|
|
Promises, promises; a whole has been happeningo but making images, or updating this site has taken a backseat to other projects. We do have some new work; we just have to find time to format it for the web and post it. In the meantime if you want to see our latest projects look like go to grow your tree dot biz. It’s a new consulting service that we’re starting up, and were quite excited about it.
The SightWork nexus is going to be somewhere between really-slow and non-existent for the next couple of weeks. I’m upgrading pretty much everything including shifting over to the Dvorak keyboard. We’ll be back better than ever.
 We don’t normally do political art. Like New York Prague is a city of graffiti . It’s hard to say with this kind of work whether the city frames the art or the art the city. In Prague, however, the juxtapositions tend to be more unsettling. You’re tempted to imagine that with all this history would have learned something; something beyond the fact that life is complicated, and that humans as individuals tend to be very slow learners, but maybe that’s enough. Maybe stained glass and video cameras are all that’s required; maybe if you understand those, then bowling alleys and tornados make sense. We’ve also got some great shots of the official baton twirling team from one of the less familiar Czech municipalities. Of course it’s not about making sense, not even about perspective. Only about being, which is why we don’t normally do political art.
 Shel’s been visiting this weekend so I’ve been on my own. This started out to be about cows but something else caught my attention. Not all pictures have to be about something, perhaps that’s not true, Malevich would argue the premise . Maybe they become about something as you go along, as you work with them. Sometimes you put too much in, sometimes not enough, it’s always a decision. At times I envy writers, film makers who seem to have everything planned, organized, maybe that’s just my imagination of how they work, maybe they just make it up as they go along. Perhaps they simply start with actor, characters, ideas, a few shots, some found footage, and just start putting it together. Maybe it could happen like that, maybe you don’t need ideas, just execution.
 Maybe it’s that we’ve started doing yoga, or just something in the air, but this one came close to driving us crazy. The I Ching reminds us that ‘limitations’ are necessary, and every now and then we get locked in to an intuitive loop that complicates rather than simplifies. In this instance the base image was from a canoe trip to Limekiln Lake in the Adirondacks; for what ever reason we decided to limit the components of the drawing to that specific place and day. That would have been sensible if we had had a lot of great images, but in this case what we had was something that often happens; you see a scene that catches your inner eye, in this case the leaves in the water. When you get home and look at the photo-image it’s, well, less that what you remember. Even more of a problem the surrounding shots aren’t much better; you don’t have much to work with. Not being ones to shrink from a problem, even a self-imposed one, we forged ahead. We’re very happy with the final result, and probably there’s a lesson in there somewhere.
Another drawing that’s sort of in process. It’s been around for a bit but we’ve been reworking it. Not sure that it’s finished, but one of the characteristics of the way we work is that nothing is ever exactly finished.
The original concept was a new/another I Ching series. We have been growing increasingly dissatisfied with the original series. We’ve grow in style and approach as well as in life and going in the original style just feels wrong. However on consideration the right move may well be to simply take a new direction for the second sequence of the hexagrams. There is precedence. Requires some thought and meditation; stay tuned.
 Shel’s working on the text for this series. Whether there’s some more than coincidence at work is debatable, but the Newfoundland trip marks a new direction for our work. Part of the explanation lies in the discovery of a new tool. Corel Painter X is a wonder.
 Sometimes the work seems to have a mind of its own. We spent a week in Prague and out of a couple of thousand images there are 13 that seem to demand attention. They are all city views, roof tops really. There are strict rules governing how the images evolve, and the process is almost as obsessional as it appears. If we stick with it there will eventually be 52 final works.
 Some of our family lives in San Diego. Climatically this area is as close to paradise as anywhere I’ve been; growing things certainly seem to share that sense. After several visits we had many hundred flower and plant pictures. Like a lot of flower pictures they were quite beautiful but they looked pretty much like all the other flower pictures. Still, beauty was not to be denied and we began experimenting with processes that we hoped would produce something that was at least a little different. Like the Conjure Belts most of the Botanicals begin with a single image. In this case however that image is duplicated, layered, rotated, and given varying degrees of opacity. What they remind is that you can’t make a more beautiful rose or improve on the orchid, but you can make something that expands your appreciation, as well as making you part of the natural process of creation that made flowers in the first place.
|
|
Simple is usually best, but sometimes you have to go quite a distance to get to simple. This image is pure Photoshop; we’ve been busy with life’s distractions and getting back into Painter has been on hold. We started this drawing awhile back and weren’t happy with it; actually we’re still not exactly happy with it, but since what we’re demoing here is process it has it’s place. The example at the left is final for now. We’ve been experimenting with borders and since the drawing wasn’t working we decided to try that the first attempt is the image at the lower left. Better but maybe a little much. The center image below is simplifies the approach and it’s actually kind of nice in a Valentine sort of way. We started working on the ground next and as that developed decided to try turning off the floral border, which gave us the final image on the lower left.
