Creative Cogitation

As I sit down to write this blog I real­ize I fin­ished Rock Me! a month ago.  I can’t believe that much time has passed before I finally got it posted on my web­site and of course do this thing.  But I guess I must push on as I really do want to paint tomor­row, oh wait it’s 2 AM which means I want to paint today!

One thing I decided to do start­ing with Rock Me! was to cre­ate a series of smaller more afford­able paint­ings.  I have heard per­son want­ing to start col­lect­ing me might want to start small and work up to a larger piece.  There is an advan­tage in these smaller works in addi­tion to afford­abil­ity to my collectors; to some extent they do go together faster, my invest­ment in mate­ri­als is a lit­tle less, and they take up less space in my stu­dio while being stored.  The down­side is, I am not used to work­ing this small, to some extent work­ing in the smaller scale with smaller brushes takes as much time as work­ing with larger brushes on a larger scale and doing abstract back­grounds on this scale is limiting. It feels odd to cre­ate non rep­re­sen­ta­tional flow of color on some­thing so tiny.  But I am endeav­or­ing to do this very thing.

I love the idea behind Rock Me! It’s a spin off the idea behind of iPod Tweety and iPod print ads in gen­eral.  My first sketches had the full body of umbrella crested cock­a­too includ­ing the spread wings.  As I fooled around with the sketch in pho­to­shop I realzed what enam­ored me most about this idea was the full head of back lit feath­ers.  I really felt like it con­veyed Rock & Roll’s energy.  The sug­ges­tion of the open beak com­pletes the image of the rock affi­cianado howl­ing and grind­ing to his or her favorite song. I decided not to zoom in any futher as it would have been too much black.  DH thinks I went too far… 

Red also seemed appro­pri­ate.  I love the energy of blood red.  And black is a very pow­er­ful color too.  As for the back­ground I just wanted it to appear splat­tered with sound, vol­umn, energy.  As I do my abstract back­grounds I real­ize I think they not only rep­re­sent emo­tion, but are accom­pa­nied by music as well.

Rock Me! by Jake Beck­man. An umbrella crested cock­a­too rocks out to iPod tunes.

I think I resem­ble this ani­mal, I am pretty much a rocker babe. I hope you like this lat­est Binary Bird as much as I do.  Rock on!

If you would like to find out more about Rock Me! or buy it, check out it’s page on my web­site. Feel free to comment-like it, hate it? 

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.

Part of my think­ing about Social Media revolves around the fringe ele­ment.  I think we all are fringy at times. Here’s a fringe the­ory from me. Please explain oth­er­wise why kit­tens are a per­rienial favorite post­ing in all forms of social media? I think it’s their secret power — I’d reach for for my tin foil hat but my cat is send­ing rays to me bend­ing me to her will… I… must… pet my cat.  Just jok­ing — but I think you get the drift. 

I have been hear­ing about the end of time (accord­ing to the Mayan Cal­en­der) since I was a teenager.  My mom is a go to source for all things fringy.  I love my mom, but she did expose me to every­thing from Nos­tro­damus, to the­o­ries of Atlantis so I have known about fringe ele­ment the­o­ries for quite some time.  I am sure the mod­ern day Mayans (yes they are still around) are sick of hear­ing about the end of the 13th b’aktun as they know the 14th b’aktun starts the next day. To them I am sure its just a flip­ping of the cal­en­dar like Jan­u­ary 1, 2000.  If you want to find out more about the Mayan Cal­en­dar, read my post dis­cussing the wheel of time that appears in the paint­ings below.

Any­way, from what I have read, it seems the Mayans would view the flip­ping over of their cal­en­dar as an aus­pi­cious event, a time for cel­e­bra­tion.  “Hey folks, we made it another 400 years.  Lets Party!”  Of course you really don’t need an excuse to party, “Happy Wednes­day!” Any­one?  But flip­ping a 400-year cal­en­dar seems to be a good a rea­son as any.

So when I was con­tem­plat­ing my Binary Birds paint­ing on the sub­ject and fig­ur­ing out how I was going to depict the the long count cal­en­dar, I decided the paint­ings would reflect this more joy­ous take on the end of the 13 b’aktun.  I decided to use a red-crested par­rot as the bird in the paint­ings as this dis­tinc­tive bird is a native of Mex­ico; after all it is their cel­e­bra­tion… no? 

But a some­thing hap­pened when I went to paint.  I could not decide how many birds to put in the paint­ing so I came up with two ver­sions.  The first sim­ply enti­tled 12/20/2012 has a happy par­rot danc­ing on the outer most cog of my wheel of time; the paint­ing is dom­i­nated by the entire cal­en­dar.   By the way any­one else notice the end of the 13th b’aktun as num­ber is kind of the same for­ward and backward? See how easy it is to point out spu­ri­ous coin­ci­dence and build some fringe the­ory around it? Of course true to Binary Birds theme there is ASCII binary which reads right to left & top to bot­tom 12/20/2012. 

12/20/2012 by Jake Beck­man. A red crested par­rot dance in Jake;s con­cep­tion of Mayan Long Count Calendar.

The sec­ond paint­ing I think expresses the cel­bra­tion aspect a bit better.  The wheel is still pretty large, but my par­ty­ing par­rots are def­i­nitely more com­pelling.  The title is Party like its CJJHJ!  Which is of course a take on Party like is 1999! reflect­ing on the par­ties that occured at the end of the last cen­tury (of course some like to point out that the new cen­tury didn’t begin until 2001, but I am going with the major­ity on this one-even if they are not tech­ni­cally cor­rect).  The binary reads Party like its CJJHJ from left to right & top to bottom. By the way, is it just me or do par­rots have ugly feet? If you are won­der­ing about CJJHJ, read more about my rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the Mayan long-count cal­en­dar in my blog post on the subject. 

Party Like its CJJHJ, by Jake Beck­man. Three red-crested par­rots cel­e­brate the end of the 13th b’aktun of the Mayan long-count calendar.

So thats the story of my paint­ings on the sub­ject of 2012 as relates to Binary Birds & social media.  I hope you like them.  If you want to find out more about these paint­ings or buy one or both check out their pages on my web­site: 12/20/2012 and Party like its CJJHJ

By the way I have con­firmed my par­tic­i­pa­tion in the End of the World Face­book party on 12/20/2012.  Have you?

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.

Update June 23:  I came to real­ize I had a strong urge to cheat on my plan using my mobile (Black­berry) . I found myself reach­ing for it every­time I saw the red light flash­ing.  It was unintentional/automatic.  I have had to delib­er­ately not touch it.  So right now it is sit­ting face down so I can’t see the red light flash­ing, although I know it is…  The exper­i­ment con­tin­ues.  I think check­ing my com­mu­ni­ca­tions 2 times a day should be enough. I have just read in a blog  by Lisa Baron ethat I may want to put off the morn­ing check in until after I get some stuff done as part of a time man­age­ment strat­egy.  OK… Maybe I’ll give that a whirl or not.

The first cou­ple of days were bad.  I was def­i­nitely going through with­drawal.  I didn’t get any­thing done-I just sort of laid around and felt my way through it.  Like the urge to respond to the Black­berry, it felt odd not to enter my office even as the lap­top bea­coned and to limit the amount of time I spent doing the com­mu­ni­ca­tions thing.  I mean there is stuff going on… you know?  But the world did not explode because I did not find out about this or that immediately; I con­fess, I love twitter-I find out about so much faster than the eye-witness new­clones can relate it to me on the idiot box.

So yes­ter­day I actu­ally got some work done.  And my mind is now think­ing in terms of pri­or­i­ties instead of let­ting this machine move me around my day.  I will be launch­ing the project I started this week­end 100 paint­ings in 100 days soon.  But first I need to get some other stuff taken care of. 

(is the inter­net slow today or what?) Wait­ing for a page to load so I can copy stuff from it…

Cindy Lou Who, con­stant com­pan­ion in my office, who knows she can always get ran­dom atten­tion from me in here.

Any­way, you got any time man­age­ment tips that can be assim­i­lated by the artis­tic heart?  Have you made peace with your elec­tronic com­mu­ni­ca­tion junky mon­key?  Love to hear from you. 

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.

UPDATE June 21:  I sur­vived a week­end of push­ing myself away from the com­puter.  I wish I could say I got a lot done, but I didn’t-I felt like I was miss­ing some­thing.  It was hard-I admit it I am now a social net­work­ing junkie.  I logged in once on Sat­ur­day and then by Sun­day I had a whole bunch of stuff that I had not seen before; one per­son com­plained it was hard to fol­low my tweets as they did not remem­ber what I was respond­ing to a day later.  But on Sun­day I only logged in one more time and got off within 10 min­utes or so.  I have decided 1 time per day is not going to be enough to keep up with my stuff.  Today its busi­ness as usual.  But I am see­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ties…  So the exper­i­ment will con­tinue.  Dur­ing the week I need to work on my com­puter, but Iwill only check my social media and email 2 times at most and I will only be on the com­puter when I have to.  Of course all that free time gave me another idea about how to spend more time on my com­puter.  Eek.    More later. 

June 19: OK. I am in com­mu­ni­ca­tion over­load.  I find myself in front of this device all the time.  I spend so much time in my office that I grow cats who get very com­fort­able on me while I am work­ing.  It is not easy to work with a 15 pound feline demand­ing atten­tion, which I guess is their way of say­ing, “Step away from the box…”

Me, work­ing at my com­puter with a help­ful feline in my lap and another on my desk gen­er­ally knock­ing crap over.

I have come to feel like my desk has a grav­i­ta­tional pull that stronger than the rest of the earth.  I am in orbit around it reg­u­larly and it is very hard to pull myself away from it-and I always seem to wind up right back in front of it.  Sure my day job forces me to be here at least part of the time, but more and more I find myself drawn into email, blog­ging, online mar­ket­ing, social media and other elec­tronic com­mu­ni­ca­tion to the point where I believe it is tak­ing too much of my time. 

Resolved, I will start bud­get­ing (limiting) my time in front of the glow­ing screen so that I can get out  and do stuff in the big blue box too.  I was think­ing I would try to stay away from the com­puter all week­end, but I think that is prob­a­bly not real­is­tic so I may just need to get a timer or some­thing to limit the amount of time I sit here.

We’ll see how it goes.  Step­ping away from the com­puter… as soon as I post this, link to it on my web­site and post it to social media-see what I mean?

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.

There have been sev­eral recent “events” that have me pon­der­ing this sub­ject.  The first one is a law passed in my state by our leg­is­la­tors called SB1070; Joe aver­age voter didn’t pass this law, our rep­re­sen­ta­tives did.  It has inflamed a lot of pas­sion on both sides of the debate, which is fine.  How­ever, a local artist I know and respect put out a poster por­tray­ing our state as a fas­cist and my first thought was, “Hey bro, you live here too.”   The sec­ond event involved a won­der­ful woman who runs and art mar­ket­ing group.  She employs new age speak­ers to help artists find their inner authen­tic voices.  Appar­ently a Chris­t­ian artist took offense to the new age speaker and basi­cally said “Remove her from your classes, she offends me.”  For sev­eral years after this pro­nounce­ment, this teacher allowed this one polar­iz­ing voice to sti­fle her own authen­tic voice, and has finally come to real­ize that is what hap­pened.  My sec­ond thought is “Words can hurt, but only if you let them.”  Finally we are all aware of the man­made eco­log­i­cal dis­as­ter of unprece­dented pro­por­tions that is hap­pen­ing right now.  I have a lot of thoughts on this topic, sure hubris and greed played a role in this deba­cle, but pri­mar­ily I find it was caused by a fail­ure of sim­ple ethics, which would have told any­one, “If you are doing some­thing dan­ger­ous, don’t com­pound it by doing some­thing stu­pid just for a lit­tle bit of money.”  But now the unthink­able has hap­pened. My thought is “We have a large intractable prob­lem that will not be solved by the blame game; we really do not even have the lux­ury of the blame game.   It is going to take a lot of peo­ple to fix this, if we can.”

It doesn’t mat­ter where you are, cor­po­rate Amer­ica, Face­Book, an art mar­ket­ing class, not to men­tion places where polar­iza­tion is actu­ally socially accept­able, such as base­ball game, there are always peo­ple talk­ing about them.  Them refers to any­body who has an ide­o­log­i­cal dif­fer­ence, phys­i­cal dif­fer­ence, intel­lec­tual dif­fer­ence or hell, is a such a pub­lic and colos­sal screw-up that any­one can den­i­grate them and feel bet­ter about them­selves based on a per­ceive moral, intel­lec­tual, phys­i­cal or other “superiority.”

I would like to point out that we all are “that guy” at some time or another; we have all been the per­son who is the butt of the cur­rent joke and we have all been the per­son laugh­ing at another’s prat­fall.  Whereas this may be the nat­ural state of being, being nat­ural does not always reflect the bet­ter part of us.  We all stopped poop­ing in our pants at a very young age, and many of us have learned if you don’t have some­thing nice to say, don’t say any­thing at all. I am not say­ing all dia­logue has to be Polit­i­cally Cor­rect, but we should have per­sonal edi­tors which keep us from cross­ing the blurry line between free expres­sion and purely destruc­tive voice.  Face it, if they knew every­thing we knew about a given topic, that does not mean that they would agree with us; and the con­verse is also true.

As for our lit­tle rock-throwing ids, we do have places to enter­tain our us ver­sus them demons; sports com­pe­ti­tions and other “games” where the goal is to be the best with­out really hurt­ing any­one else in the process.  I think we devel­oped games as a species because we rec­og­nized injur­ing our best and bright­est in a match where they are not the very best or very bright­est at the moment is not a viable sur­vival strat­egy for the group.  Games and sports also should teach another les­son that is often lost, and that is, you win some, you lose some. 

 I guess what I am try­ing to say is once we have made our point, it may be time to mod­er­ate our inner fire­brand and do some­thing con­struc­tive instead; com­mu­ni­cate in the lan­guage of co-operation, col­lab­o­ra­tion, and, yes, even com­pro­mise.  Prob­lems are usu­ally not solved while both sides are still throw­ing rocks at each other.

My two bits. Back in my hole now. 

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.