Creative Cogitation

In this sec­ond paint­ing inspired by Roll Play Games online, I draw upon the idea that any­one can become any­thing and be suc­cess­ful at it.  One of my friends who was hav­ing a hard time in the Big Blue Box sev­eral years ago, but online she did become mas­ter of her guild and empress of her uni­verse.  Too bad suc­cess in the real world doesn’t seem to cor­re­late well with cyber­space, but who knows maybe cyber­space is becom­ing the new “real world.”

I admit I used to play Dun­geons and Drag­ons back in the 70s; of course in those days play­ers would get together and play face to face — some­times we even took it “live” roam­ing through the city “adven­tur­ing.”  I even played an “online” ver­sion on a com­mu­nity college’s main­frame, but back in those days there were no graph­ics — just a series of events that would be trig­gered if you inputted a rec­og­niz­able response.  Games have come a long way.

CMAP (Cover My *Butt* Parter), by Jake Beck­man. As they near the entrance to an omi­nous look­ing cas­tle, the house finch gamer turns to his rap­tor buddy and asks him to cover his butt.

This image is inspired by what I con­sider the grand­fa­ther of RPG online, namely D&D.  Adven­ture awaits those who dare to enter the fore­bod­ing cas­tle, but it is always good to have friends look­ing out for you even online.

For more details about CMAP see its art page at AKAJake.com.

Any com­ments? Do you like it, hate it, think its too dark, think its funny?…”

Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

The art work in this blog is fed­er­ally copy­righted. All repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights are retained by the artist. Images are not to be copied, re-distributed, imi­tated, derived OR oth­er­wise used in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.

NOOB is a third paint­ing inspired by online roll play, specif­i­cally first per­son shoot­ers.  I have been around long enough to remem­ber play­ing the orig­i­nal ver­sion of Doom — it was very pop­u­lar among the bud­ding sci­en­tists at my uni­ver­sity. It makes me laugh to see old time com­put­ers in movies from the 80s and 90s, which I remem­ber using.  It is all so very dif­fer­ent now.  You used to need a lot more imagination.

In gen­eral NOOB is an acronym recast from “new­bie,” which can refer to any­one not famil­iar with cyber­space, but in the con­text of RPG it refers to an unskilled player.

NOOB by Jake Beck­man. Two yel­low house finch gamers perch in a tree gaz­ing down upon a fallen com­rade as the first per­son shooter roll play con­tin­ues on.

In this paint­ing I harken to Halo, Half-Life, Call of Duty, and other vaguely mil­i­tary first per­son shoot­ers.  Although their com­rade has fallen, he can rise again and be slain again ad infini­tum. In cyber­space death is a tem­po­rary incon­ve­nience.   I kept the back­ground includ­ing the hel­met that as fallen off the dead bird in shades of soft blue gray to con­trast the yel­low house finch play­ers from the cyber game space.  In the mid­dle back­ground I have placed sev­eral vague mil­i­tary fig­ures engaged in the con­tin­u­ing game play. Update: Some­one sug­gested I put the size of the paint­ing in the blog; size and other par­tic­u­lars are avail­able on the NOOB art page.

Any com­ments? Do you like it, hate it, think its too dark, think its funny?”

Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

The art work in this blog is fed­er­ally copy­righted. All repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights are retained by the artist. Images are not to be copied, re-distributed, imi­tated, derived OR oth­er­wise used in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.

Sorry to take this long to post some­thing new.  Back to back art mar­kets wiped me out.  I have com­pleted sev­eral paint­ings in the interim, and even wrote a cou­ple of draft posts about a week ago.  Then I got busy. Oops. It hap­pens.  Even though Con­spir­acy The­ory is not yet done, I did wan­der into another social media topic — online gam­ing, which turns out to be a very rich source of mate­r­ial indeed.

Avatar, I’ve always thought it was kind of a cool word back when it was only men­tioned in con­junc­tion with earthly incar­na­tions of Vishnu. Then I read a novel by Poul Ander­son, called The Avatar,  which intro­duced me to an alter­nate def­i­n­i­tion, the  embod­i­ment of a principal.

I can’t remem­ber when the word came to refer to the image that is the “embod­i­ment” of online per­sona, but in gen­eral I feel many avatars are the quin­tes­sence of our aspi­ra­tions rather than who we really are.  Avatars can be the pic­ture of a per­son 20 min­utes ago, or 20 years ago, like the news­pa­per columnist’s pic­ture that never ages.  They can be a photo from a day that a per­son just hap­pened to look par­tic­u­larly good.  They can be pic­tures of objects of desire. They can be the image of the moment;  some peo­ple change their avatar as often as they change their socks.  But like all things in cyber­space they are not nec­es­sar­ily a reflec­tion of reality.

Avatar by Jake Beck­man. A yel­low house finch uses a fierce, god­like scream­ing rap­tor as his avatar.

In the con­text of RPG, avatars gen­er­ally are illu­sory.  Even if a scrawny social mis­fit in real-life can be project as the unbeat­able war­rior, or irre­sistible sor­cer­ess. And so  a house finch could take on a fiercely divine rap­tor as his avatar.

Update: Some­one sug­gest I put the size of the paint­ings in my blogs. Details of this work are avail­able on the Avatar Art Page

What avatars do you use and why? Do they bear any resem­blance to real­ity or are they firmly lodged in fan­tasy? Do you think avatars should rep­re­sent the true self ? Or are they just good fun?

Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

The art work in this blog is fed­er­ally copy­righted. All repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights are retained by the artist. Images are not to be copied, re-distributed, imi­tated, derived OR oth­er­wise used in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.

The paint­ing made its pub­lic debut last night at the Scottdale Fes­ti­val Art­walk.  It was a chilly night to be out and about. My free cof­fee and Reeses were very pop­u­lar.  Any­way, meant to post this blog yes­ter­day, but I didn’t get a roundtoit.

In this paint­ing I explore the darker side of the inter­net, one which has been in the news lately, PleaseRobMe.com.  PleaseRobMe.com works off an appli­ca­tion FourSquare.com, (or any geo­t­ag­ging soft­ware such as Google Buzz or Bright Kite etc.) which allows peo­ple to track their friends via twitter.com to pre­sum­ably to make it eas­ier to con­nect in the big blue box.  PleaseRobMe.com basi­cally notes when peo­ple using this appli­ca­tion tweet things like “I am going away for the week­end,” or “Going to the gym now, be back in a few hours” or “I am at the mall now.” etc.  The folks at PleaseRobMe.com say they are basi­cally re-listing these tweets to make peo­ple more aware of the dan­gers of telling peo­ple where you are and where you are not.  Essen­tially their ser­vice is a dressed up Twit­ter search. It gen­er­ally does not take too many tries to find a per­son, who is listed on PleaseRobMe.com, and whose home address is also listed on the inter­net.  The own­ers of PleaseRobMe.com do say it is not their inten­tion to have anyone’s house bur­gled, but clearly show this is one pos­si­ble nefar­i­ous use of this pub­lic information.

“2nd Story Job” by Jake Beck­man. A crow with bur­glary on its mind lis­tens to geo­t­agged tweets look­ing for an empty home to rob.

In this paint­ing the binary code on the wires all read,

• “I’m leav­ing” (the color binary),
• “FourSquare.com” (up (b or d) and down (p or q) binary),
• “RobMyHouse.com” (right (b/p) or left (d/q) fac­ing binary).

I chose a crow as they are one species of bird known for thiev­ery.  Besides I like crows, ravens, and the other clever mem­bers of the fam­ily corvi­dae.  The sym­bol on the nose of the crow is a dis­torted ver­sion of the FourSquare.com logo — I think the round thing in the logo is sup­posed to be a dodge ball, or is it a track­ball? I dunno. But I have trans­lated it into the eye of the crow that is lis­ten­ing to the buzz of the wires.  Also I have cho­sen a dif­fer­ent color pal­let of red,  green­ish black with shad­ings of green and pur­ple.  I hope you like this lat­est in the Social Media Birds series (I really need a bet­ter name — help?)

I am notic­ing my high res­o­lu­tion pho­tos are really not doing jus­tice to the color gamut of my backgrounds-I don’t think there is much I can do about that, except maybe get a new cam­era, which I can’t afford right now.

Any com­ments? Do you like it, hate it, think its too dark, think its funny…”

Update: Some­one sug­gest I put the size of the paint­ing in the blog; details about 2nd Story Job are avail­able on its art page at AKAJake.com

Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

The art work in this blog is fed­er­ally copy­righted. All repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights are retained by the artist. Images are not to be copied, re-distributed, imi­tated, derived OR oth­er­wise used in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.

This week­end, now nearly over is the big annual down­town Phoenix Art Show called Art Detour now in its 22 year.  The event kicks off with First Fri­days, which has become the tail wag­ging the dog so to speak.  Although Art Detour was the big event for many years, the monthly party called First Fri­day receives a lot more atten­dance on the whole these days. I had planned to go to First Fri­day but just couldn’t make myself join the mad­house that event has become. It really doesn’t seem to be about art, but more about the party, which is fine — but not nec­es­sar­ily some­thing I auto­mat­i­cally think is a great idea on any given day.  But I still felt like I had to make it down­town at least once to see the peo­ple who rou­tinely sup­port me at the local art shows I do.  So I force myself to be a social ani­mal and kicked myself out of my studio.

It was good to inter­sect with sev­eral peo­ple I had not seen in a while, but while the stu­dios were open I think many artists/owners were absent & recu­per­at­ing from the night before.  It was a quiet day to be about, but it was a clear-blue-sky brag­ging weather day in Phoenix AZ.   Gor­geous, absolutely gor­geous.  So, I didn’t just go to the stu­dios but did a gen­eral walk­a­bout in the down­town Phoenix area to inves­ti­gate how the Con­ven­tion Cen­ter remodel went, to see how the new ASU down­town cam­pus came together and the over­all progress of gen­tri­fi­ca­tion.  It appears gen­tri­fi­ca­tion was well under­way but the reces­sion has def­i­nitely halted things for now.  As for the art stu­dios, some that were open before are closed now, some have changed hands, some have moved, and maybe there are a few new kids on the block as well.  The Art Detour Head Quar­ters was listed at the Phoenix Cen­ter for the Arts so I was expect­ing a pretty decent dis­play there; in the old days it had a sam­ple of art from all the par­tic­i­pat­ing gal­leries. Unfor­tu­nately this year it was lit­er­ally a trol­ley stop with a few brochures — no art that I could see.  My over­all impres­sion of Art Detour on Sat­ur­day was under­whelmed. Any­way I took lots of pic­tures and edited them when I got home so you can check them out here if you like.

In the last few min­utes I have receive a cou­ple of tweets regard­ing this final day of Art Detour 22 1) Bring an Umbrella and 2) Greg Esser is pro­mot­ing his new ven­ture at West­wind Stu­dios, 16th Street and Cypress. I didn’t make it over to West­wind yes­ter­day; I wish Greg all the best.

So onto new art. While I was work­ing on 2nd Story Job, which will be posted next, I did not have a sec­ond paint­ing to par­al­lel process in mind.  I got a piece of water color paper out, gesso-ed it on both sides then thought­fully dripped, drooled and spat­tered paint on it while I waited for lay­ers of paint to dry on 2nd Story Job.

As 2nd Story Job neared com­ple­tion the abstract aux­il­iary work looked like this.

Born of Fire under­paint­ing (by Jake Beckman)

The color gamut of this pic­ture appears a lit­tle skewed toward the blue, and the range of the photo does not do the under-painting/background jus­tice, but I think you can get an idea of how it looked.

I have been on a major bird kick for years and I often default to some­thing related to that — in this case a bird-like dragon.  It took me a few min­utes to sketch the crit­ter out on to my can­vas.    I did a glaze of man­ganese blue to fill in the bird-like dragon’s body for no other rea­son than I had a big glob of it on my wet pal­let left over from pre­vi­ous Social Media Bird paint­ings and I intended to make the dragon dark.   I did not antic­i­pate I would love the effect of the under-painting show­ing through, but I did.   I very care­fully applied glazes of black to the ser­pent to define its struc­ture while retain­ing as much of the trans­parency as was possible.

Detail of Born of Fire by Jake Beck­man show­ing the under­paint­ing revealed through the glaze

Born of Fire, by Jake Beck­man, A dragon gazes sky­ward, obliv­i­ous to the fiery inferno that sur­rounds it.

So this results from me not hav­ing a plan when I start paint­ing. What do you think?

Update: Details about Born of Fire, size etc., can be found on its art page at AKAJake.com

Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

The art work in this blog is fed­er­ally copy­righted. All repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights are retained by the artist. Images are not to be copied, re-distributed, imi­tated, derived OR oth­er­wise used in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.