Monday, June 7, 2010 – 4:23 pm
It always surprises people when I tell them I feel more creative and spontaneous using a computer to make art compared to when I made mixed media paintings. While it’s true that it took some time to learn the electronic tools well enough to get to this point, there is an incredible amount of play that takes place when I create images in Photoshop.
All that has a downside, of course, in that it’s important to always have a backup copy or two of everything, because when things disappear digitally, they really disappear. A recent failure to save a version of an artwork before I “saved for web” and closed it resulted in the loss of the high resolution version before it got backed up. What really became interesting about this failure was trying to reproduce what I had done before. There were so many twists and turns, I couldn’t even get close. There was no getting it back, so the only thing to do was create a piece I liked more.
The original:
The replacement:
Well, the replacement might not be an outstanding piece on its own, but at some point, I started seeing it as the right half of a diptych along with the previous piece in the series.
The Diptych:
I really like the results, and am happy I lost the original. I wouldn’t have created this work which is now a landscape with effective contrast of reality and metaphor.
Monday, May 17, 2010 – 10:44 pm
It’s not easy to observe that as I approach 700 in this series of 1000, the way I put images together has not changed fundamentally since I started doing digital work ten years ago. Hopefully there is some noticeable maturity and sophistication in the results of my creative process, but I have to admit it’s a disappointment that there haven’t been major breakthroughs in the way I work. There have been some interesting techniques I’ve developed, and I’m happy to have those in my artistic quiver. I also look forward to more explorations in the time-based work that has come out of this exploration.
But the initial desire I had for the Weekly Press was to find fundamentally new ways of working within the confines of 2 dimensional art-making. My mistake, I believe, was in putting too much faith and focus on the process and technique, and not enough on the thought and philosophy behind the images themselves. The latter is really where the meaning lies in my work. The method of creating this work adds only a little to the overall meaning, even with the references within the imagery to the digital process.
So, learning from that, for the next 300 in the series, I think I’ll try shifting focus to a wider exploration of images; things I avoid, things I don’t like, or do like but haven’t taken the time to do them. I’m finding it easy to be lazy. It’s time to put a little more effort into it.
Are you on auto pilot too?
Saturday, February 20, 2010 – 8:22 pm
During a “career day” some time ago, a fellow artist and I were invited to talk to school children about being an artist for a living (I thought this a pretty bold move by the school). During our presentations, we asked the students of their interest in various arts: music, dance, visual, writing. As the ages went up, we saw the enthusiasm go down, and I reflected on my own trajectory growing up. An experience in third grade might have damaged my pursuit of an art career had it not been for a fourth grade teacher who convinced my folks to put me in art classes outside the school curriculum. In visual art anyway, I avoided life-damaging education.
So when I saw this TED talk by Ken Robinson, I found myself nodding in agreement, and very moved when he described the discovery of a young girl becoming a dancer. The fact is schools really can kill creativity and we need to find a way for it to continue to flourish in young people, or we will be screwed as a species.
In the talk, Ken Robinson says, “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” Please visit the TED talk by Ken Robinson.
