Two Shades

 

Two versions of another one: most recent on the right.

November Girl

I've still been working on the small, dark, portraits through November.  Seems like a good thing to do when night falls mid-afternoon.  A sample from one in the works. 

Savannah: Moss and Global Art

Spent two full days in Savannah this week, checking out the arts scene and admiring the local flora. There's copious amounts of Spanish moss hanging off of pretty much everything about town, even more then I remember from my childhood visits to Louisiana.  The old town is filled with small parks and old trees that are absolutely gorgeous.  I spite of the cool weather and walkability of the streets, I did spend a large amount of time indoors trolling for art.  I hit two of the Telfair museums on the first day, the contemporary Jepson Center for two current exhibits and the Telfair Academy which houses a modest permanent collection. On the second day I made it to SCAD's new museum, an impressive new complex with equally impressive hand dryers. Liza Lou on view with Kehinde Wiley, and Bill Viola, featuring a video that I actually like quite a lot but can't seem to get away from. (I first viewed "The Crossing" in Warsaw, Poland.) Not to disparage any of the artists, but it seems you can travel to any major city across the planet and see the same things over and over.  It's great in some ways to give every towns a chance to host all the big names, but the names of the contemporary art elite also become brands as inescapable as Coca Cola, The Gap, or Mc Donald's.   It leaves me to wonder if museum curators aspiring to global relevance are left with less choice on what to stock than the manager of a Disney Store outlet. Yet, it was the first time I witnessed a Wiley in person, so it was an opportunity to intersect with another New York artist outside a Chelsea venue--effect achieved.   But this too, is hypocrisy, as blogging big names only serves to establish my cred as an educated art viewer.  Time might be better spent giving props to the Jepson Center for a nice show of a local artist, Besty Cain, or reporting that the Telfair Academy had a curious amount of snow paintings like the one by George Bellows.  Digressions aside, it was a great little trip and Savannah is a city I'd love to visit again anytime.

The last picture is from the flight home, which was amazingly clear.  Perhaps why I was having such a removed perspective about Manhattan.....

Fall Colors

Some shots taken from the kayak on the journey from Buker to Jimmy Pond in Lichfield, Maine.

Project Photofly

This could be considered the second part my recent post "digital distractions."  While playing around with Sculptris is fun, I was lamenting that I couldn't simply scan sculptures that I make by hand, IRL  I'm aware that three dimensional scanning technology. exists, but the cost is still prohibitive to something that I'd have to label as a whim at this point.  I've Googled, and it seems that some people are working on some hacks for Kinect to to make a more affordable scanner, but I'd suspect the resolution will be pretty crude.  While I cheer for power to the people, I surely am not going to waste precious studio time learning to program to help the open source revolution.  So, suffice to say I've been thinking on this lately and imagine my surprise when my October issue of Wired arrived and I hit page 68.  

On page 68, they reviewed Autodesk's Project Photofly.  The gist is a free program that allows you to use your point and shoot camera to make a 3D scan. No doubt every geek who reads the issue will be driven to scan their own head, their friend's heads, and all the knickknacks within reach, but I think this program could be of great use to artists with a few more enhancements.   (Autodesk, if you want to hire me on as a consultant, gimme a call.)    A caveat to the casually interested:  the process is very labor intensive, and involves making well over 40 photographs, and an upload to a supercomputer to do the real work.  That said, I was rather impressed by the results.

The truly amazing part remains, sadly, trapped in my computer.   Trust me, my sculpture is scanned into virtual space.  I can play with it, relight it, zoom, and rotate it in any angle.  As a novelty feature, the program allows users to plot a film of their own Matrix-like rotations and upload the video to YouTube.  While you could wave a video recorder around an object for the same experience produced by this video, remember the part currently trapped in my computer.   If I had the necessary digital skills in other software to clean this baby up, I could print out a version for you, and then things would start to get really interesting.

From The Archive, 3

Digital Distractions: Sculptris

Sometime in February I picked up an old block of clay and started playing around. The result were a couple of sketches that were a fun distraction from my core paintings, but unrealized as to their application to my recent nocturnal explorations. As I responded in a comment, I perhaps came to making figures as naturally in clay as a child as to sketching.   In grad school, a colleague remarked that "I painted like a sculptor."   While I may have suspected at the time he was simply trying to sound profound, I have since agreed with his proclamation.

Often, when I am painting a form in two dimensional space, I imagine it as if I am forming it three dimensionally.   A curving line in space gets compressed by the flattening demands of the illusion, as the 2D eclipse follows the same flow as in the mind as a 3D circle it could represent.   It's not an easy concept to grasp if you don't draw, so I hope that my non-artist readers will forgive my musings.  Suffice to say, when I heard about this computer modeling program which mimics some of the hand manipulations of clay forms, I was intrigued.

I admit, I've very briefly experimented with programs such as Painter (about one evening's worth), and found the initial learning curve of the Wacom tablet as in input to be off-putting. Similarly, while I've watched other veteran painters like David Hockney as they experiment with the ipad as a painting tool, I haven't been personally interested in making crude marks with my fingertips.  In the digital age, if technology grows more accessible by the day and I'm holding out until someone makes an actual artist-level touch interface in a reasonable price-range.  The free download of the Sculptris beta met my last criteria, and I was impressed by the rather natural interface.   While I may have lost five hours of painting time, I did manage to make a mushy version of a clay sleeper above by sheer trial and error from imagination.   The intense symmetry is a result of using a mirror option with each step that builds form in half the time.  While I have yet to play with the program any further, or add hair to the guy, it's a neat tool that I would recommend to anyone looking for alternatives to the tablet interface.    Now, I will just have to wait until someone makes a Kinect hack so that I can just do this in real space with my hands.....