Blowing Rocks, Jupiter Island, Florida:

Sunday, March 23, 2014

Today I write once again about photographs and videos made with the iPhone. As Apple Corporation has demonstrated, their phones can make true works of art, sometimes accidentally. Though I can’t claim the two photos included here are great art, they do fall into the genre, “pretty photos at the beach.” Never the less, yesterday was the perfect day, air - 82 degrees Fahrenheit, H2O – 77 degrees, brilliant sunshine, deep blue sky, nice surf, water various shades of aqua and green, and the iPhone captured it all.* I've included the first photo because my husband is in the background, and because the wave is captured the instant before it breaks.

The second is posted because of the composition, blanket running off the edge in the foreground, the figure behind projecting off the top of the picture plane.

I also shot some video, and I will put together a short movie based on those (time permitting) in a future post.

Note

I am providing links here to information aboutJupiter Island and Blowing Rocks.

Breaking the Mold

Means risking criticism and negative response

“South Florida Atlantic, Calm As A Lake (Flat Water),” a 32” x 40” pastel was the very first pastel painting I made in North Palm Beach back in 2006. For years I refused to do any rubbing and blending with chamois, erasers, tortillons or cloth. If colors blended together at all it was because individual marks ran over one another. So, the paintings were made of millions of tiny scribbles rubbing over one another.

When showing these pastels I had been criticized because my “approach to pastel technique was annoying,” which is just another way of saying it just shouldn’t be done that way. I’ve always rebelled against being told that something shouldn’t or can’t be done. To this day, I almost always use the pastel itself as the tool to rub and blend another pastel color together with other pastel colors, though now I may resort to turning the pastel on the side to blend, so I don’t always have to use millions of little scribbles.

I still like the diffuse quality the scribbles made in those old pastel paintings, especially when I made a new color with two, three, or four different pastels of different hue but very similar value scribbled together. Then too, whether working with pastel, graphite, acrylics, or oils, I’ve always enjoyed breaking with tradition, and/ or reviving old discontinued technique. Moreover, I wouldn’t be using my creative talent to the utmost if I didn’t play with ideas, and break rules.

Portuquese Man O’War

I shoot photos wherever I go. This is one from my picture file or Morgue.* I took the picture in 2010, but when I looked at it accidentally this past Saturday I was taken by the Portuquese Man O’War’s sinister beauty. The really dangerous part is the darkest ink-blue-black shape collapsed beneath and behind the inflated sail. People have been known to drown when becoming entangled in the creature’s tentacles, not because they couldn’t get away, but because of the numbing pain. Some of the tentacles are visible around and over the shells. The blue colors shaded from deepest charcoal-navy to cobalt, and gradually shifting through transparent into pale shades of magenta and rose make me want to reach out and touch even though I know better. That magnificent inflated sail would have been almost invisible as this particular small but deadly creature floated in the warm gulfstream water.

When these are found grounded on south Florida beaches you swim at your own risk.  At such times there may be many more, some much larger and almost invisible with twenty-foot tentacles dangling beneath the surface and often well away from the sail.


Note

*A morgue is an alphabetical file of photos that an artist uses as an aid in creating his/her artwork.

March Graphic Art and Illustration

This month, March, I will review Graphic Art and Illustration in a different manner from months past. 

Instead of writing a brief summary for each year's chosen graphic, photo, and/or illustration, I will simply provide a direct link to the blog entry in which that artwork was published. To view the actual artwork and read about it in context with the blog entry, click on the highlighted text. As usual I will begin with the year 2008 and work toward the present year, 2014.

1. March, 2008 - "Our 40th Anniversary Celebration Sculpture Walk"

2. March, 2009 - "Economic theory: An Extremely Brief History."

3. March, 2010 - "Post-postmodernism Defined: Really now John! (Continued)"

4. March, 2011 - "Flight of the Pelicans"

5. March, 2012 - "Isaac Stolzfuts' Return: Part II"

6. March, 2013 - "Wonderful." The photograph in this presentation was taken by Ginny Dixon, official photographer of the Gay Men's Chorus of South Florida. I copied it from the Gay Men's Chorus of South Florida Website in March, 2013 and I make no claim to it as part of my oeuvre. I used it in 2013 and I use it now because I am in the photograph, and because I am proud of the fact that I sing with this wonderful, professional men's chorus.

History of a Commission

In Reverse

First few Steps in completing the commission

Our good friends first came to me with the kernel of an idea last year, 2013. She was redecorating their bedroom, and wanted a multi-paneled painting above the bed, had seen many paintings from the LGBT Pictionary, liked the mixed media distressed paintings, and requested the panels to be created in that technique. I said, “Why not make it a triptych since that type of painting has a 500 year history going back through the Renaissance,” and they agreed.

I bought the panels, paints, various varnishes, oil pastels, sprays, archival computer printer inks and other tools needed to make the new artwork after discussing color with my new patrons.* The room is to be in various shades of green and rust, and we looked at two bedside lamps she had bought. Once back at home, I painted the ground layers on the panels knowing that those colors would almost vanish beneath the many layers to be painted over them. Finally I visited with a color-swatch sheet, though I made the point that I would be using more than the colors on the sample. After discussing the colors and making notes as to adjustments and additions I was struck with a notion. Why not bury images of family documents and photos from both sides going back through several generations. That would bring a family history into the room. Both loved the idea, and immediately began discussing which photos and historic documents to use.

Old Layered Distressed Walls

I don't know why it took so long for the inspiration of historic representation to occur to me because the technique lends itself to exactly that. In fact, the original idea came from looking at old layered and distressed walls in Mexico. These had posters and painted lettered signs buried between layers of various colors. The buried items were difficult to read, and without knowledge of local history I knew nothing of the actual events represented by the fractured items in the flaked and textured walls. Never the less they had an authenticity and presence that no ordinary flat-colored walls on ninety-nine percent of all the buildings I have seen possess. It felt as though I had held conversations with those walls.

At this stage in production the three panels have but one or two layers of paint on them. One has been distressed for the first time. Another is about to be distressed. And, the third has only the first layer of paint. Thus the panels represent the first three steps in the process. There will be many steps to come, and I thought to do a history of that process here on the blog. Ultimately, when finished this history will read backwards through time, with this first entry at the end, and the finished triptych at the beginning, a fitting reversal that will actually represent perfectly the mixed media distressed painting technique that I often work with.


Notes

* The reader (if there be such) can find descriptions of these art supplies with prices at Dick Blick Art Supplies.

February Graphics

I continue the monthly review of the past 6 years of graphics on this blog.

The February 3, 2008 blog entry began,

“I was going to write about the photographer F. Holland Day this morning. However, when I read the news about this latest court ruling against the citizens of New Orleans I couldn’t help myself. These are the very people the court system should be helping and protecting from criminal injustice whether it be on the part of other citizens, corporations, or the state.”

A Federal court had absolved the Army Corp of Engineers of any liability for the failure of the Levy System during hurricane Katrina. Thus, any coastal city that has been or will be fortified against damage from climate change by the Army Corp of Engineers will have no recourse with faulty and/or incomplete engineering. In anger I made the acid green and purple graphic about the great nation of Atlantis sinking beneath the sea.

Okay, this is to be a summary so I will be brief in my explanation of the next 5 years of graphics.

Any reader of this weekly exercise in futility that I send into the “cybervoid” knows that I am a progressive Democrat.*  Thus, the graphic I’ve chosen from 2009 is taken from the diatribe I wrote about my frustration with Republican pundits Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reily. Among others.

In 2010 I wrote at great length about my notion that we had long since left the Postmodern behind and I coined the term “Po Pomo,” or Post Postmodern. One of my main points was that neither the change between the Modern and the Postmodern, nor that between the Postmodern and the Po Pomo represents a great paradigm shift.*1

“Lotto Heart,” an illustration I prepared for the July 4th celebration of that name at Camp Rehoboth, the LGBT community center in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, is from a blog entry that I have since removed, I know not why.

The 2012 entry was from a series of photographs taken at sunrise for a Pastel commission. I am not a morning person, so the blog entry grudgingly admits to actually enjoying the experience of rising at 5:30 A.M. in order to be present for "old sol’s" daily debut.

Finally, Amphierotic is the 2013 graphic chosen because I did not know the word until I began work on the LGBT Pictionary. It was an invention of the psychoanalyst, Sandor Ferenczi , and means a person who is able to know him or herself erotically as either or both male and female simultaneously.

Notes

* Cybervoid is a term I have coined to designate the vast vacuousness of so much that is on the Internet particularly the social media.

*1 I have since found that others were also using the term, Po Pomo.

Beautiful Ocean Photo

This particular digital photo from 2010 caught my eye as I scanned through the thousands in my morgue folder labeled "South Florida Ocean."* I was fascinated because it is in focus through the entire depth of field. From the seaweed in the foreground to the horizon, everything is sharply detailed. The image is so crisp as to seem crystalized - even the figures swimming in the distance seem to be hovering in the water suspended in a semitransparent green vitreous mass. It is as though the primary purpose of this photograph were to freeze a moment in time and space into something that can be held immutable and permanent, one particularly perfect instance of the abstract notion, "sunny day at the beach."

The original photo was taken with my 10 megapixel camera, and holds amazing detail when blown up to 53 by 36 inches at 300 dpi, increased from 72 dpi. I personally like the depth of the aqua green sparkling water, intense sunshine and sky even though this last is only hinted at by the thin bar of blue at the top of the image and the blue reflection in front of the closest breaking wave. If I recall correctly, I shot the photograph at f22, shutter speed 1/500th of a second, and focused on that first line of breaking waves hoping to get the depth of field that was actually obtained.


Notes

* A morgue is an artist's file of photographs used as aids in drawing, painting,multi-media or other artistic activity.