Parallels Desktop

If you are in the market for a new computer, consider this:  Windows 8 works brilliantly when installed on a virtual machine in Parallels Desktop on a Mac.  With OSX Mavericks' new feature app nap, it sleeps quietly in the background until needed, and when you want it switching to Windows 8 is as simple as hitting "Command - tab"  as shown above.  Great stuff!

Farewell to an Icon

I was backstage in the greenroom at a Laurie Anderson show, where I'd worked as a volunteer usher. I was exhausted, and sat down for a break on a ratty sofa. There was a TV on showing a baseball game. A guy came in and plopped down on the seat beside me. He asked if I wanted a beer- I said sure. He went to the fridge and got two icy cans, popped one for me. I took the can and did a double take when I realized who he was. He grinned, poked me in the shoulder, and said "get over it- I'm Lou Reed." I hope you are taking a walk on the wild side Lou! Thanks for the beer and the music! Say hi to Drella for me!

Poppy

Bisbee Afternoon

After a strange drive (the bridge over the San Pedro river was limited to one way traffic, so there was a long wait there, and there were hundreds of motorcyclists on the road as well) I was able to find a parking space and a seat in the nicest cafe within a hundred miles or so.  Bisbee Coffee Co. is, in fact, one of the best cafes anywhere.  It has a nice combo of inside and outside seating, is well lit and busy. The aroma of fresh coffee is intoxicating, and if you want to get an idea of what Bisbeeans are like, this is the place to be.
Its easy to forget that I live only 20 miles from this little bohemian haven.  Sierra Vista is bland by comparison.
Wandering the streets, its easy to believe that this city once rivaled San Francisco as the best city in the west.
Unlike most of the cities in southern Arizona, Bisbee actually has a main street and a downtown.  There is a place you can point to and say "that is Bisbee".  The streets are clean and well maintained for the most part, the buildings are colorful and attractive, the folk are friendly if not gregarious. Today there are no events here, but later this month Bisbee hosts a yearly race - which involves 1000 stairs in the city as part of the route.
Compared to other parts of southern AZ, Bisbee is cooler. The temperature here tends to be about 15 degrees cooler than Tucson, which means that even in the hottest parts of the summer its fairly comfortable here.
If you are an artist or a photographer, the place is a paradise.  

Ubik and Dreams

Eternal life in a spray bottle. Safe when used as directed.

At least once a year I stop in to visit Runciter and the other odd but intriguing characters in Philip K. Dick's Ubik, which remains one of my favorite novels.  It is a favorite for the same reason a painting becomes a favorite. In examining it, it always rewards me with something new, something I hadn't seen before.

Ubik is new every time I open it up.  The flow of the plot doesn't change.  Its not a sequential thing that changes, but an idea thing.  The questions Phil asked about philosophy in Ubik present different answers every time I read the book.  Half life, after life, death, birth are all discussed at length in context of the novel, and every time I read it new levels open up, while others close or just outright disappear.  

Under the facade of a science fiction story, Dick created a parable that is both timeless and beautiful.  It is also deeply disturbing.

Symmetry and Crosshatching

http://greenmanwest.tumblr.com

At times when I am working on a crosshatch image, my mind wanders to the Kabbalah, and the idea of the world as emanations of light from a source.  The main source is simply boundless light, which is somehow set inside of a larger thing, simply called the boundless.  I suppose that the boundless could be the room I am working in, and the boundless light the empty page. Then as I build up layers of hatching over each other, and the body of the image on the page begins to appear, the successive layers reflect an impression of the lower emanations to the source, until we get down to the level of the world. Thinking about drawing in this way means that drawing is a form of prayer, or of meditation that tunes us in to the source - the boundless light which, by its existence, reveals the boundless.  

Or is it just turtles, all the way down?

Two New Leaves

Here is a pair of faced leaves that I was working on yesterday - this is part of a satellite project to the large volume, that I’m calling “The Dinky Manuscript”because its very little.  

Its nice to take a break occasionally from the bigger volume, if only because the smaller one is unbound leaves and a bit easier to handle.  

This volume is also on a different paper - I’m using Arches white cover stock for it, which has a deep tooth and a highly absorbent surface which just sucks in the paint.  I think there is an earlier  version of the illustration on the left, with less detail, posted few weeks back.  I’m not sure, but I think both leaves have a bit of work yet to go.

I’m calling this particular script, the one that dominates all the volumes I’m working on right now “caligraphic block”.  Its not very ornamental, mostly I’ve designed it for writing quickly as I don’t want to think too much about what I’m writing.  

This entire project is about automatism - making art, writing things on the fly.  Rather than thinking about what I’m writing or painting, I’m writing or painting about what I’m thinking.  I’m creating musical pieces the same way - just making stuff up as I go along.  No rhyme or reason, and if there is a meaning to it, I’ll have to find it later.

Space

Painting Planets

I spent part of today painting planets in Photoshop  CS6.  It’s a lot of fun to make worlds – the work is very fast, and tossing about atmospheres and coming up with ways to fill the space between planets and suns, and the simple act of creating distant galaxies are all very fulfilling.  One can imagine what it is like for a real planet maker – if its this much fun to make planets digitally, how much greater it must be to make the real thing. 
The above image is part of a suite I’m working on of travel posters for non existent space colonies.  This particular one goes with a small caption:  “Although Janis enjoyed her visit to the Lukas system, there is no blue at all in the Lukas light spectrum – she really misses Blue!”
I’d miss it too. 

I'm learning how to make movies - here is a recent sample.  I made a screen capture of quick drawing from my iPad, made with the Paper app from 53, used Garageband (also on the iPad) to record and quickly edit an improvised guitar piece.  I used iMovie to edit them together, and here is the result:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2c0tIxGNRKM&feature=youtu.be

As I was writing the caption I tried to say a bit about the correlation between the music and the drawing - in my mind, instrumental guitar playing has some of the same elements as drawing or painting does.  In visual art, I start with a neutrally colored space, either black, white, or some other color, and into that space I add lines and shapes, building them up layer upon layer.  Sometimes they resolve into an image, sometimes they remain somewhat abstract.
The musical equivalent, in my own esthetic practice, is that when playing the guitar, I create a ground of chords and rhythm over which the more intricate notes of the melody are built up, layer by layer.  Sometimes those notes coalesce into a song, but sometimes they remain in the realm of abstract expression.
In both cases, I am speak a language that doesn't partake of words for the most part.  Even so, there is a vocabulary in use which communicates, but there is no accurate way to translate them through words - it just has to be seen or heard.

The Tempest: Ariel Mug Ariel Eric Talerico Art and Design

The Tempest: Ariel Mug Ariel Eric Talerico Art and Design