Anatomy and Art

Sometimes I do Google searches to see how this site pops up, and it always bothers me that searching for the words “anatomy and art” don’t necessarily bring up anatomyandart.com in a search.  So here I’m saying it within a post.  That’s right.  This post is a total cheat just to make Google look at me.  Or you could say I’m being helpful to people looking for the site here.  But apparently I have to say it.  I have to say anatomy and art. Did you get that Google?  Do you hear me now?  Anatomy and art, anatomy and art, anatomy and art!  And while I’m at it, anatomy art, art anatomy, anatomical art.  There.  Ha ha!  Take that searching algorithms!

Lately I’ve been seeing art pop up that paints real objects and real people as though they were painted or drawn.  I suppose the over all idea is something that I first saw when I went to a live performance of The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch.  The costumes and make-up were very much inspired by Dave McKean’s artwork for the original graphic novel.  Master of mixed-media that he is, he tends to combine photographs with drawings and well pretty much anything.  So when they did the play the, costumers chose to add a drawn or painted element to the actors on stage.

photo is from the LA Times

Well in the last week or so, I’ve seen that idea of painted life come up a couple more times.  And I have to say that the effect is stunning every time.

This video for “Forever Dolphin Love”, completely drew me in, and so much of it is specifically that aesthetic. Well that, and the fact that this guy’s just got such an amazing face to work with here.

Forever Dolphin Love – Connan Mockasin from daniel brereton on Vimeo.

Then just a few days ago, I found the work of Alexa Meade.

And how incredible is this?  She’s creating live paintings and then photographing them.  I’m sharing the links I’ve seen of hers directly here, because I think it’s just so much fun going through her work.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/alexameade

http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/hyperrealistic-acrylic-body

All in all, it’s a style that really speaks to me. And I’m tempted to experiment with it a little myself. Maybe just once, I could paint the world, and my friends, and get to walk around in that reality, just for a little while. I don’t even know if I could pull it off, but I think I’d like to try sometime.

I know I haven’t written much this week.  Been reacclimating to Chicago, and fighting off a cold in the process.  But the cold is finally fading and it’s time to be sending off resumes far and wide to all those places that might have use for an anaplastologist just out of school.  I’m also finalizing the animation and finishing my research project paper for graduation this summer.

I’m attaching my resume here for download as a PDF.  It’s a shiny and new resume, and I’m rather fond of how it turned out.  It does have my current contact information, so here’s hoping that this isn’t a terrible idea to post here.  If ever there was a time to put it all out there, I suppose that now would be that time.

saraegner2011

So after making a sale so quickly on that last painting, I’ve been giving a little thought to the power of these here internets, and how I can use that connectivity to make more sales.  As it is, I went back to my primary website where I’ve been keeping a record of everything I’ve put to canvas since coming back to painting in 2001 – http://snapshotgenius.com/paint.  It’s not really set up for sales, but I have always kept a record there of which pieces have been sold or given to someone.  That information presents in the single image view for any piece.  I went back and specifically put the words “available for purchase” on all the other ones though, to make that clearer.  Ideally though, I’d like to come up with a site where anyone interested could just buy a piece right then and there, or at least contact me directly with ease about pricing.  I wrote up a few scribbles about how I might go about this yesterday while I was thinking about it.

That’s the basic layout I came up with.  The one drawback I guess is that I never get to show off any of the pieces I’ve done as gifts that way.  I’ve got a few that I’m pretty proud of that fall under that category.  I’ll have to think about that some more.

This is usually about the point that I shake my head a bit and think about how narcissistic this whole process is.  And that pretty much goes for art on the whole, not just promotion.  Sometimes I feel like a little kid clamoring for everyone to look at me, look at my picture.  But it’s what we do.

Unfortunately, I’m not that great at web design.  All those little colons and semi colons all having to be just so, well it’s not exactly a strength for me.  Even if I was better with basic design, I know it’s another step entirely when you start bringing credit card transactions into the picture.  People do it though.  Maybe someday it will be a worth while investment for me to get someone to put that together for me.  In the meantime, I’ll keep scribbling notes about such ideas down for later reference.

I really do have a special place in my heart for the XKCD webcomic.

And this one should be shared…

http://xkcd.com/896/

“Illumine”
Just finished today.
I’ll give her a coat of gloss when I get back to Chicago.

Now that the internship is done, it’s about time to head back North to Chicago.  There was something at the end of the week here that I wanted to stick around for, so I decided to take a few days to get my things in order, and take advantage of an empty house to work on my paper for graduation.  That was the plan anyways, but last night I fell into a painting, and well, it’s really coming along.

I always think it’s neat, the progression on these things.  So in case you think that sort of thing is neat too, here are a couple of cell phone shots.  The first is an early image followed by how far it had come by around 4am this morning, when I finally went to bed already.

I’m excited.  Despite the terrible distraction from my paper, I think this is going to be a nice piece.

And there you have it, the first of my anaplastology tools – one spatula, one #7, and one dappen dish for work with acrylic.  Last Friday marked my last day as an intern in Dallas.  As a parting gift I was given these tools, along with a couple other fun odds and ends.

My time with the Medical Arts Prosthetics Clinic has been really great.  I feel like I’ve learned so much.  And I got to work with a patient from their initial consultation on through the creation of a prosthesis, and onto delivery.  I had done all of those steps before, but never all towards one prosthesis, not from the point of an initial consultation anyways.  I got to do a lot of things with this internship, but seeing that patient through was really great.  And I know that this is what I want to do.

Here is a photo of the lot of us out at the clinic.  Listing left to right, that’s Greg Gion, Allison Vest, Colette Shrader, Sky Miranda, and me, Sara Egner.

And now it’s on to finishing up my project research, graduating, and making a career for myself.  Wish me luck!  Or better yet, send me job offers!  I’m about to be on the market!

So, I was just thinking how it’s gotten awfully technical around here lately, and I should show some more artists’ work for a change of pace again.  And then tonight I stumbled into Tatayuki Hori’s Oritsunagumono (things folded and connected), winner of the 2001 Mitsubishi Chemical Junior Designer Award, according to Colossal Art and Design.

I wish that I had a direct website to point you towards for the artist directly, but for all of the blog articles available on his work, I haven’t seen anything from him directly.  If any of you reading know of a more direct source, please comment.

As for the project itself, please allow me to copy the description up at Design Bloom…

“each translucent sheet is first printed with either the images of fragments of an animal’s skeleton, or,
on some pages, human-made discarded objects that are often ingested by the animals in the wild.
using the ancient tradition of folded paper, hori assembles the pages into a three-dimensional model.
once the paper is folded, the printed components are united as a whole, telling the visual story
of the animal’s plight to survive in an increasingly polluted and hazardous ecosystem.”

The exhibition at large, looks like this…

…with each figure underlit so that it emphasizes the translucency and fragility of the piece, and each featured next to a wall hanging of the printing diagram prior to folding.

Here is one of the diagrams.

And here is the 3D model of that same piece.

Impressive work, most certainly.

Because there will no doubt come a time when I will want to remember, and because some of you reading may also be trying to sort this one out for yourselves.  So far, the best sequence settings I have found for HD animation in Final Cut Pro have been as shown here…

That is all for now.