Painting: Spectrum

I’m back!

Spectrum, acrylic and latex caulk on 11″ x 14″ canvas, January 20, 2013

Spectrum!  Because I am not going to call it ‘rainbow’, grunt, snort, wow that spot on the floor is interesting.  But enough feigning of manly insecurities, the deal with this painting is not so much the spectrum as that it’s my first experiment with using latex caulk as an art media.  It does give it some texture…  This picture with the harsher lighting shows better the blobs of caulk that I painted over.

Spectrum, acrylic and latex caulk on 11″ x 14″ canvas, January 20, 2013

One note on spectrums though — it strikes me as fascinating and unfathomable that the only real difference between colors is frequency and wavelength.  Same difference between the frequencies we see and those we don’t.  Makes you wonder if some kind of neurological manipulation could allow us to further subdivide the visual spectrum and experience more colors.  Colors we cannot even imagine now.  Or going the other direction…  after the singularity I just want gamma-ray eyes, is all I’m sayin’…

On a housekeeping note, I’m changing how I write this blog.  You may have noticed, I’m not going to slavishly post twice a week anymore.  That led to lame posts between paintings I think, and more importantly it was starting to turn blogging, and worse, painting into work.  Not work in the sense of something I get paid to do, but in the sense of house work and yard work — something I’d just rather not do at all.  We don’t want that to happen to painting and blogging do we??  No Zorgs, we don’t!!

One of the best pieces of advice my dad gave me was that the best way to ruin a good hobby is to turn it into work.  And wouldn’t ya know it, that’s exactly what I was doing.  That Cosmic Calendar stuff…  it was a really cool idea when I decided to do it, but wow it got to be a drag in the last days of December.  The irony of this change is not lost on me — I first decided to stick to a biweekly schedule because I wanted the pressure of needing to finish paintings so I’d have something to blog about twice a week, and get more paintings done that way.  But I just don’t think I need that motivator anymore.  Quite the opposite, too much blogging was threatening to kill the blog and the paintings.  Before last weekend I hadn’t painted in about a month.  Just didn’t feel like it.  Tried painting anyway, but just wasn’t having any fun.  I gave up that day after I broke my palette knife.

Until last weekend when suddenly I had five new paintings going all at once!  🙂  This is the first of those.  So now it’s going to be a normal blog and I’ll post when I want to.  Hopefully this will lead to better posts when I do.

Thoughts on this leap day

So when “they” (the Romans?) invented this calendar we use, instead of giving February 28 days and 29 every four years, they could have instead taken a day each from two of the months with 31 days, made February 30 days like most other months, and ended up with seven months with 30 days and five with 31.  That would be a lot more consistent and easy to deal with, don’t you think?

It’d be even better if they put the seven 30 day months first (January to July) and then finished the year with the five 31 day months (August to December).  Leap day would then best be put at the end of July —  July 31st, every four years.

Even better still, 365 days divides pretty evenly into thirteen 28 day months.

I think the 13th month should be called Zorgember.

28? 30? 31? Whaaaaaat?

I’m going for two thirds…

“We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.”

– Arthur Schopenhauer

 

I hope to work my way down to 2/3…  Someday…  🙂

Abstract photography

Last weekend I did somethin’ weird.  With my camera.  When my daughter asked me what I was doing, I said “Something weird.”  She needs to get used to the fact that her dad does weird stuff.  Thinking back on that now though, I think she already knows this.  Anyway, now I’m calling it ‘abstract photography’.

Four things came together that led me to this particular weird activity, though I am definitely not the only one doing this sort of thing.  First, reading Aaron Leaman’s awesome blog lately has given me a new-found artistic appreciation of ‘blurry photos’ if you will, or what I’m now calling abstract photography.  He’s really good — you should check out his work.  Second, I’ve been thinking lately about something I read years ago that some of the Dadaists — I can’t remember who or where I read this — wanted to incorporate random elements into their work.  As part of the Dadaist rebellion against the limited scope of what was at that time considered art, and more to the point what was not, they wanted their work to in some ways happen by itself, or at least to some extent be created not by the artists direct control in making the work.  They wanted it to be literally spontaneous — self-generated — not of their own doing.  Taken with this idea, I’ve been thinking of how I might do, or should I say cause, something like that.  I mean, I could pour and drip paints or washes onto canvas à la Jackson Pollock and let them run around as gravity and the terrain of canvas texture wills… but that just doesn’t interest me.

Then, third, I remembered this photo that spontaneously sprang into being on my phone about two years ago.  I do not remember taking it, do not remember ‘messing up’ a photo, and have no freakin’ idea what it is… but I love it.  It’s bright, blue and glowy.

A gift from my phone

Last, I remembered an idea I had when I was first messing with video cameras as a teenager.  I wanted to tie the camera to the branch of a tree and suspend the camera just above the ground and swing it.  This I thought would make an effect of dizzying speed as the camera flew just above the grass and spun around.  Back then though, the camera I’m talking about recorded on full size VHS tapes and you had to carry it around on your shoulder it was so big.  And it was borrowed.  So I did not attempt this.  Later in life when I bought my own 8mm camcorder, I still did not want to risk it to this half baked idea.  But then last weekend!  This idea fell into place with the other three and I thought heck — my digital camera is not that heavy and it’s getting old anyway.  I wouldn’t be too broken up if I had to buy a new one.  So I strung it up and set it spinning  and swinging from the branches of various trees in my yard, using the auto-timer to attain the total Dadaist randomness of me having no idea or control over the composition of the resulting photos, beyond swinging the camera initially.

What resulted was even more awesome than I hoped, even from the first shot:

Woosh!

This one has a nice autumnal theme to it

I like this one because the flash went off -- you can see grass and leaf litter in the swoosh of green

Abstract evergreen

I still haven't figured out what this is, but I like it!

No idea what the black bird-shaped thing is. None.

A nice landscape

A waterscape

Abstract landscape

Is this a self-portrait or a picture the camera itself took of me?

And the string did break towards the end, but the camera is ok.  It landed in the grass…