It's Just So... ughhh, Tedious

So what do I do on a Monday morning when my brain is backfiring? I try, once again, to wrap my head around Fairey's legal wranglings with the AP. Yeesh.

It seems that in an inextricable series of mistrusting communications, the AP, as scared middleman, fucked things up. They're acting completely inconsistently and bullying both Garcia and Fairey. Garcia didn't even want to sue people over the situation, and didn't even know about the Fairey poster for quite awhile.

And that's my underlying issue and why I still don't get Fairey. He says he meant no disrepect for Garcia, justifying his position with the fact that Garcia is an Obama supporter too, and all Fairey wanted to do was help Obama's campaign. He even says he wouldn't've done anything differently on the off-chance he had a substantive impact on the campaign. Ego! Jeez. But Garcia didn't know about it! That's my point. Fairey knew, he knew enough to preemptively file to protect his fair use of the image before the AP filed any copyright claims against him. But he didn't clue Garcia in.

Garcia took the blasted photo!

I don't know, maybe it's touching on my own insecurities again of transformatively using the photographs of others to paint my portraits. Maybe it's the fact that the AP screwed things up communication-wise, between Fairey and Garcia. I don't know that I could determine the photographer for all the photos I've found on Google, the way Fairey found Garcia's photo. I really really tried after my last attempt to understand this issue. Now all the images for whom I found photographer credit have them listed as inspiration.

For instance, this image of David Bowie was taken by Mick Rock. He even has a David Bowie page on his site. The guy's a legend, having taken some AMAZING photos during the '70s, most of which would be perfect to use as inspiration for my portraits. I'm going to try to contact him. I'm not really expecting anything from the contact other than to hopefully just thank him.

I just don't want any middleman fucking up my communication with anybody relating to my Vinyl Art.

Peace.

David Bowie 05/18/09

Following The Followers

Today, like every Friday on Twitter, is #followfriday. For those who haven't the foggiest about Twitter, basically you can label updates with #[blah] so your tweet will be grouped in with a larger trending, or popular, topic. The hokey word play of followfriday just became a routine for people to tell other people who they like following and why. It helps expand your Twitter circle, which can get to feeling real small real quick.

I don't follow everybody who follows me. I do, however pay attention to who is following me, especially when they direct tweets at me. I decided to turn the idea of sharing who you like around and share who likes me. So I do #followerfriday.

On Twitter, I have the benefit of knowing who is watching and reading along regularly, for the most part. However, here on my blog I only know those who've followed using Google's friend connect, or who've subscribed via email, like my friend Rodney. I've got some 50 people right now presumably regularly reading this blog who I don't know.

I'd like to.

To that end, I'm going to try not moderating comments. I explained before why I'd stuck to moderating them even though some people in other circles consider it a surefire way to discourage commenters. Basically, I wanted you to know I was listening because you'd know I was forced to decide to accept or reject every comment submitted, and it is my blog and I wanted to avoid having to delete spam comments.

But I want you to feel totally free to leave whatever comment you'd like. I want to know anything about yourself you want to tell me, like what music you like right now, what you think about American Idol or Grey's Anatomy, or why you keep up with this blog. Anything.

So we'll try it.

Peace.

I've Gone Dotty!

Early on I realized that trying to paint normally as one would with a brush wouldn't work well on vinyl. It ended up looking blotchy or too thick. In the back of my head, my high school art teacher's favorite project helped me figure it out. Dots.

I've described my work kind of like a reverse newspaper photo, with the density of the dots of paint creating the illusion. What was this project Mrs. Kahn loved so much that gave me the idea? Using only dots to create drawings with a very fine point rapidograph pen. I was in her elective class 3 years and each year we'd do these things and have a book printed of the whole classes' work. They were insane.


The idea stuck in my head from such a repetitive action so much so that after high school I actually was planning on trying one with colored ink. Yeesh. But, the theory is really useful. With enough care, volume can be created with smooth surfaces, and edges can be defined without solid lines. Indeed, the best lesson for me from the whole thing was that using lines to create shapes truly flattens objects, breaking the illusion of real substance.

This, along with my lessons from sculpture, are why I start in the middle of shapes and shade outward, bringing the volume out of the dark into the light.

It's also why I have to paint to music with a beat to it to drive my wrist's repeated dabbing.

Peace.

The Sculptading of Paintrature

I realized I haven't shared very much of my artistic upbringing. I'd listed some artists who'd influenced my aesthetic growing up, but haven't shown much of what I did back in school.

This image of Roger Waters of Pink Floyd is one of the more sculptural ones I've painted. So I'll take this opportunity to show you a couple sculptures I did back at the Brentwood Art Center with Jonathan Bickart.

Like my portraits, which kind of emerge from the vinyl, I tended to create figures emerging from chunks of clay. The woman's general shape looked like a triangle from a certain angle, so I had her fade into the geometrical shape. The man's face was more of a study, so I just took the block of clay straight from the bag and sculpted him into the corner, adding back on removed clay for the nose and beard, so it sort of look embedded in the block and sort of like a mask.

This tendency might be attributed to a bit of laziness on my part. With my portraits on vinyl too, as I don't use any black paint. Just using white, and very little at that, makes my job easier on one hand. With painting, it's more difficult on the other hand because I can't screw up, I can't remove the paint. So if I get a part of a face too bright, it'll pop out too much, messing up the contour of the face.

I'm basically sculpting the painting, or shading the portraiture. After I've gotten the shapes of the face, I rely quite a bit on my sculpture training to understand the flow of the face and to brighten or raise the right places. Both painting and sculpture use light to create relief. Sculpture has the benefit of actually being raised, while I use paint density to create the illusion of relief on the vinyl. But I definitely think like a sculptor while painting.

Next, I'll show you how my high school art teacher got me hooked on dots, dabbing, and basically density.

Peace.

The Story Of My Life

Last night on "House", Wilson asked House how he wanted the story of his life to go. It is in your control how you act, how you live. That is the free will we beings have. I've pondered before about whether we truly have free will or not, but it really came down to semantics, as philosophical ramblings usually do.

The bottom line is that we live as we live. Is as does, and it is by our actions that we are judged. The title of this post was just quoted by a friend and it, and something else big, got me thinking again about responsibility and how the story of our lives fit into the tapestry of humanity.

The Summit is so iconic, such a known part of our culture, because of their stories, their lives. I am sooooo humbled to have become a teency part of those stories as I shared in my first email newsletter. (If you haven't gotten that newsletter and want it, please email me and I'll send it to you.) I'm humbled because Frankie and Sammy are more than just entertainers in our culture. The way they lived changed our culture and did their part to change the way Americans live.

For me, big news is coming at the end of this month. Big. Life changing.


So please stay tuned.

Peace.