From Point A to Point B: Making Art Again

Thanks, Lacey!

I think my recently passed dog Lacey wants to see her Mama doing something she loves. I knew when I heard her ghostly dog tags mysteriously jingling that she was telling me "Get on with things you love- I know you haven't forgotten me".

It's still lonesome here in my computer room/quasi art studio because she always laid under my desk. Still I feel her presence strongly in here, and it keeps me good company, as my other dog Smokey is as quiet as a church mouse. He's feeling the loss too.

As far as getting from Point A to Point B, I joined a collage group seven weeks ago and make a collage a week. I also joined a mandala group a few weeks later. How on earth are those two things related? Well, both involve art, and both are ways I've been expressing my creative urges and my emotions. And recent events have brought the emotions to the forefront.

This week my collage was about art and the spirit it evokes in me, the urge to play. Our animals teach us about this important part of life every day but we often ignore it as silly or childish or foolish. But we really need it. It keeps us balanced and healthy. The animals know it but we forget. So the collage was called "The Point Is Play, Play, Play" and here it is:



I got some good feedback on it and was pleased with it. I had been playing with some new filters for my graphics program today so when I got a challenge to create a mandala with an Autumn feel to it, remembering Lacey and Smokey's past antics, I decided to play.

I got out the central image of the collage, the woman in orange, and used a new kaleidescope filter on it that had all kinds of settings to play with. I dialed away, moved sliders and just had fun, till I finally came up with this image.



I cropped it into a circle, and voila, instant flame medicine wheel. I wanted to do more though. I brought in a second image, a photo I took of some faded yellow Ixoras, seen here.



I cropped that to get the best bits of the flowers. Then I got brave enough to try making a mask with an alpha channel - my first ever - and was successful. I loaded in the flowers as partially transparent and moved them around to look the best with the medicine wheel, using the mask to get rid of the unwanted parts of the flowers.

Last I played with the color and added an edge and a drop shadow, as well as a background. One final cropping and I was done. Here it is, Autumn Medicine Wheel:



You'd never believe one picture would lead to another, would you?


It just goes to show, we have an innate need to play. So go outside (or inside) and do it!

The Source of Creativity

Some major kewl info on creativity found on the website of Charlotte Rains Dixon called "This is Your Brain When it is Creative", here. At least for jazz musicians, an MRI has shown that creativity is like a dream state: "Creativity in the form of jazz improv utilized the same parts of the brain as dreaming. First of all inhibition switched off and then self expression switched on. The musicians also showed heightened sensory awareness, with areas associated with touch, hearing and sight lighting up."



While the areas may turn out to be different for writing and art, the implications are staggering. Are we at last onto the source of the wellspring of our creativity, and on our way into tapping into it directly, not just by chance?

A Picture Worth a Thousand Words

This is a series of four poems on the seasons, each two-hundred and fifty words, to make up a picture worth a thousand words.

I wish you could see it in it's full size format but it's way too big for here.

So here is the text for each season:

Winter

Winter’s frosty reign opens cold but serene,
Austere and clear, echoing across frozen lakes
The death of the green and the living
It seems, masked in ice crystals, sleet and snow,
Shivering in the chill air, waiting and still
A dark night creeping upon us in midday,
Something gray and ominous and unwanted
That steals our breath away and freezes it
Unyielding and too strong for us to fight
So we surrender to it and give in as it
Dims our eyes with a storm of stinging white
A cold embrace from an opened door
That sends feet scurrying back within
To seek a warm fire or loving arms
But once more frozen in time, until
One day seeing the beauty of a single snowflake,
As it dances its way down to the snowbank
Or witnessing black bare branches silhouetted
Against a bluer backdrop that heads toward March,
Its beauty and perfection jogs loose memories and we
Realize the earth didn’t die and pass away into darkness,
It just lay asleep, silently dreaming
Nodding and turning over onto her other side, to wait
For the resting time to rejuvenate soil and sky,
Regenerating creatures too, bodies and souls alike
The peaceful, silent days required to
Make all things clean and pristine, culling
The weak and those whose time was at an end
Old feelings and old thinkings both alike
Waiting for the proper time to start
Thawing and repeat the process all over again,
Winter, when all of life begins

Spring

Spring time earth soil warming slowly, root hairs
Tingling, stretching out underground, prodding
Earthworms to reclaim dark soil, as grasses’ roots
Push their way to the surface in a burst of green
So shocking it almost hurts the eyes after
All the somber colors of the cold time, stark trees
Put on new garments of fresh color, budding into flowers
While far below tubers prepare to release the blossoms held within
Tulips, hyacinths, daffodils with their pungent scents announcing
Light and color has returned to the world, reflected in pools of rainshowers
Let spirits rejoice with the woodland and the field, drinking in
The rich jewel tones of red and yellow and purple, regal enough for any king
To wear as proud plumage, like the birds that call, announcing their joy
To mate and bear young, replenish the skies with new life as
Flowers and trees and grasses and weeds replenish the face of the earth mother
She is pleased and sends out her blessings and benediction, richness
Overflowing as the flowers set fruit and the eggs are laid,
Cubs and kits are born, the acorn forms in microcosm, and winter
Becomes a distant memory, life is moving fast, a blur, quickly spurred
By a rhythm that tolerates no delay, no pausing by the way, only
The quickening of the earth and all its creatures, including us,
We who would set ourselves apart from this cycle, but really
Are as much a part as any other, observer, participant, and lover

Summer
Summer rolls in lazy and soft, her countenance hot and hazy
From a distance, we doze, lying under laden peach trees sucking
Rosy flesh from fuzzy skins, juices running freely down our chins
While bees hum over our heads and butterflies alight to sip nectar
Here in this wilderness garden a thousand plants bloom with abandon,
Lantana with its prickly stems and golden heads of tiny flowers,
Trails of white clover, perfect for threading into blossom
Necklaces, crowns for our heads, bracelets, and rings,
Our little fingers find, digging right down among the grass
Hiding way down low, bright delicate strawberries
Nestling there, from tiny nub to sweet luscious orb, sprinkled
With tiny seeds that shine on the ripe surface sublime
We plunder them too, more juices streaking our skins,
Our leavings attracting the white doves who peck at the bitten fruit
Then we spy not far away, over a low stone wall another delight
With a thousand shades of red and pink and yellow
The rose garden so tangled and wild, a faint path
That winds through sun baked field heady and nodding
With their spicy scent, the two, the fruit and the flower,
Scarlet rose-hips nodding in rhythm while rose petals ruffle
In rare breezes, here we can only look with wonder and breathe deep
The perfume guarded by spiky thorns, stems too strong for surrender
To young hands, they go free of our plundering ways and know
They will survive the end of our pirate summer days

Autumn

Autumn unfurls carpets of bright wheat, ripening in fields
Rippling proudly by strong northern winds snapping cold
Sharp air that makes the chest expand with joy at being alive
Relief from the heat of the season past, now glowing with energy
Gourds and pumpkins snake their way over land
Yellows and golds, striped, and rusty orange with dark green leaves
Earthy potatoes huddling underground to breed white flesh
Tall gnarled trees dangling shiny crimson apples come to ripeness
People in sweat-stained, worn clothes swarm gardens and fields
Hay falls before machines and rolls into great shocks
Corn stands at attention and then leans into tents of stalks
Harvest is readied to be scythed and bundled, then trundled away
To granaries and silos, to be salted, dried and preserved,
By wise, knowing young or ancient hands, in jars and crocks
Filled to the brim for the empty season that lies ahead
A rich time, a turning time, a winnowing time
When the world waits for the bounty to be stowed away
Red squirrels gather stores of acorns from stately trees
Oak leaves evolve from sage to yellow to burnished amber,
Dark veins tracing patterns in leathery matrix, falling
And spiraling down down down to the damp ground
Wind piling them in drifts of colors all mixed, a blaze
Of fall’s chaotic design, a kaleidoscope that shifts
With every breeze, frost coming on with setting sun
Bonfire burns brother oak’s beauty to soot and ash
Announcing to all, this season is done

Chris Jordan's Stats: Hits You in the Gut

Photographer/Artist Chris Jordan has a gift for translating icy, dry statistics into art that hits you right in the gut, as these selections from an article by Richard Woodward detail.

Be sure you check out the interactive presentation to see the art in the "Numbers in Art" interactive feature.

The illustration shows a few of the nine million building blocks in the massive piece representing U.S. children without health insurance, a shameful statistic since such children are twice as likely to die from medical issues as those who are insured.


Chris Jordan Numbers Photo Essay - Portfolio.com

Running the Numbers

by Richard B. Woodward January 2008 Issue






Photographer Chris Jordan turns cold, hard stats into provocative statements on economics, culture, and the American way of life.

Chris Jordan keeps his eyes open for staggering statistics, and the more alarming the better. What sets his 44-year-old heart racing is some new figure expressing American excess and neglect--the number of disposable batteries manufactured by Energizer every year (6 billion) or plastic beverage bottles used every five minutes (2 million) or children without health insurance (9 million). Think of him as the unofficial artist of the Harper's Index.

The puzzlelike photographs he makes in response to these big numbers are designed to illustrate "the scale of consumption of 300 million people" and what such rampant profligacy, if unchecked, might mean for the future of the planet. He has completed 19 pieces for the sardonic series he calls "Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait," and he has more in the works.

Please check out the rest of the article.

Lichtfaktor Really Shedding Some Light on Notions of Art

Color + Design Blog / Interview with LICHTFAKTOR:
Light Graffiti Artists by COLOURlovers
stairwell light graffiti





These amazing guys work with light and their surroundings instead of a paint brush and a canvas. It's challenging to think of something so ephemeral as art, but it certainly is. Thank God for film.

"The 3-man creative force behind LICHTFAKTOR is VJ sehvermoegen, graffiti artist jiar, and VJ 1"0X."

"To keep up with LICHTFAKTOR and see more of their creations, visit their Myspace profile(mostly in German) and be sure to check out their Flickr page for nearly one-hundred light creations."

Phil Hansen, Internet Art Sensation

People of the Web -
Strokes of Genius by Kevin Sites

Phil Hansen

(This article features artist and Internet sensation Phil Hansen. Be sure to watch the videos on this site for an overview of his work.)

"Phil Hansen is not only tearing down the “gallery” walls that keep many people from seeing and enjoying art. He’s also showing us how it’s made -- all on the Internet.

Phil Hansen stubbornly adheres to one artistic cliche. He's willing to suffer for his art.

Take the giant portrait he made of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il as a protest against nuclear proliferation. He applied 6,000 adhesive bandages on a plywood backdrop. Then, using a quart-sized bag of his own blood, he painted Kim's face on the exposed gauze.

Hansen shrugs off the experience.

"Five hundred cc's of blood seems like a lot, but it's just nothing," he says from the basement of his brother's house outside St. Paul, Minnesota, where he currently lives and makes his art.

It's not the suffering that really distinguishes Hansen's work (after all, it's hard to top Van Gogh) but his style and method for displaying it. Hansen eschews galleries, preferring to take his art directly to the eyeballs rather than bringing the eyeballs to the art — through the Internet.

An art school dropout, Hansen works as an X-ray technician by day, spending all of his spare time and money on his art. But his work, and his method of presenting it, has given him a huge audience.

His breakthrough piece was a time-lapse video of a two-day project called "Influences." He painted 30 pictures on his own chest, one over the other, with each picture representing an influence in his life. When he was done, he peeled the quarter-inch thick layer of paint from his skin and cut out a silhouette of his own profile. The video was streamed more than a million times on the Web — a cyber art phenomenon in which both process and final piece were revealed.

Hansen often uses the technique of pointillism, in which the canvas is dabbed with tiny bits of color, rather than fluid brush strokes, to create a larger image.

His works often have a political stance. Several years ago, Hansen devised an image of President George W. Bush by hand-painting the names of 1,700 coalition soldiers killed from the beginning of the Iraq War until April 2005.

"They're dying for George Bush," he explains. "They're dying for an idea that he had and unfortunately it wasn't a clear idea."

Covering the entire back wall of his brother's basement is a 7 x 14 foot mural of the Ku Klux Klan, made up from thousands of verses copied from the bible and individually cut out. It's a companion piece to an image of civil rights hero Rosa Parks — also made from bible verses.

Hansen says the idea was to show the far-reaching influences of religion for both evil and good.

Hansen's commitment to his own brand of pointillism is most evident in a portrait of the so-called Green River killer, Gary Ridgeway.

He made the piece by drawing one-inch portraits of each of Ridgeway's 48 female victims in various shades of light and dark. He then photocopied the drawings and cut them out into 12,000 tiny squares which he arranged, one by one, to reveal the killer's face.

Hansen says it's about remembering the victims — women all connected by the misfortune of having crossed paths with Ridgeway. The project took four months.

The detail work has taken its toll. Hansen holds up his right hand to show me a twitch he says he's had since high school, when he was first introduced to pointillism and became obsessed with it.

Hansen created his self-portrait 'A Moment' over the course of six days, oven sitting cross-legged for up to 12 hours straight.

His latest project used the Internet to connect his viewers to the art being created. He created a ten-foot, spinning, circular canvas in his brother's garage, then moved in there himself. Taking a week off work, he spent six days straight living in front of his web cam, sleeping on the floor, eating takeout and encouraging people to call him or email him with a "moment" that changed their lives.

He got over 600 responses. People from all over the world, from the United Kingdom to Romania to Botswana, told him their personal moments: their first time acting on stage; the death of a parent without being about to say goodbye; seeing the rainforest destroyed.

Starting from the center of the canvas, Hansen then painted their words, working out to the edges until the image they had collectively created was a face — Hansen's own — bordered by four hands.

Strangely, Hansen says the jitter in his hand that has plagued him for so many years went away while he was making the piece.

-See more of Hansen's work at his Web site."

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Japan's Unique Art Form

Japanese Version of Crop Circles-
But More Highbrow



Rice field art --

Pimp my rice paddy ::: Pink Tentacle

Japanese farmers in Inakadate make crop art every year, this time based on Hokusai's 36 Views of Mt. Fuji. They use purple and green kodaimai rice along with their regular seedlings to create these show-stoppers.