 21st century.

I'll release Windows and Mac binaries in the next 2 days or so. I also threw a GPL open-source license on it.

You can find the code here (and I know it's still not completely "python-like", that's next):

http://sintixerr.wordpress.com/tone-altering-mosaic-generator-tamogen-in-python/

For sample images, I used two old conte-crayon pieces I'd done and combined them. The first image is of the "whole" mosaic. The second is zoomed in. I love the color variations the code creates when it makes the mosaic - I think the second image could be a standalone piece of art in its own right:

Open issues are the (too) conical tree in the middle, sharpening up the left bank and the foreground and then seeing if there is anything else to do to make it perfect :-).

Something I've enjoyed here a lot is the use of ultramarine for shadows. Shadows are not colored ultramarine in real life, but it is interesting to see how lifelike blue or purple shadows can be. This is something for future work maybe.

I have a bit of a busy week this week, so I'm not sure when I'll get this finished but keep tuned because I hope to have some interesting news tomorrow or the day after, even if I don't have a completed painting...

In the image on the right, you can see what the picture I showed yesterday looks like after I mark it out. This is a scan of my hard copy of the picture after drawing compositional vector lines on it.

Looks a bit of mess doesn't it? So lets look at this a bit more analytically. what I will do is take the lines one-by-one or group-by-group and explain where they are coming from and why.

In this first image you see on the left, I have drawn in the lines eminating from the disappearing point of the river on the top left. These eminate in a radial manner and show the concentration of the focus to this point. Note that what I have drawn in are the border lines of major objects that all link back to this point - the banks of the river and the tops and bottoms of the trees.

Now we will go on to the next set of line I saw here - the parallels. These are again the borders of major objects, but in this case they do not eminate from any single point, but run in parallels. In this picture they run very nicely in a kind of ladder that takes us from the bottom of the picture to the top bordering the foreground bit of the river and the trees on the far bank and those up the hill.

Finally I look for the verticals. The verticals are not necessarily borders but are often run along axes of objects and link the tips of things. Here we see then marking the axes of the prominent trees. the third line (counting from the left) follows the borders of the bottom left and top right trees while passing through a tree axis on the far bank on the way.

My next stage from marking out the lines on the reference image is to transfer this to the canvas. This I do by measuring out the line poisitions and then I mark in charcoal. Next stage is blocking in the objects, but that will wait for the next post.

You can see it here on the left. As you can see I started from the top down while trying at the same time to work simultaneously on various parts at once. So far I have the background, trees and river in. What still needs to be done is the bottom left hand corner (the most foreground always comes last and then maybe to add some more white foam on the river and maybe to add something to the far-bank trees to make them stand out.

The colors I have used here are ochre and burnt umber on the earth color side, sap green and bright green and phthalo and ultramarine blues. I have used the ultramarine quite extensively in shade in and under the trees as well as for the rocks in the river. The sap green also got use outside its natural habitat of the darks of the trees and has found its way into the far exposed rock on the hill behind.

All in all the painting is coming on really well and is set to be a good painting. This is one of those flowing-singing paintings I wrote about while doing the evening in the Galilee picture a couple of months back. Maybe I should take note of this when I am choosing subjects. I seem to like these small scale outdoors sceenes best - not man-made environments and not sweeping landscapes. Hmmm....

The wireless was a lifesaver sitting on the 8th floor and I spent a good amount of time on my Mac trying to add "color" to my python mosaic generator. It was harder than I thought it would be. It looks like the Image.point function of PIL operates on three color bands simultaneously (ie, it wont update Red, Green, and Blue independently). The fix I found was to use getData and putData, but it's not working quite right yet. Hopefully it'll be done this weekend.

Other than that, I only had to go find one straggler before shop closed up at 10.

(edit: the following are just observations and thoughts. they might not accurately reflect reality. just thinking out loud folks . I also wrote the second half of this in direct response to a specific email I was shown from one anonymous artist to a volunteer. )

In the past few times Ive been at Artomatic, though, I've noticed something that kind of irritates me about the bad or mediocre reviews (and reviewers) of AOM:

There are two approaches to "seeing" Artomatic -

1 - Spend, on average, two seconds deciding whether or not to get closer to a partition. Half the time, many of the partitions are outside of your peripheral vision and quite a few are missed. The people who take this approach don't usually read anything the artist has written. Their initial interest is based on their 2 second visual assessment, nothing else.

The other approach is:

2 - Make sure every partition is looked at. One at a time. Slowly. These people give each artist their due time. But there are 800+ visual artists. Innundation happens rapidly and attention/cognition dwindles.

In either case, only a small portion of the works at AOM are both grasped and retained. The others tend to fall out as peripheral noise.

There's no problem with this, it's the nature of AOM

The problem comes when people act like looking at the show in these ways is the same as reviewing or experiencing a 20 artist show. It's not. You can't go through the show once, retain some small percentage of it, and then claim there is no good art like you can at a smaller show.

AOM should be walked through multiple times on multiple days and the experience layered over multiple times before strong conclusions and opions are reached. Otherwise, it's like reviewing DC after running through it in 24 hours.

I also find myself at odds with many reviewers' positions on the "quality" of the art. While art typical of local galleries might be hard to find at Artomatic, I look at that as one of the many reasons this show is so valuable to the community. To be honest, I find much (but not all) of local gallery art to be the same self-aggrandized, repetitious, mediocrity incarnated material as the Artomatic works are claimed to be. But at least at Artomatic, you tend to find pieces closer to the heart of the community.

Said nicer: Artomatic serves a different form of social expression than galleries do.

Similarly, in my own life, I've found that my friends, family, and coworker's usually cannot visually distinguish between gallery-quality work and that of a pre-schooler. It doesn't connect with them. I think this is has been a problem with "art" for years. People would (to use an artdc'ism) rather go get their art from IKEA. Obviously, there's a disconnect somewhere.

If the art fails to resonate with the culture or community, what measure of quality are we using?

If it is some intellectual standard by which we are judging Artomatic, I have a difficult time believing most people have managed to go through a statistically significant portion of the art at the show with anywhere near the level of attention required to make that kind of judgment. If so, they have either spent an extremely large amount of time at the show or are a better person than I am.

But that was never really the point of Artomatic - to fit in to anyone's idea of "quality". The show is intended to be a forum of universal self-expression, regardless of others' judgments and criticisms. In that light, the show itself could even be looked at as a work of art in and of itself. What do 1000 artists, professionals, students, children, parents, and others produce when thrown together to express themselves visually? As an artist, I find the answer to that makes fascinating art.

There are over 800 visual artists. If someone can't find a single artist worthy of merit - especially when a number of those artists currently have work in other galleries and/or are nationally recognized - then my opinion is they either have not tried very hard or are not particularly interested in doing so. (Edit: I stole this sentiment, partially, from a comment secretworm made on artdc)

But, in the spirit of Artomatic, everyone is entitled to their opinions.

:)

What I am going to do is make a couple of posts on this subject, so that they don't get too long. I will probably digress later also on to how I progress from the initial marking out and building up the underpainting and then the whole picture.

Well now I am working on a new picture (see the reference image on the right) that is a section from my ravine of the Jordan river picture that I did back in 2005. That picture was by the way, my first picture on canvas. Until then I had painted on board only.

What always amazes me (though I suppose it shouldn't) is that whenever I analyze a reference photograph that I have chosen to paint, I always "discover" compositional features that "just appeared" there without necessarily any forethought. For example, a picture that just hangs together and has great composition "just happens" to divide on thirds and have great compositional vectors so that elements just lead your eye from one object to another within the picture.

In this one, the thirds "just happen" to come out on the bigger trees on the top right and bottom left and on the start and bend of the river. Those trees "just happen" to balance each other off and the river just flows between the other third marks. "Just happens" :-).

Artomatic Install: My Space DONE!!

Originally uploaded by sintixerr

Ok. So the space is done (minus a guestbook which Ill try and bring in before the Cure show Friday at the Patriot Center).

It's a little more cleaned up than the last picture, better lighting, straightened drapery, a table, etc.

I ultimately ran out of time to do all the extra stuff I wanted to do. Ill most likely look back on that as a good thing.

It's still fun to see people realize for the first time why the picture is so pixelated!! Dawning realization...a smile...then "oh wow!"...tough to get tired of that!

The position is really unfortunate the way it faces away from the foot traffic, but Im lucky to have a space at all and even luckier to be across from Angela and Paivi.

I also like the way my space looks next to my neighbor's.

Here's a shot of Erin (right) getting holga shots of Paivi (left), Angela (middle), and their spaces:

(As a side note, Paivi has two pictures of me up....that makes 4 portraits of me total up at Artomatic this year. Wtf? Im -not- photogenic) :)

Artomatic Space - Almost Done

Originally uploaded by sintixerr

Ok I so I got in to Artomatic tonight finally - despite feeling really physically bad all day long and managed to get the bulk of the installation work done.

This picture is the result and should help make the previous comments and pictures make a little more sense.

My big concerns tonight were lighting and hanging. I had no idea how I was going to fit those pieces together evenly AND close together. The normal wire method of hanging simply wasn't going to work. Instead, I opted for screws with big, flat heads and hung the frames from them directly. I only used one screw per framed section so that I could pivot them to fit any variance in the positions of the adjoining sections. They're not perfectly even by any means, but close enough for government as they say. I dont think it detracts from the effect.

They are, however, not as stable as I'd like so Im going to work on securing them better somehow. That and clean them - we have 3 cats in a 600 sq foot studio apartment. It shows

Unfortunately, the lighting is going to be a bigger problem. I want to (and still will) light up the area with red lighting, but the lights I have there (1 100 watt and 2 50's) is simply not strong enough to overcome the ambient light from the window. Because so much of the piece is dark - and because Ritz's shiotty matte printing forced me to use lustre - up until about 8pm it's really hard to make out what the large image actually IS due to all the reflections caused by the window light. Im hoping that If I bring in a couple of stronger lights, the edge of the problem will be blunted a bit.

I had also considered using blue and yellow lighting to create a subtle mix of color on the black and white pieces, but Erin (Halo) rightly thought that the interplay would be lost in all but the darkest surrounding conditions. So, Im sticking with red.

There's also a question of the other mixed media elements I was planning, but if the image remains unclear in the daylight, there's not much sense in covering it up further, so we'll see.

I was also really please to run into a number of artdc'rs at the end of the night who stopped by my space! It was good to see Halo, even in her sleep deprived state. These last few days make a lot of people loopy. I thought she held up her end of the convo remarkably well and appreciated her input!

We talked about organizing an artDC dinner after opening weekend, but it seems Barry and Jesse have beaten us to the punch.

Tom Cardarella made an appearance down on 8 as well and we had a great talk about his work, mine, AOM, etc. I really like what he's doing with his space and that kind of piece resonates with me as an artist.

Lastly, Cynthia & Paul of Britishink did come down as well. Being a bit slow and distracted, I was honest to god surprised to see that Paul didn't actually have a tophat and was not sepia-colored. Again, I'd walked by him more than a couple of times thinking there was something super familiar about him. It was cool to finally meet both of them. I'm such a big fan of their space that I don't even know what to say about it. Like everyone else, Im thinking about getting ink...but probably won't. I wouldn't dream of getting something done that I didnt draw myself...and I havent sat down yet and created the kind of inspired drawing I'd want for myself. My wife has 3, but personally Im not getting Sisters of Mercy or Cure tats and I'm not a scorpio.

It was a good evening and there was definitely a lot more hustle and bustle going on than the previous evenings and Im really looking forward to seeing everyone's lights on and the floors packed.

Artomatic Piece

Originally uploaded by sintixerr

So -

As mentioned earlier, when I first really started thinking about AOM this year, I thought I was going to be in Arkansas for the majority of the show and wanted to put together something "simple" (yeah, right, me? simple?). I was so strapped for time, in fact, that Angela and Paivi had to grab me some space for the second year in a row while I was out of town. ( My space is on the 8th floor at SE D6 btw.)

Ok. Great. Have space. Project? Art? No so much.  Ultimately I decided to do a huge (6'x6') self portrait installation (covered in earlier blog posts - http://sintixerr.wordpress.com/2008/04/27/python-photography-digital-art-artomatic/ )

So, uhm, how do you print a photo that's 6'x6'??? I ended up deciding to print the picture in 9 sections, 24"x24" each. I originally wanted to do an 8'x8' image, but at 24x24" sections I could go one price category lower at Chrome than 32"x32". Still, lots of cash. Hrm. Where else will print this? For a much more reasonable sum?

It turns out that -Ritz Camera- of all places will print really large images for less than half the price of Chrome. Supposedly archival. I test printed one 24x24" section and it came out perfect. Sweet. I had a printing solution.

For framing I went with Angela's suggestion of American Framing and picked the smallest frame borders I could - with no matting. The ultimate effect would hopefully look like the face was peering in through...something (window-esque?). That was an easy process and everything showed up toot-sweet.

I went with overnightprints.com for the business cards. They did a good job but, in hindsight, I didnt. I think my cards are a little bit juvenile and cheesy, but, we all make mistakes sometimes I mean, who puts "Artist" on their cards? I guess I do. Meh.

While I was still playing with my final image, I met Angela and Paivi at our spaces last Sunday to help them paint, do lights, and take a look at my space.

I got there first and spent an hour or so mocking up what I wanted things to look like with rope and gorilla tape (it made sense then). The final result was looking pretty good and I was feeling very satisfied. Until Ang and Paivi showed up.

"Thats not your space, Jack"

"Whu?"

"Thats. Not. Your. Space. Its the one next to it."

--Insert vulgar words here--

Luckily I hadn't done anything permanent and I sheepishly took down all my stuff. At any rate, I knew what it was going to look like and everything was good.

Angela and Paivi that day managed to paint their space, buy lights, put up lights. I managed to...put down duct tape and put up one wall of the shadowbox (seen in pics later). Really, I hate this part. Im slow as HELL at painting walls and usually a mess. People always regret asking me to help them paint their house/interior. I suck at it.

I came in the next Thursday after work by myself to try my luck alone and got a lot further. I managed to put up the second shadowbox wall, put down a layer of paint, and not end up with blood or paint all over my clothes. It was a good day in that regard. Still, I had forgotten paint rollers and had to use a brush. Those partitions, even with primer, suck. up. the paint. I was despairing a little bit about how things were looking, but put that aside knowing how much was left to do.

So far, I'd run into a couple of people here and there that I knew, but the AOM space is -so- large this year that unless youre actively wandering around looking for people or just outright lucky, it's entirely possible to work with a dozen people you know there at the same time and miss them completely. (Except for Melissa, whom I run into every single time Im in the elevator.)

This past Saturday night I had my first volunteer shift with Angela and Paivi, so I came in ahead of time to get some work done. I met my "partition-mate", who's name I can't recall at the moment, but who's work I had been familiar with and am really psyched to be next to. If I had space in my apartment, Id buy some of it honestly. More painting ensued and things were good.

Queue the volunteer shift.

I have a gripe here. We were given a 3 minute introduction to our responsibilities by the GM on duty. The instructions did not mention two big things that we were asked about -all- night:

1. Lights. Anything about them. Where to get them? What to do if any were broken? Etc. I know this was a GM responsibility, but by Saturday you'd have figured that there were enough questions being asked that the volunteers should be given some sort of heads-up.

2. Brightest Young Things:

Anyone who was at AOM that night figured out very quickly that there was some shindig on the first floor. The only instructions of info we were given by anyone about the first floor party was "oh yeah, tell people bathrooms are on the 10th and 12th floors if they start bitching about the first floor bathrooms".

What about the first floor bathrooms? Huh? And who's making all that racket next door? Apparently Philipa Hughs' Pinkline and Artomatic collaborated to help throw a relaunch party for a website called BrightestYoungThings.com ( http://www.brightestyoungthings.com/events/byt-relaunch-party-1200-1st-street-ne/ )

So, in addition to AOM people, there were tons of the trendiest, coolest, hippest, artsiest, brightest young things wandering in and out of the front door. Nothing against them (and it was cool something else was going on there), but it was really a pain in the ass to do "lobby" duty while there were bands playing, a plastic fence between us and them, etc.

I was asked to "keep people from there going up to AOM"...but really...how was anyone supposed to tell the difference? There were also a lot of people bringing in artist materials through the lobby that I didnt catch because I couldn't always pick them out from the crowd milling about in the lobby.

This all would've been cool if we had been given heads-up....but we weren't. We were left to piece it together ourselves...

I also wish I'd NOT worn the -skankiest- shirt I own to paint in. Felt like I was bringin the place down just sitting next to the party Wink

The monotony was broken up a bit by a trip to Sketchies (aka Wendy's) to bring us back some much-needed diet cokes (Angela and Paivi were covering Loading Dock duty that night) and also by Jim, who gestured for another volunteer and myself (I think he meant me too) to come out front where he proudly showed us the new lighting for the Artomatic signage in the windows. The "ART" in "ARTOMATIC" was glowing red! Cool!

By the end of the shift, we were all -done-. Id gone running that morning for the first time since the Cherry Blossom 10 miler and between that, working on the space, and the volunteer shift, I was no longer human. Paivi wanted to take some pics of the graffiti kids up on our floor (Cool doing their thing (didnt work out), but we did run into Halo and Arty4ever putting down some finishing touches on Michael's space (which looks great!).

I also met a couple of cool volunteers, but unfortunately was too brain-fried to ask for the business card of one of them and now forget her name. :( Ill need to check the volunteer list later if I can...

That brings me to today. Lights are up, painting is finished, etc. I just need to get some fabric to frame the shadowbox, hang the piece, and add some other artistic touches to the installation (and it will be an installation) that I dont want to describe here. I managed to frame all 9 sections (woohoo - Im really slow at that, so Im proud of myself here) today as well!

Ok, whew. Finally, this behemoth of a post is at it's end.

(As a side note, the lighting in the first pic is provided by a couple of White Lighting 10,000 strobe, which we've now started using as generic apartment lamps lately. Heh.)

I'm still mulling over what I want to say about the whole thing, but tonight I'd like to offer a prelude by way of a small technical glimpse into the core of the piece.

Essentially, I've been wanting to work on the idea of self for some time. The Second Life work had addressed some of that, but -primarily- from a perspective that was fairly extreme and lacked a lot of emotional resonance (not least with me).

So this year, I'm going to be mixing up my newfound interest in photography with some traditional sketching technique, adding a dash of emotional investment, and finally tying it together with some custom computer scripting.

It's this last component I want to talk about. There are a lot of "themes" Im starting to address with this piece (later post) which made me feel like I needed to use some sort of mosaic. Initially, I thought I was going to do a self-portrait of myself....composed the very same self portrait. This would constitute the anchor concept of the piece.

The image was originally supposed to look something like this (right image is zoomed in on the left eye where you can see the main image is composed of many copies of itself)

But how does one go about creating this kind of mosaic? Doing it by hand would take so long I'd never finish!!!

Maybe there are programs "on the internet" that will do it? Maybe (it turns out there -sortof- are), but what's the fun in that?

Instead, I decided to write my own program to do it. This has a lot to do with the fact that computers are a huge part of who I am and writing code to help me generate a self-portrait struck a chord with me

I had played around with the Python scripting language back in my NetSec days (for rapidly setting up data analysis) and while I had never been particularly proficient in Python and it had been some years since I'd worked with it, I -had- enjoyed it's way of dealing with the world of bits and bytes. it seemed like a great language to try this out in.

So, I grabbed my new Macbook (heh. Microsoft forced me into -that- with Vista) - which had python already on it - and sat down to write a self-referential mosaic generator. Away we go!
Hrm. Or not. How does one actually go about editing images with a scripting language often used in web pages? It beat me! I'd never done it before. In any language.

More Hrm's. Google kindly suggested I give the Python Imaging Library a try, so I checked out the tutorial online. "Wow. This might be doable", I thought to myself. This looks like a really simple library.

And it was....the code below took about 3 days to write starting from "Uh, how do for/next loops work in Python again?". So while it's not a LONG program and it's NOT elegant, and it CAN be done a lot better, it does the trick.

In fact, not only does it do the trick, but the code now lets you specify which image to use to recreate the base image of the mosaic. (And the concept of the art piece has followed with that, Im now using two self-portraits.)

The program I wrote is a little different from web-clients for Mosaic creation I've seen. Those go and grab images (often at random) from a repository and create a mosaic of another image out of them based on which filler-images already best-fit which piece of the base image. The filler images, themselves, arent altered.

In my code, the user specifies one filler image and one base image. The code then goes through and checks tone averages and alters the filler image to fit into a given section of the base image. If the filler's average tone is higher than the current section of the base image being converted, the program darkens the filler image and then pastes it in.

The ultimate effect resulted in this image created from one base self-portrait and one (different) filler self-portrait (Click it so see full detail):

The code which produces this image  can be found here:

http://sintixerr.wordpress.com/tone-altering-mosaic-generator-tamogen-in-python/#comment-2512

Please be kind...it really isn't pretty yet and I know it :)

"lines and colors is a blog about drawing, sketching, painting, comics, cartoons, webcomics, illustration, digital art, concept art, gallery art, artist tools and techniques, motion graphics, animation, sci-fi and fantasy illustration, paleo art, storyboards, matte painting, 3d graphics and anything else I find visually interesting. If it has lines and/or colors, it's fair game." -Charley Parker

lines and colors

lines and colors Critique: "Sassone’s brusque brushstrokes threaten to break up the representational image, as if it were on the verge of dissolution, but he holds back just enough, and includes enough elements of visual interest in his paintings, that they work both as representations of real scenes and severe abstractions from them."

In case you're wondering, the title is a pun. The picture (now finished) was painted of a view view from the end of the last street in the Nofei Aviv neighbourhood of Beit Shemesh. Hmmm. Well, I thought it was funny.

Anyway, as I said another picture finished. The image above is a bit less than optimal but it get it more or less.

The sky was done with a broad (1") soft brush and I like the effect. It is ultramarine and phthalo blues and titanium white. Moving down, pallete contains sap green, ochre and azo lemon yellows and burnt sienna and I have used ultramarine and titanium white for getting the distance.

All in all I like it a lot. Now I just need to take a good photo of it and upload it to my website.

A few comments on techniques. As I pointed out in my first post on this painting, I set out using "vectors" - lines that descibe the dynamics of the pictiure and then painted in by feel from there. This is rather than setting out by grid, that I think gives a more static feel to the finished picture.

I painted from the top down. The top represents the furthest object, so this is logical. I think the important point here for this painting is that I didn't build up in layers, but rather started from the top down and just kept going. Relative to some other pictures I've done in the recent past, I laid most of the paint on more or less neat and only used a small amount of water mainly for lubrication and not in order to create a wash.

I was also a lot bolder with color. Right from the start I decided to go for the rather extremely purple shaded cliffs and to reproduce this in the path at the bottom. It followed from here that I needed to make the trees and the other colors bold. The backlighting on the trees that starkly contrasts the cliffs both in hue and in color value is what really makes the picture.

I am really happy with this one. A great start towards my exhibition (still dateless).

Sometimes there are pictures that when I am working on them, I keep saying "I hate this picture", "it's not right" and worse curses. The creative process just doesn't flow and the birth is hard. Generally they come out OK or even better in the end and often after a cool-off period I can even get to like them.

And then there are pictures that just seem to flow out of the brush. I don't know exactly what it is that makes the difference. Is it me? Is it the subject? Is it the timing, the combination of mood and subject? If I could work out the formula then not only would I enjoy myself more (that's a goal), but we would benefit from better paintings. More importantly the paintings would be more me.

What is that elusive element that makes all the difference? Hayim at Nofim says that he can see it in the paintings - I certainly can as well. You can see it in labored overworked finishes, that even when they are finished after multiple reworks still just don't look right. They don't sing.

This one sings.

What always amazes me is how the painting just flows, even after such a long break. The difficulty in getting started is the fear of creating a bad piece - yet when I actually get started, the picture comes out just right. Well, I haven't finished yet, so maybe I should keep quiet till I've seen the last brushstroke...

The painting is of a view in Nahal Kziv in the Western Galilee in northern Israel. The picture shows a view towards evening, looking down the valley showing the contrast of the dark cliffs in shadow and the bright low sun pouring through the branches of the trees.

In the bottom section of the picture that I haven't covered yet, you can see the guide lines I put in to aid the composition. This is a technique I often use to mark out a picture. I take the reference photo and draw lines along the major compositional lines and then mark these same lines out on the canvas in charcoal. As I paint I refer to these lines to position the elements on the canvas. I find this to be a lot better than marking out a grid as it helps transfer the dynamics of the picture and not just the element positioning.

Maybe I'll do a post about this technique some time in some more detail.

After thinking this all over and putting the question to the forum in WetCanvas, I came to the conclusion that if your art is something that can be specified down to the last detail, then it doesn't matter who did it. However if (as in painting) you can't specify every brushstroke and the way it will look when laid on, then the artist needs to do the work himself. I just read a new and related discussion on Maggie Stiefvater's blog today. She was writing about new regulations by the Colored Pencil Society that say that if you ever posted your work as a WIP on an Internet forum and people commented, then you can't submit the work to one of their exhibitions, because it is no longer your own original work.

Maggie's word to describe this was "bollocks". I agree. This is a totally ridiculous stipulation. As she rightly points out, no artist works in a vacuum and will always get opinion from other artists or just plain wellwishers during the creative process. Personally, I ask my children and wife for their opinions. Sometimes I veto their suggestions, but they do give valuable feedback. Does this make my work any less my own? As we have already said - "b******ks".

There are of course boundaries here as well. As we have already established, work cannot be called the artist's unless either he did it or he specified it to the last detail and somebody else actually did it.

My concern their was around the craftsmanship of the work; this argument is about its spirit.

I would argue that if the work was specified and dictated by another then it is not the artists's work - otherwise it is the artists's interpretation of whatever it may be and therefore it is his work. This is really the same as our previous case: if somebody else can specify the work and you just fabricated it according to his specification then it is not your work but his. Otherwise it is both your interpretation and your craftsmanship and therefore yours.

What do you think?

John McQueen, "Beside Myself"

The Textile Museum in Washington, DC, recently had an aptly-named exhibit, "Private Pleasures: Collecting Contemporary Textile Art", showcasing over fifty pieces of textile art from eighteen Washington-area private collectors.

Thumbnails of some of the art may be seen here.

Since the theme of textiles is rather broad, pieces ranged from tapestries to quilted art to cast paper to willow withes, both 2D and 3D. The curator, Rebecca A.T. Stevens, had a good eye for interesting and masterful work. The collectors are to be commended for buying such pieces and their willingness to loan it to the museum for lengthy display.

Part of Ms Stevens' notes for the exhibition:

Textile art represents a significant change in art making which occurred in the mid-twentieth century when artists began to explore textiles as an expressive medium by investigating the “the language of thread.” The collectors represented in this exhibition are fascinated by “the language of thread” which includes both the formal properties of fiber — line, color, texture — and the significance of textile objects in the human story — identity, status, and memory. Collector Marc Grainer observes, “These works have everything a collector seeks. They combine technical virtuosity with challenging, interesting ideas.”

One work I particularly enjoyed was "Beside Myself", by John McQueen, pictured above. He often poses a question with his pieces. With this one, in his statement he asks, "Does a basket symbolize me if I am known for my basket sculpture?"

Besides being obviously well-crafted, I found it witty and worth examining closely. The figure's posture is literally navel-gazing. Looking down into the basket, it is apparent that the figure and the basket become all of a piece, rather than the basket being separate from the figure. I also find this medium interesting for its semi-transparency, for how a relatively stiff object like a twig can be shaped at the artist's will.

More examples of John McQueen's work:

"Ganesh"

"Turning My World On Its Ear"

an image from the Schweinfurth Art Center:

Faith Ringgold, Dinner at Gertrude Stein's, 1991, Acrylic on canvas, tie-dyed, pieced fabric border, 79 x 84"

I'm not looking for champions of either format, just a list of what, as an artist, you can do with this but not with the other medium; what effects you can get with this but not that medium; what subjects work better in that medium than this one; etc. I would also like to hear from people who work in an opposite manner to the obvious way that the medium might suggest.

Yesterday, Terry Grant, Gerrie Congdon, and I saw Faith Ringgold 's piece, Marlon Riggs: Tongues Untied, A Painted Story Quilt, (1994, Acrylic on canvas with pieced fabric border, 89 x 59.5,") in the Cooley Gallery at Reed College.

Marlon Riggs: Tongues Untied

Ringgold is obviously a painter, with a strong point of view and subject matter that she works in sophisticated (albeit apparently "naive") ways. She paints in acrylic on canvas, and in the piece I saw, she stitched ("quilted" is too strong a word) with what looked like dental floss in a large all-over grid pattern. But her work, even if it stretches it a bit to be called quilted, references quilts, particularly in her use of borders and repeated motifs, like flowers. In the piece we saw, she centered her figure, bed quilt fashion, and echoed the border floral pattern in the pattern on the chair in which her primary subject was seated. Her borders and corners, however, while from a distance might appear to be a commercial fabric, are painted (even if "pieced") in a fairly primitive style. She binds her paintings with traditional colorful bindings.

Ringgold's work is also full, sometimes slightly chaotic, in the manner of many quilted works -- lots of busy-ness, in the best sense of the word.

Faith Ringgold, Tar Beach 2, 1990, Silkscreen on silk, 66 x 66"

Ringgold is obviously aware of the confusions her work creates between the traditions of painting, of quilting, of black people, of cultural and material heritages in the world of art as well as the world of African Americans and white Anglos. She loves playing with stories that the confusions can create.

Faith Ringgold, The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles , 1991, Acrylic on canvas, tie-dyed, pieced fabric border, 74 x 80"

Comparisons can help us understand more fully why we choose to work as we do and how we can enhance our choices -- or change them. So help me with this list -- what can you do in your quilted medium that you can't do with paint? How does Ringgold subvert the quilted medium while also referencing it? Does she honor it with her referencing?