IFTTT

If this then that.

In my college course on artificial intelligence I learned how life can be modeled as sets of rules structured this way. Amidst the chaos it does seem that much of our existence can follow this structure.

It's just hard to follow, though. Like why Stevie Ray Vaughan ended up on that last minute fateful flight. Like why the piece I painted for Jason had to be of this portrait of Stevie Ray so that now I cry painting it because... well you know.

Anyway, IFTTT is easy to follow. And cool. It's a site/app/community thing that pulls together iOS functionality with lots of social media sites allowing one to create a 'recipe' taking the input from one 'channel' and generating output to another. It's very versatile and user friendly. I've scratched the surface with recipes to automatically spread posts to this blog on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. We'll see what else I might cook up.

Peace.

____________________________

creating art on the artifacts of creativity

http://danieledlen.com

Give Hard

Last year I gave to the Alabama Blues Project. Three pieces for their auction.

They asked me again this year. I'm giving them an all new SRV and a similar B.B. King.

I like giving to charity, not straight money, but my work, my time, my self. I feel like I'm connecting more with them, hooking into the humanity of the effort, acknowledging the reality. I don't know if the people who win my pieces at auction feel that way, as most have gone for quite a bit less than what I sell them. But out there somewhere will be on somebody's wall or in someone's closet a piece of me that meant they gave to the cause. They gave hard.

Peace.

DONATED - 08/25/09

Business Matters

Back in April of '07, Shelley at Wild About Music gave me a chance.

That chance has allowed me to do what I do today.

WAM had a location in Santa Monica, CA across the street from where my mom regularly eats breakfast. She'd been on the lookout for places that might be interested in my Vinyl Art. See I'd sold them only through word of mouth locally to people either my wife or my mother-in-law knew. The goal was to be able to pay my own health insurance for a year. If I could do that, then I'd be able to keep going.

I needed a more steady source of sales in order to follow my passion. Wild About Music was a perfect fit for my work. SXSW was coming up in Austin, so Shelley, after looking at a packet of inkjet prints of photos of my early work, decided to show several during the craziness in Texas. The Led Zeppelin Page and Plant and the Stevie Ray Vaughan I sent sold before the festival even started.

Since then, both the Zeppelin and the SRV pieces have done consistently well. B.B. King, Willie Nelson and others have sold occasionally. But thanks to the sales from WAM, I was able to pay my health insurance.

As the economy tanked, art sales predictably have dropped. Fortunately, my online presence has kept me afloat with sales here and there and now has led to more opportunities for wider and more focussed exposure.

But Shelley's still there, with a couple pieces of mine in the front window and a bunch more hanging on the wall as you go downstairs from the merch section to the gallery section. Last month the SRV sold again.

So I'm doing something special, for Shelley and hopefully for my art. I'm sending her the double portrait above. It'll be marked at $325, less than what 2 separate pieces would be, even though my costs, all told, are higher. I want to draw attention to her store, my art, and as a result our precious memories and culture. So go if you're in the neighborhood. Because business matters.

Peace.

ON CONSIGNMENT - 07/22/09

I Am, Without Words

I unfortunately found out about Stevie Ray Vaughan the day he died. The local jazz station, KLON, was playing nothing but his music, as well they should've. Since, I've bought several albums including some amazing concert bootlegs. I wish wish wish I could've seen him perform. There are no words.

I found out about Jill Bolte Taylor today. She's not dead. Amazingly. I'd heard about this neuroanatomist who'd survived a stroke and written a book about the experience, but I'd never pursued learning more. Fortunately, happenstance led me to watch her TED talk on YouTube this morning.

If you haven't heard her tell her story before, click on that link in the previous paragraph and allow yourself 20 minutes to be captivated. What she communicates, I'm not entirely sure how she was able to say it with words. It's absolutely completely overwhelming. It is Life, both individual and eternal.

And that's what I've struggled with for years. Long ago I had a BIG problem with words for awhile. I whittled everything down to the statement "I am", fundamental to both the logic of Descartes and the spirit of the Tao. I couldn't figure out what even that meant at the time though.

In her talk, Taylor resolves my struggle by so simply, so clearly differentiating the left and right sides of the brain. I won't even try to restate it. Just watch it. What I will say is that, in my oversimplification, "I" is the left side and "am" is the right.

But really it's like trying to say in words what SRV does with his guitar. So please, watch both clips.

Peace.

Front And Center

Even though I'm suffering a might bit of post-holiday lack of motivation, a bad thing for the self-employed, and a persisting upset stomach with accompanying joint aches, I need to keep painting.

I just found out over the weekend that a couple of my pieces, the Page/Plant Led Zeppelin and the ZZ Top, are in the front window of Wild About Music. In the center too! I know because my sister-in-law, the one who's just been visiting for 3 weeks lives near Austin and goes to 6th St. for Saturday night fun.

So I've gotta replace the Stevie Ray Vaughan and Willie Nelson they'd sold last November! Chop chop! A-listening to Rob & Big.

Peace.

SOLD - Stevie Ray Vaughan 01/05/09

The Groove Was Gone?

CBS news last night ran a story about the "comeback" of vinyl. I wish they didn't characterize it as though vinyl had disappeared both as a means to distribute music and as gold to be sought by passionate collectors.

Certainly during the 80s and 90s with the dominance of cassettes and CDs, record labels didn't produce as much vinyl. The demand wasn't there. As a result, some used record stores also had to shrink or perish. And yes, many of lesser years could be heard to say "what's that?"

But nobody I knew who had loved vinyl previously gave it up wholesale, getting rid of their collections and replacing every album with a CD, or later, an MP3 download. People who loved vinyl kept loving vinyl. The new media were just more convenient for the music industry to use to distribute new releases.

It actually seemed to me that the main symptom apparent was the almost non-existence of turntables in electronic stores. I don't know if it was because all the hip little mini-systems were coming out with CD players included or what, but that was what I noticed.

Of course I did start buying CDs. Not to the exclusion of vinyl, but techno just doesn't make sense on vinyl. The music is created and mastered digitally, so there isn't anything lost. Also, I remember finding bootleg copies of live shows of Stevie Ray Vaughan during an outing to Record Rover. I was looking for Beatle bootlegs as the crackdown was happening and boots were vanishing from store bins, and in the glass case at the register were all these CD boots. Long live shows wouldn't fit on vinyl and with the increased ease of creating CDs and duplicating them, bootleggers were making and trading them instead of cassettes. They were way expensive at the time, but worth it, because there wasn't a Napster yet, much less the whole torrent thing.

But I still sought out older releases used on vinyl. Even then they were more expensive, or at least the same, as a used CD, yet I still went to the vinyl section of Moby Disc before hitting the CDs.

Today, I head to the back of Zia Records to look for "rough" vinyl to use for my art, but I'm delighted to see more and more in the NEW section of the vinyl racks. Amy Winehouse, White Stripes, Spoon, and lots of reissues, great stuff. I won't use them for my art unless somebody commissions one, but I tell ya, I'd love to be able to buy them for my collection. I'd probably find out first how they are recorded and mastered, as if they are recorded digitally then I'm not sure of the point, but to hear Jack White's voice recorded analog would be amazing.

If you haven't seen this yet, please check it out. It's only 3 minutes and it shows what my art is about.

Peace.

SOLD - Stevie Ray Vaughan 08/20/08

Grawlix Not Included (Or Authentic Passion Expressed Authentically)

DJ Shadow's "Endtroducing" fuckin' blows me away. Just heard it here.

(Sorry for the French, or New Yorker. Blame Hugh over at gapingvoid for ruining my sense of propriety with blogging. I'll use it sparingly. I want it to have the impact I mean for it to have. "$#@&!" just doesn't cut it.)

"Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt", well, shit, the whole album, makes my neck tingle. I'm not sure what it is though. I just am in awe of his mixing. The way he layers the sound seemlessly, the way he creates melody with loops and rhythm with scratching, man!

I love what the WWW has become. I can discuss its future with Jarvis and Godin, I can chat about my artwork with teenagers wanting to try it too, I can connect with people looking for the coolest gift, I can remind myself of kickass music.

I can be inspired to be creative.

What can YOU do with the WWW that blows you away?

SRV is also for the woman's anniversary gift to her husband. I get to paint Jimi today!

Peace.

SOLD - Stevie Ray Vaughan 07/25/08

The Observer And The Observed

Part of the Uncertainty Principle in Physics (yes, I hear "blah, blah, blah..." after the word Physics now too, even after 6 years of UCLA science courses, but stay with me) says that whenever a subject observes an object, the act of observing changes the object, making the observation always slightly different than the reality a moment before. In a way, listening to vinyl is like that: each time an album is played, the record is worn a bit. I know it's very slight, but sometimes I hesitate to play albums because of it. That's one reason why I'm so thrilled to be able to archive my records with the iRecord.

Some of my records were recorded from "reference discs", not master recordings, so they already bear the artifacts of repeated play. That was the case with the third album I recorded, "Strawberry Fields Forever" by The Beatles, another fan club release. It's got some great rare stuff on it, but the recording noise and extremely short track breaks led to both sides being recorded as one long track each. Oh well, so I got to try out Audacity, a free audio file editting program, to split the tracks. It worked like it was supposed to, even though it took awhile to load in the original uncut file. So, I think I can use the iRecord succesfully for all my records! I could've tried increasing the silence sensitivity setting to split the tracks, but I didn't want to have to play the whole record again. There already was a small skip from when I bought it. So, woohoo!

Oh, yeah, art...

I painted Stevie Ray Vaughan for Wild About Music in addition to the Dylan in my previous post. Today I'm going to frame, box and send those. Next I'm painting The Flaming Lips. The record is a dark, clear, red vinyl. This is the first time I'm using colored and clear vinyl. I'll see how it looks. I might end up spraying the backside with black to make the portraits show up more if the album cover is too distracting behind it. Or I could just create a backing out of black construction paper... I'll show ya both ways before deciding.

Peace.

Roger, The Apostle, At Year's End

What a way to end this year. It's taken me this past week to wrap my head around our experience in California. I feel humbled and honored at the same time, everything and nothing. Great fodder for my internal philosopher.

Roger Steffens is remarkable. Incredibly giving, generous with his time and energy, sharing his stories about Life. As a kid, captivated by sci-fi comic strips, he wrote a letter to his favorite and ended up becoming lifelong friends with the creator and having his name used in the strip. As a teen, looking up to Alan Freed, he saw some of the first group shows of the birth of rock-n-roll, later to be called himself 'Alan Freed' by Little Richard. As a young adult in the time of the Vietnam War, he found reggae, so impressed with a Gonzo-writer's article in Rolling Stone. Since then he has become THE chronicler of Bob Marley and his contributions to the world. Collecting every scrap of audio, video, and printed material about Tuff Gong or even remotely related to Bob, Roger has created an archive that not only would reduce any superfan to drooling, but would make that fan want to add his collection to Roger's. There is a genuine sense of driven purpose to preserve the essence of Bob's life. Befriending Bob's family, The Wailers, and any photographer, musician, roadie connected to Bob, Roger continues to seek connections worldwide, spreading One Love. That's why I would characterize him as Marley's apostle. It is that deep of a love.

After throwing in stories about his friends Timothy Leary, Carlos Santana, and others, Roger connected me and my family to his collection. Looking back, it was very interesting, deliberate. Listening to Bob's solo jamming in the background, Roger asked us all about pieces of our stories, taking pictures with me and the paintings, learning that my wife's birthday was the day Bob died, hearing about my father-in-law's Vietnam enlistment rejection, and sharing his personal photos of Bob with me to see if I'd be interested in having any copies. Oh my! What beautiful shots he had, some he took, some Peter Simon took. I'll definitely paint more of them. Connecting me further. Such an honor. It was truly a moment of mutual respect, something very unique. Life reconnecting with Life. One Love.

I don't know if I'm portraying the experience well enough, but I think at least I've given a sense of it. Overwhelming would be the one word for sure. Also, more practically, overwhelming is the fact that I basically broke even financially this year, even with paying for my health insurance! Pretty cool for my first full year. I've also got several irons in the fire, as they say. Primitive Kool sold Hendrix and SRV, Wild About Music sold SRV, and I've got a few potential commissions. Also, http://www.notcot.org/, a very cool site, posted about me, leading to a couple other blogs asking for info to do their own posts. I've got many more contacts on Flickr as well. So, it's spreading! I'd better get painting, huh?

If you're coming to this blog unaware of my Vinyl Art, please, take a bit to read through more of my posts. They really do give a good sense of my background and what I'm doing with it. Then, you can also see other examples if you:

CHECK OUT MY WEBSITE AT: WWW.VINYLART.INFO

and please have a safe and happy New Year's. Peace.

Merry Holidays!

So here it is! Roger Steffens' own photo from the cover of "Soul Almighty", a collection on JAD Records. The gold of "Exodus" makes such a cool background. I hope it'll be good enough to go in the museum! I bought a piece of glass to use in the frame instead of the plex that comes with it, looks more professional that way. Doesn't scratch as easily as well.

Paul at Primitive Kool just sold the Stevie Ray Vaughan and Jim Morrison, but had to swap out one piece of plex. Shipping glass just scares me though. But, hey 2 more sold! I think he's doing a 20% off deal for the holidays. He has a few more of mine, listed at http://primitivekoolart.com/pages/DANIEL.html, and of course they are all available by commission! So read through my blog and then see more examples when you:

CHECK OUT MY WEBSITE AT: http://www.vinylart.info/

and have a safe and wonderful holiday! Peace.

GIFTED - Bob Marley 12/20/07

Family And Friends

Stevie Ray for my brother-in-law in Austin and Lennon for our friend down in Tucson. I love giving gifts! I'm painting these for music-lovers who share our passion, so why not give them away too? Obviously I need to sell some, and the holiday season is the perfect time to get your commissions in, but sharing the love of music is what it's all about. This weekend I'm going to try to find the ones I'll do for Free Art Seattle. More giving. I'm looking forward to participating in other shows like it. If you know about art shows in your area that you think my work might fit into, please let me know!

I also created a profile at XING, kinda like LinkedIn. We'll see what connections I make there. Also, happened upon LiveVideo, so I created my channel there too. Basically, it's a duplicate of my YouTube channel, but it'll reach a whole new group of people. I'm tellin' ya, if I ever have to change E-mail addresses with the number of accounts I have... yikes. I just want people out there to know about what I'm doing and to give you all as many ways to find and connect with me as possible. I'm hoping to get more regular subscribers to this blog, but I'll take what I can get. Just give me feedback! Also, sorta important, if you haven't seen my online gallery, please:

CHECK OUT MY WEBSITE AT: http://www.vinylart.info/

and E-mail or even call me. Don't be shy, I won't bite.

GIFTED - Stevie Ray Vaughan and John Lennon 11/30/07

Trying Out eBay Again

The Jerry is still available that I made the YouTube video of a couple weeks ago. So I decided during the holiday buying period to try out eBay again. I've put it up for auction. It's up through next weekend. I figured people might be checking things out during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. We'll see.

Bob Marley and the Jerry Garcia that Primitive Kool had in their show sold along with the Hendrix at Wild About Music. Also, I've gotten some great response from other blogs:

http://hippiesounds.com/vinyl-art-video/
http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/records-vinyl-art-by-daniel-edlen
http://www.curbly.com/DIY-Maven/posts/3061-Daniel-Edlen-s-LP-Canvases-

so I'm glad I made those videos! I'm excited to see what ripples spread from those posts. Maybe I'll get that swarm of wasps buzzing yet! To see other examples of my work, as always:

CHECK OUT MY WEBSITE AT: http://www.vinylart.info/

and scroll through the jukebox to find your memories! I'm off to do Stevie Ray Vaughan.

Miles, And Miles, And Miles!

Newport Nights rocked! It was a great gig, lots of people. I got to watch quite a few checking out my work. Ocean Beach is a cool place and getting to see the ocean was wonderful. A couple pieces sold, with more commissions as well. The Miles Davis they had sold online and another of him was requested by one of the employees of Primitive Kool. We'll definitely be heading back there for a future show!

Red Dog Gallery in downtown Phoenix is going to be displaying 8-10 of my pieces during the upcoming First Fridays! I've been hoping to find a place that participates in that monthly event as well, as the turnout of people interested in local culture is supposed to be huge. Woohoo!

I also found an inordinate number of records today at 2 local used stores. Bob Marley, Hendrix, the Dead, Pink Floyd, SRV... man, that was sweet! So now I'm stocked up and ready to paint. Besides the Miles Davis movie, I've also got the shots taken for a Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix so I'll be posting those this week. In the meantime, I've still got my gallery so:

CHECK OUT MY WEBSITE AT: WWW.VINYLART.INFO

and, please, leave comments here, on YouTube, or email me!

EDIT: I wanted to note that the image I use for the Miles Davis piece is the 1985 photo by Anton Corbijn. He's well known in the music world for his photography and music video work and I wanted to make sure to give him credit for the initial beautiful vision of the legend on muted trumpet.

Two For Tuesday

Rockzone Records hung the ones I gave them! They look great. I'll take my camera next time I'm down there and get a shot of'em. I'm sending 3 to Wild About Music today and the ones for Primitive Kool are almost ready to go too.

Yesterday, I tried to contact the radio stations I listened to growing up to see if they'd be interested in my work. We'll see. They did play an important role in what pop music I listened to during my teens. I found out about classic rock groups from KLSX, heavy metal masters from KNAC, and all those great alternative bands from Pirate Radio. All of those are different now, but KLOS, KCBS, and KROQ are still there. Grunge certainly wouldn't have influenced me as much if it hadn't been for radio and MTV. I'm looking for a Nirvana record right now to do for Primitive Kool, but they're hard to come by for sure. Ozzy's available through PayPal in my online gallery, so if you're interested:

CHECK OUT MY WEBSITE AT: WWW.VINYLART.INFO

and scroll through the jukebox.

What's Your Story?

I saw a few segments of the old HBO Taxicab Confessions the other night. Our schedule was a bit outta whack after the Arctic Monkeys concert, which was excellent. It reminded me how those early shows on cable that were more raw and more reality did a lot to make me more tolerant. While it also desensitized me a bit, it made me want to seek truth and individuality, to strip away preconceived notions and let people be who they are with no judgement. Everyone is worth listening to and showing love for simply that, who they are.

That's why with my portraits I try to be true to the individual, to celebrate their natural beauty. I want the person to come through with no filters, no externally imposed beliefs. To me, it makes them feel more personal, more connected, instead of homogenized and flat.

I get to do another Zep, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Johnny Cash for Wild About Music as they sold 3 last month! Roy Robbins also sold the Sammy Davis Jr. he had on display. Here come more frames! Keep an eye on my gallery for new ones when you:

CHECK OUT MY WEBSITE AT: http://www.vinylart.info/

Christmas is coming! Still plenty of time to commission pieces!

Marvin Gaye 09/24/07

Best 3 Things About Austin, TX

1. My brother-in-law Jason lives near there.

2. http://www.keepaustinweird.com/

3. Wild About Music, the first gallery to show my work, has sold yet another Led Zeppelin! They took a chance on me and sold a Johnny Cash, Jimi Hendrix, Louis Armstrong, Willie Nelson, Stevie Ray Vaughan, B.B. King, and a bunch of Zeppelins. So if you're in the Austin area checking out 6th Street, drop in and say hello!

And, if you want to see more examples of pieces like Page and Plant:

CHECK OUT MY WEBSITE AT WWW.VINYLART.INFO

Now I can buy more records and frames!