GAJit

Big music at Smalls

2006-10-10T02:50:00.000-07:00

I got back from a business trip from New York last week where I was helping to show the some of the new technologies Verizon is working on to a room full of analysts. It was fun and interesting but that's not really what I want to post about. What I do want to post about is music.
Without getting into a long post about my love of music, likes, dig-likes and what not let me just say I'm a big jazz fan. So anyways, I got to take a few days after the business stuff and hang out with a couple of friends who lives in city and knew I liked jazz. Now, Being the good friends they are they called a friend of a friend who has a friend of someone who does some bit of writing on the NY jazz scene to see if they could recommendation of a good place to hear jazz.
Anyways somehow in all that we wound up at a club called "Smalls" who is somehow affiliated with a place called Fat Cat and sat in on a set from Ned Goold who is a regular their. It was an experience that far exceeded any expectations I had about it. After a few drinks and a few songs you'll think your back on the NY jazz scene of the 50's and 60's. Great environment, fantastic music. It's my new favorite place in the big city. I just hope it doesn't get to crowded.

(note: given the popularity of my blog, I don't think I'm in any way endangering that hope.)

New Media in Art

2006-09-08T13:14:00.000-07:00

Recently I finished reading New Media in Art Second edition by Michael Rush and just wanted to post up a few thoughts about the book.

First off, I thought it did a good job of covering ground in an art period I new the probably the least about. That being the time around the 60's, 70's, and early 80's.

Now that might sound odd coming from someone with a life-long love of art. Also, being that I grew up in two of those decades. But as a child I was more interested in old world art. I seem to start around the time of the renaissance, as that was visually a very direct and beautiful art. From their I seemed to progress through art in a orderly fashion. I suppose this makes sense as typically artistic movements are born in large part from the one before. Also, as one gets into Modernism, art becomes more highly conceptual and much more closely tied with social and political issues of the times, that as a child was hard for me to grasp without a little more life experiance and historical understanding to contextualize it with. So, as it went I moved chronologically up through art history and stopped around Picasso. When I went to collage, the art history classes I took seemed to do pretty much the same thing. Maybe the 70's and 80's was still to young to be thought of as historical. Anyways, I digress from the book.

The book does seem to do a good job of going over this time period and as a working artist himself, Michael brings insightful commentary on the art and artist in this area. The book does cover a lot of ground but at times seems brief in certain areas. Most notably his coverage on computer art. He does some key points on early computer art but does not go much farther.

It seems that a book with a title like New Media in Art would have more coverage in the area of computers. I did notice that the publisher Thames and Hudson has a book out called Digital Art and another called Internet Art. Perhaps I wasn't thinking specifically enough when I saw the title.

Bike scribble two

2006-08-22T15:15:00.000-07:00

At long last I have perfected the art of motorcycle illustration without reference images. This is probably do to the fact that I spent about a year looking over different bikes before I bought one. Only thing is my bike is a BMW and looks nothing like the one I can draw from memory.

Bike scribble

2006-08-21T13:23:00.000-07:00

I think I'll start posting more drawings and pictures to this blog from now on. Writing requires to much anylitical thinking.

Sketches

2006-06-27T22:17:00.000-07:00

I think what I have been missing lately is hands on pencil on paper sketching. I actually draw all the time when thinking about a some of the computer based work that I do. But this is more just thinking sketches and usually has little to do with an artistic visualization of something. Sketching that is more about use cases, visualizing user interaction, visualizing how the elements will move, or maybe just my own kind of pseudo-OO/UML coding sketches.

One of the main reason I got started in all this creative stuff in the first place was because I loved to draw. I would draw anything and everything. As a child, if for some reason I realized their was something that I had not drawn, I would set about drawing it as soon as I could. The very act of drawing is one of the more fulfilling things I have ever done and I could talk about various aspects of drawing in great lengths. I have read somewhere that Rembrandt would care almost nothing about a prospective apprentices painting abilities and focus soley on his sketching ability, saying something to the effect of, It's easier to take someone who could sketch well and teach them to paint then it is to take someone who knows how to paint but lacks in the ability to sketch. I very much agree with this, as do a lot of art teachers I have known. But sadly, in all my profesional interview I have ever had someone asked to see my sketch book.

It puzzles me tho that I often lose site of my love for drawing and slowly fall out of practice with it. I think that I might unconsciously tell myself that I really don't make money at it and my creative efforts are better spent in other ways.

So for the rest of the week I think I'll make a point to make a at least one drawing a day. What the drawing might be, I'm not sure of yet, maybe something different each day. If anything turns out decent I'll post it up. As for tonight thou, I'll post an older sketch, one of my many female figure studies.

This is not a gun

2006-06-26T16:42:00.000-07:00

On my way home from work today I hear a report on the radio about toy guns. I was only partially listening but it had something to do with a law banning the manufacturing of realistic toy guns. I don't really care to debate the details of what this law would constitute as realistic but it did get me thinking about realism in general and in art.

Quickly jumping past the literal truth of what makes a gun a gun, I found myself a philosophical crossroads of what is real and what is non-real. Even though I am well aware of philosophers far more capable of wrestling with these type of issues, I still like to ponder them every once and a while. And after awhile, as I usually do, I turn the question to the subject of art.

Surrealist artist Rene Magritte, known for incorporating such philosophical issues into his work, must have grappled with thoughts like these. His famous painting "Cici n'est pas une pipe" or "This is not a pipe" is a beautiful play on the thought of realism. It's simple but powerful image is mirrored in the simple but powerful question left by the title. If this is not a pipe then what is it? Is it just a two dimensional rendering of a pipe or is it something else? If by making such a literal statement is Rene realy begging us to question what we see, and in doing so question what is art?

Marcel Duchamp seem to take this type of provocation with the viewers even further with his "Readymades" series of art by simply stating an object as art. It seems like their should be some sort of ritual involved in the making of art. Maybe he had some magic words he would chant, oh, or maybe a wand, an art wand.
Anyway, this "what is art?" paradoxically seems to be be at the very core of "what art is" and runs through my mind almost daily, so I'm sure I'll come back to this.

Refocus

2006-06-24T04:35:00.000-07:00

I tend to bounce back and forth between a technical and artistic mindset. This is especially true for my work life right now. I work as a designer/developer at Verizon and as of late it's been more development than design. So to help balance this out, I feel it's time to refocus this blog for what I originally intended it for. That being a diary of my thoughts and actions as they relate to art and design.

I very much enjoy working in this hybrid type manner. In the I.T. world I have had the opportunities to work with many designer only and developer only type people. But for me, I love the ying-yang of art and science. I guess if pressured I would have to resort to that of a designer or to be more direct, a creative person.

Creativity may be human nature, but I do think it's stronger in some individuals and can manifests itself in different ways. In me, it just seems to take a visual approach. As a visual person I sometimes use this fact to compensate for my lack in written or verbal communications. Well, no longer, with this handy, refocused blog I shall increase my writing skills ten fold (give or take a fold). Also, it seems when you write things down they become more than just thought in your head. I'm sure some writer or word smith has conveyed this more elegantly but I'll leave it at that for now and try to get on with the business of writing about art and design.