Creative Cogitation

Photo of Oak Creek taken by Jake Beck­man on or about July4, 2010. Isn’t it beautiful?

I think I last blogged Day 5–6 of 100 paint­ings in 100 days.  In the­ory we are now at Day 13. So in the­ory I have had 7 more days to work and I con­fess I have not.  Sun­day started with the best of inten­sions, but I didn’t fin­ish any­thing.  Mon­day was back to work day and I car­ried out affairs of my other busi­ness.  Some­time this week DH inter­rupted me with a com­puter repair that sucked up a day & ½.  Wednes­day I did some book­keep­ing and deliv­ered it Thurs­day.  This week I also dealt with get­ting my AC fixed-so paint­ing, which I did do, was squeezed in 30-minute chunks of time wait­ing for this or that to hap­pen.  Another advan­tage of work­ing small-you can actu­ally *do* some­thing with a 30-minute chunk of time. 

Tra­di­tion­ally my friend Mayna, who retired after 20 years in the Marine Corps, and DH would join me on this 4^th of July vaca­tion break; we usu­ally stay a week or more.  Some friends and fam­ily have a dumpy trailer in Oak Creek canyon, with a lovely lit­tle deck hid­den in the trees next to the creek-when I say dumpy I mean it an affec­tion­ate way. It is bet­ter than “lit­er­ally” camp­ing out as there is a gas grill, a gas stove, restroom facil­i­ties and even a shower.  It also is stocked with things like sleep­ing bags, air mat­tresses, lights and lawn chairs.  Basi­cally you need to bring your enter­tain­ment, food, drink, cloth­ing, and shower sup­plies. There’s a coun­try store within walk­ing distance-their prices are high, but you pay for the con­ve­nience of being able to get ice in the wilder­ness. Oth­er­wise Sedona is a short drive away; it has all the usual accou­trements of a town.  

I usu­ally take a bunch of pic­tures, we build a dam to make a swim­ming hole, hike about and I really enjoy being in a place where there is no cell phone ser­vice what so ever. 

So this year Mayna is stick­ing to home as she is out of work and try­ing to con­serve funds.  DH, I dunno-we did dis­cuss com­ing up here-I cleared it with the friends and fam­ily, pur­chased sup­plies, the plan was com­ing together. Then he did the heel-dragging thing all day Fri­day rather than flat out say­ing he didn’t want to come. I ulti­mately decided I needed to get out of town, even if it was by myself, but owing to DH’s pro­cras­ti­na­tion, I showed up here some­time after 9 PM, well after sunset.  

For­tu­nately for me some of those friends were already up here; they fired up the elec­tric­ity and water for the trailer so I didn’t have to find those things in the dark. I really appre­ci­ated them doing that; they are in a dif­fer­ent trailer so they didn’t have to do that, but they did because they knew I would be com­ing. I also remem­bered to bring some pre­cooked chow so when I finally did get sit­u­ated I would have some­thing easy to make and eat. 

Last night I slept under the stars.  When the moon rose some idiot bird started singing wak­ing me up, but I drifted back to sleep until sun­rise when a squir­rel demol­ish a pine cone began throw­ing its orts at me.  The umbrella is up now so that won’t hap­pen anymore.

This is where I slept and painted. A “Deck in the Trees.”

 I did notice when I turned my lap­top detected 4 wire­less net­works includ­ing an unse­cured one. One I rec­og­nize as belong­ing to a per­son who lives up here year round.  I bet if I asked nicely he’d let me use it.  But I don’t want to.  Mostly I do come up here to “unplug” but it is get­ting harder and harder to do.  You prob­a­bly can find an unse­cure net­work on the top Machu Pichu these days.  Any­way, I am ignor­ing those net­works as if they do not exist-hey the sig­nals are “low,” they might cut out on me in the mid­dle of some­thing.   Cur­rently this blog is in a word doc­u­ment to be cut and pasted later.

I brought the com­puter up so I could work on a Spe­cial Enroll­ment Exam Class I am sup­posed to teach in August.  I am respon­si­ble for updat­ing a web­site full of mate­r­ial on all three parts and I teach the sec­tions on depre­ci­a­tion and basis.  So I turned the box on, dragged out the part one mate­ri­als, and find I have absolutely no desire to do it. Instead, I spent a leisurely morn­ing unwinding-made break­fast, drank tea and read half a book, The Tomb of Her­cules, by Andy McDer­mott, which is exactly the delight­ful escapist trash it sounds like.  Finally I am think­ing of doing some­thing con­struc­tive.  I am here in all this reek­ing fresh air and stink­ing nature com­plete with the full com­ple­ment of bugs and other wild­fire so I guess I should get my cre­ative juices flow­ing.  Instead of work­ing on the tax class website, I decided to blog.  And now to paint-maybe. 

A bit later.  I wan­dered down to the creek, Blackberry and Lumix in hand. There is this one tree creek­side which reminds me of a tree ent ala JRR Tolkien. Don’t know how I can turn that into a binary bird.  But three other images did come to me-in the morn­ing as the squir­rel was throw­ing pine cone at me, I noted an abstract pat­tern in the branches of the trees over­head.  It was almost black and white (and blurry because I was not wear­ing my glasses).  The sec­ond image came to me as I watched a sucker swim­ming in a rel­a­tively still part of the creek.  The third image came later as the shad­ows started cross­ing from the West leav­ing a shaft of light weav­ing through the thicket of trees to illu­mi­nate a sin­gle stone.  When I fin­ish them at least one will be posted here.  I don’t know what the ulti­mate ver­sion of these images will be as they are barely drafted at the moment. 

Enjoy­ing the peace of the canyon, being unplugged, and hav­ing a moment to read for the joy of reading. I wish Mayna and DH were here to enjoy it with me.  The weather is gorgeous.

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.

I planned on tak­ing the week­end off to paint.  I got on my com­puter, Saturday, and just spend the whole day there. I had eight paint­ings I needed to get on my web­site com­plete with all the lovely pic­tures, most of PopCult Gallery Three got uploaded.   Then I needed to start get­ting the word out there via social media, post­ing pic­tures on my Face­book fan­page which auto­mat­i­cally goes to var­i­ous places.  Once that was done I was finally able to post a blog about two of the new pieces and deep link on a cou­ple of other posts that are in the que wait­ing their turn.

On the upside I started five, zero and a paint­ing called Vuvuze­las in honor of all that soc­cer stuff I keep hear­ing about; I don’t have the sports gene so I was nit watch­ing the matches. What that means is that I am still on track with respect to a paint­ing a day for the first week, assum­ing I fin­ish them by tomor­row  You should hear me right now… I am chuck­ing at the unre­al­is­tic dead­line I just set myself. In addi­tion to this blog I want to write a bit about the other two paint­ings I uploaded so I can do some deep link­ing to them too.

I am find­ing social media is tak­ing a lot of time.  I am try­ing to work in some more Linkedin and today I hit a bunch of new Face­book friends with a request to become a fan of my Fan­page.  While I was at it I uploaded the 8 new paint­ings to the photo album on my fan page and changed my avatars on my fan­page and Face­book page all the while chat­ting away via Tweet­Deck.  Oh my. 

I keep hear­ing that I need to auto­mate newslet­ter sign up.  I have a newslet­ter — it tends to go out when I am have a show, but right now it’s too hot locally so no email newslet­ter, so I won­der what am I going to put in a newslet­ter.  Then there is affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing, mon­e­tiz­ing the site, etc. etc. - those are just words to me right now — I don’t know what they mean.  Any­way while I was blog­ging I fig­ured out how to put links to Twit­ter, my Face­book fan­page, Linkedin and MySpace etc at the top of my art blog.  When I set up the blog that idea never occured to me, now of course it’s, “Like Duh…”

By the time this post gets done I will have five and zero done, but will they be uploaded to my web­site, I am mak­ing heavy sigh­ing noises even as I think about it. 

five, by Jake Beck­man. Five yel­low canaries cavort about an orange num­ber 5. The back­ground is an abstract of warm pur­ple bub­bles. The binary reads “five” and “5”.

So this is five, finally posted in this blog, and zero is below.  Vuvuze­las got its own blog on the eve of the World Cup final.  I had to post it before the end.  It was coin­ci­den­tally painted in the col­ors of the win­ning coun­tries flag-red vuvuze­las and a bright yel­low canary (excuse me, gold canary) .

zero, by Jake Beck­man. An out­line of a canary, rep­re­sent­ing the canary null set, flies before a gilt num­ber 0.

OK I guess by now you know what 6, 7, 8 and 9 will look like.  But zero was a puz­zle for me until I came up with my “null set” canary.   I am enjoy­ing the minia­ture abstract back­grounds more too.  As much as I love paint­ing my big ones, some of my effects take a long time and a long time to dry.  Work­ing on this scale def­i­nitely speeds things up. 

As I write this blog on day five (pic­tures to be inserted later) I real­ize time-management is def­i­nitely and issue for me.  Got any tips? 

Also all this art is for sale.  Mama needs some more can­vases.  Want to buy some? Check out five and zero’s pages on my web­site.  Thanks for stop­ping by. 

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.

On June 22 I decide to attempt 100 paint­ings in 100 days. I don’t know if I can even do this.  Its a daunt­ing task to con­tem­plate, but I am going to give it a try.  Why? I watched Julia & Julia and it gave me this ridicu­lous idea.  Sure I have heard about it before as a method to develop a dis­tinc­tive style. The the­ory is when you have to crank it out, your style will happen. 

There are peri­ods of time when my pro­duc­tiv­ity goes through the roof, but there are lulls, some­times long ones where I let my life get in the way of my pas­sion.  I also intend to blog about it.  Short blogs prob­a­bly, but blog­ging about it is going to be part of this exer­cise.  I have a hard time talk­ing about my art, it just doesn’t flow eas­ily.  I also want to write bet­ter blogs and there is no sub­sti­tute for, well, just doing it.  I am prob­a­bly going to be exper­i­ment­ing with the plug-ins and what not as I attempt to get more advice on pre­sent­ing the blog, so this will involve a lot of blog­ging too. Jeepers. 

Day 1.  I fin­ished up 2 paint­ings that had been lay­ing around.  One was very nearly done.  The sec­ond I thought was fin­ished, but when I went to pho­to­graph it I hated it and had to edit it sub­stan­tially.  So the edit­ing job became the the first paint­ing in 100 paint­ings in 100 days. I fin­ished two for day 1 and I started a sec­ond and a third paint­ing.  I had orig­i­nally painted one and decided to paint two with­out really know­ing where I was going with this idea. 

two by jake beck­man, two canaries perched with the num­ber 2, and ASCII binary of two & 2

As usual, the binary code has every­thing to do with the paint­ing, spelling out two and 2 in ASCII binary. 

Day 2.  three and four were barely started yes­ter­day, I had got beyond a sketch, but not by much, however they are fin­ished today. Of course I have to pho­to­graph them etc now.  Since these are all 6x8 inch paint­ings I have decided they are going to be arranged like a phone key­pad and be grouped that way; I have to do 5,6,7,8,9,0 #, *, and maybe answer, hangup and do it but­ton too.  So I have the idea for the next 8–11 paint­ings, which will give me time to con­tem­plate what comes after the cell phone num­ber pad. 

I don’t know what you all think about this idea, but Julia’s mother’s com­ment about, “Why,” espe­cially when I am so busy with other things does come to mind.  So if any of you all have ever under­taken a self-commited pro­gram for only rea­sons you can under­stand I’d like what­ever advice you might chip in or what ever gen­eral com­ments come to mind as I embrace this insanity. 

If you’d like to find out more about one and two or per­haps buy them please check out their pages at AKAJake.com, one and two. 

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.

I fin­ished this paint­ing more than a month ago.  I can’t believe it has taken me that long to upload the images to my web­site and to sit down and blog about it.  As John Lennon said, “Life is what hap­pens while you are mak­ing other plans.”  So true for me too.  I found myself spend­ing sev­eral weeks deal­ing with feral cat issues, softy that I am.  Adding that one thing really put me behind on every­thing and so these paint­ings lan­guished in the obscu­rity of my studio.

But no more.  Since June 27, 2010 was a total washout on paint­ing I endeav­ored to “catch up” on my blog­ging, and my web­site main­te­nance among other things. I cranked out quite a few so I can post them later. It’s now later for this blog, enjoy.

Bridge is a spin off on iPod Tweety and iPod ads in gen­eral, but it is also a con­trast as well. Once I did iPod Tweety, one of the first things that came to mind was a per­son who con­ducts an imag­i­nary orches­tra while lis­ten­ing to a record­ing of some kind. The cock­a­too became the obvi­ous bird because of the crest. I dunno but I think of con­duc­tors as hav­ing shocks of unruly hair stick­ing up.  Con­duc­tors usu­ally wear dark suits so the bird in sil­hou­ette also tracked in my mind. 

But unlike the music behind Rock Me! clas­si­cal music has lay­ers, move­ments, changes in melody, key and other such devices that gen­er­ally imply a more com­plex arrange­ment; besides most clas­si­cal works are much longer than your aver­age pop radio tune.  With this in mind I set out to make my abstract back­ground con­vey­ing this com­plex­ity and pas­sage of time.  I chose green.  The back­ground is a very dark green, which is over­laid with bright green and then light sea green. I did sev­eral waves of color sweep­ing from the top of the can­vas to the bot­tom around the con­duc­tor bird as a melody.  I placed a series of thick bright spires behind the cock­a­too oppo­site these waves, I think of them as a deep throb­bing base­line.  Finally I painted some thin ver­ti­cals that were much lighter in color to con­vey a sprin­kling of high notes.  The top of the paint­ing is lighter in color and the bot­tom is still bright green but much darker, the waves and ver­ti­cal lines “bridge” the two zones. I also have some tex­tural ele­ments in the waves and the thick bright spires. Of course while I was paint­ing it I was not in this lit­eral “this means that mode,” I was feel­ing the music. 

Bridge, by Jake Beck­man. A crested cock­a­too con­ducts and imag­i­nary sym­phony while lis­ten­ing to its iPod. The green back­ground is an abstract rep­re­sen­ta­tion of clas­si­cal music.

That was the thought behind Bridge.  I hope you like this dif­fer­ent take on Binary Birds, iPods and music.  Any com­ments?  If you would like more details about Bridge or would like to buy it, please see its page at AKAJake.com.

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.

Howdy Sport Fans,

Update: I must have been chan­nel­ing same vibe as Paul, the Octo­pus from Ober­hausen Ger­many, when I made this paint­ing, chos­ing red vuvuze­las and opt­ing for a yel­low tweety. The octo­pus appar­ently was pre­dict­ing win­ners of the var­i­ous soc­cer matches and ulti­mately selected Spain in the world cup. Me, I just started a paint­ing in red and yel­low about 3 weeks ago. Any­way, Spain won in OT or some­thing like that.

This Binary Bird paint­ing is because of you.  For weeks Vuvuzela was listed as one of the top 10 trend words on places like Twitter.com, all because the annoy­ing lit­tle horns were omnipresent at the 2010 Foot­ball World Cup in South Africa-or so I have been told. Vuvuzela has been suplanted by LaBron James and assorted Harry Pot­ter char­ac­ters, but by now you’d have to be liv­ing in a cave not to know a) the Soc­cer Cham­pi­onships are going on b) what a vuvuzela is because of a).

Nat­u­rally I fol­lowed the United States team (or at least DH did)  until they fell out of contention.  Today, when I went to pick up my lamp from fel­low artist, JA Jure, she told me all about some Span­ish guy with a lot of hair (Car­les Puyol?) making a spec­tac­u­lar play against the German’s yes­ter­day to advance Spain to the final.  Me I don’t watch so I can’t say for sure. I do not have the sports gene.  How­ever, I do love pop cul­ture and right now Soc­cer is pop and there­fore Binary Birds fair game. 

Back to Vuvuzelas-since it was the word of the day for so long, I, like the rest of the con­nected world had to find out what the heck that was, given that a do not actu­ally watch soc­cer, and of course why every­one was talk­ing about vuvuze­las. Imme­di­ately a Binary Bird image sprang to mind. I have finally fin­ished paint­ing it before the World Cup tour­na­ment ends, so with­out fur­ther ado, I reveal Vuvuze­las.

Vuvuze­las, by Jake Beck­man. A yel­low canary Soc­cer fan rolls a foot­ball against a back­drop of red vuvuzela horns.

The paint­ing fea­tures my trade­mark yel­low tweetie, with a foot­ball, and a back­ground of red vuvuze­las.  The binary across the bot­tom trans­lates as “Vuvuze­las.”   Ini­tially I though about mak­ing the horns assorted col­ors (like red, white and blue ) but it made for a very busy pic­ture. I chose red because I like the color and for no other rea­son.  The fact that Spain’s jer­seys are that color is purely coin­ci­den­tal.  I am sure sev­eral other teams sport that color as well.  As for the tweetie I think he is con­vey­ing, “Hell Yeah!” just fine. 

If you would like to find out more about Vuvuze­las or per­haps buy it, check it out on its page on this web­site.  I hope you like my Foot­ball inspired Binary Bird. 

  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.