Anatomy and Art

It seems that I’ve been short on time, but overdue for an update around here.  Work with Sapling continues to go well.  Lately I have been moving into the post production phase of a 3D animation that I’ve been working on for some time over there.  It’s about the translation process wherein individual strings of our genetic code are translated into a polypeptide chain and eventually form a protein.  It’s exciting stuff, and I’m anxious to get it all strung together and finessed.

I also managed to get in another vacation.  I went back up north for the big regional burn event that is held in Michigan.  It’s called Lakes of Fire and I had an amazing time.  I also got a glimpse at my old Chicago neighborhood and I have to say that the people and places there still hold a pretty big piece of my heart.  That and they’ve gotten me thinking about plasma cutters.  All the computer art I make starts looking a lot cooler when I start seeing such things used to create real things.  And this weekend I learned that one can design an image in Illustrator and use that design with a plasma cutter to have it cut into steel.  Nothing about that is anything less than awesome.  Seriously, my friends made this, and I’m ever so impressed.

Just sayin’.

Anyway I promise to write more soon.  And thanks as always for reading.

I’m soon to be out of town for a bit, and not a lot of time for writing, so I thought that I would post some old paintings again.  Hopefully when I get back, I can get back to such endeavors.  Been missing the act of painting lately.

These are some of the figures that I’ve done over the years, and sort of the development of a particular style.

I think that maybe the starting point was when I did “Frantic” in early 2002.

Then years later it came together stronger with “Scream” in 2007.

Then I made a teeny tiny painting later in 2007 playing with the same style of line movements.

The following year I painted “The Fall” (this one was pretty big, especially after the tininess of my last effort).  You can tell that I was getting into anatomy here, because it’s less chaotic and features actual muscles where they lie.  I think this was the first piece of this style I did after starting to learn to sculpt, and it was done shortly before starting school at UIC.

Then in an effort to create a gift for my friend Scott before leaving California, I diverged from things a touch into a swirlier style while trying to paint something that was neither quite a warm tone or a cool tone (Scott really likes purple.)

And lastly, before leaving for school, I attempted to combine themes and use my more chaotic line style on a tree.  I often paint trees.  I’ll probably do another post like this of them sometime.  But I can’t say that the combination of styles quite worked.  I still keep it on my wall, and sometimes I kind of like it, but I don’t consider this one much of a success.

When I got into school, it took me a while to find time to paint again.  I got sick around the end of my 2nd semester and held up in my apartment, probably longer than was exactly reasonable, and fell right back into paint again.  The first thing I made was “Pour.”

And goodness I honestly didn’t realize that there were going to be so many of these when I started this post!  But I’m in it now, and up next is one of my, and seemingly many’s favorites, “Tom Tips His Hat.”  I can’t tell you how satisfying it was to get this one out between semesters.  Someone had told me that all the men I painted were creepy.  That combined with having studied likenesses for sculpture shortly before coming back to school, I thought I’d try painting a man who I happen to be quite fond of.  Tom Waits, being his beautiful awesome self, fit the bill perfectly.

Then, the likeness bandwagon went on, when a couple friends of mine got married.  I couldn’t go to the wedding, but I could play with their faces!  It took me forever to get this right, but I finally got Ellen and Joe down in paint.  Take that you crazy lovestruck fools!

I did a couple things in other styles, and then went to Dallas for my anaplastology internship.  When I got to the end of that time, I couldn’t wait to put paint to canvas again and painted what may be one of my favorites in really a just a period of a couple of days.  I love it when that happens.  It really doesn’t happen enough.  But that’s when I made “Illumine.”

Then back in Chicago I picked up another tiny one that I had started some time before.  It had started in a more realistic style, but I painted over all of that, moving it into more of this style and changing the colors.  Thanks to Scott, I can paint in purple now.  And I made “Feel.”

It’s not my last painting finished, but it is the last in this style.  And goodness, if you’ve made it through all of that, thank you.  That was more pieces than I’d originally thought I was getting myself into showing!

And I hope to have some new ones for you all over the next year.  It takes me so long to adapt to a move, but I can feel it coming.

Tonight I discovered Nerd Nite.  It was pretty sweet.

A friend of mine, Cynthia Phelps, gave the opening talk.  It was on “The Neuroscience of Logo Design.”  Her talk included a lot of information about emotional responses to color and symmetry the way we read shapes.  I’ve often struggled with the idea of committing to a logo.  As someone who tends to pull from a lot of different areas, and wears a lot of different hats, even in my freelance years I could never settle on a single image to represent it all.  Maybe tonight I will dream of something with Cynthia’s inspiration.  I don’t need it now as much, but it’s always good to have ideas like that filed away.

She was followed by Bruce Leander’s “Advanced techniques for digital fine art nature photography.”  Bruce got into the advantages of HDR (high dynamic range) photography, focus stacking, and panoramic images created from stitching images together virtually.  Really technology has come so far in being able to put images together like this.  It’s something I’d like to get into if I ever find the time.  As digital cameras get better and better, some of these techniques have become much more accessible to the non-specialist.  Bruce was actually a specialist though, and his work was beautiful.

And lastly Jason Neulander spoke on “How The Intergalactic Nemesis Started Taking Over the World.”  I was not familiar with The Intergalactic Nemesis before tonight, but it sounds fun and I hope to catch a showing sometime.  He’s basically writing comics/radio plays that are performed live with foley and music and projected art work.  I’d like to see it sometime.  And I really appreciated his talk about getting the show launched and his path as a creative.

Anyway, it was a fun night, a fun crowd, and interesting speakers and topics.  Apparently they do these nights in a lot of different cities.  Someone in Chicago is doing podcasts and recently interviewed an actual ninja, and there’s a magazine, and people posting videos of talks to Vimeo.  It’s a whole little world I never even knew about.  I have to admit, I’m a little tempted to try and give a presentation myself sometime.  I could talk about anaplastology, or educational media, or maybe talk about anatomy and art.  Could be worth doing if I were to manage to summon up the nerve and energy to put something interesting together.  And whether or not that ever happens, I’ll definitely be going back to more of these.

The world lost one of the good ones yesterday.  Ray Bradbury died in Los Angeles at the age of 91.

I got to meet him once, back when I lived in LA.  I went to a book signing just so I could shake his hand and tell him thanks.  He signed my copy of The Martian Chronicles and a copy of Something Wicked This Way Comes for a friend who couldn’t make it.  He couldn’t believe I was such a fan of work he’d written over 50 years prior.  But The Martian Chronicles continues to be one of my all-time favorite books.

There wasn’t another sci-fi author out there with so much heart.  Really, I’m not sure there was another any kind of writer that got people like Bradbury did.  You might say I was a bit of a fan.

This is him, in his home.  According to the Google News link where I found it, he said that he never threw anything away.

From everything I know about him, he was about as good a guy as they get.  And Los Angeles always felt a little bit nicer knowing he was out there in it, still madly in love with Hollywood after all those years.  I’m sorry to see him go.  He planted magic into the hearts and minds of millions.

In the afterword of the short story collection “Driving Blind,” Bradbury writes of a dream wherein he was taken in a student driver car (he never did learn to drive) by a blindfolded Greek muse, who “whispered notions, concepts, ideas, immense truths, and fabulous lies” as she drove him along a country road.  She told him that it was okay not to know the way, and to just reach out.

I don’t know where you’re headed now, Ray, but I like to think of you reaching out, and I hope that it’s wonderful.

So last weekend (and the days surrounding) I took the first paid vacation of my life, and went to Flipside.  It was beautiful.  And I am again inspired to want to build awesome things.

I posted here sometime back about The Gallery of Dreams that my friend Nobo was putting together.  The idea was a gallery of artwork that would never be photographed, to be shown throughout the event, and set on fire at the end of it all to live on exclusively in our memories.  My own contributions to the gallery were small.  I painted a little bit on one of the walls.  But some of the contributions inside were amazing.

I have one photo that I can share of the final burn.  Anything closer would have revealed the art inside.  It was a good fire, and watching the pieces go inside is something that I think I will remember for a long time.