Creative Cogitation

Ever since I started doing PopCult paint­ings I have wanted to do some­thing inspired by Andy Warhol.  But I have never been one to just copy some­thing.  The germ of the idea behind Social Net­work­ing! came to me as soon as I started doing the Binary Birds, but it did not erupt as a full blown con­cept until this weekend.

Social Net­work­ing! by Jake Beck­man. Four brightly-colored canaries socially net­work form their own squares. The ASCII Binary back­ground reads, “Social Networking!.”

Call to action: Buy Social Net­work­ing.  Mama needs new canvases. 

I looked over some of Andy Warhol’s work, let­ting the vibe flow through me, ana­lyz­ing it in an abstract way. The iconic Andy Warhol image was the Marylin Mon­roe rep­e­ti­tion, there­fore I opted to embrace some part of this con­cept and do a four square Binary Birds paint­ing.  Andy Warhol appears to have loved the color red (so do I), so I decided there would be  a lot of red in the paint­ing. Finally I adopted the out­ra­geous color vari­a­tion that appeared in those images.  Ini­tially I enter­tained the notion of repeat­ing my own icon, the canary, in the boxes, but there the my anal­ogy and Andy’s anal­ogy parted ways.

My tweet­ies rep­re­sent ordi­nary peo­ple, not famous peo­ple who would be rec­og­niz­able at a glance.  My canaries had to be indi­vid­u­als. I departed from absolute repetition.

From there the con­cept moved into the sketch phase.  Warn­ing, some quasi-technical stuff ahead.

 Hav­ing already com­pleted many Binary Birds paint­ings with canaries, I just rounded up 4 of my favorite canary sketches, which had been scanned and saved to my com­puter.  I required an angel-winged fly­ing one of course.  I liked the one where the bird is hang­ing off a ver­ti­cal wall.  For what­ever rea­son I like the one I call the “side­ways singer,” as it looks like an Egypt­ian glyph to me.  Finally I set­tled on a perched canary with a long flow­ing tail for the fourth bird-I kind of like the idea of hav­ing its tail invade the next square.

I moved these into a new Pho­to­shop doc­u­ment and began mess­ing around with the col­ors. If you have sev­eral ele­ments you need to play around with Pho­to­shop is great for that.  Its also superb for color lay­out as well, which is pri­mar­ily how I used it in this instance.  At first I thought I would have four solid boxes, but that turned out to be bor­ing.  I recalled Andy Warhol did a rep­e­ti­tion with a panda bear toy that had lit­tle frames around the image so I tried that.  So the frames are shades of red: Pink, Brick Red and Cad­mium Red.  I opted for red, light blue, yel­low and light green as the col­ors for my vari­a­tions.  The canary in a given square picks up the color of the back­ground in the square counter-clockwise from it, and the eyes, feet and beak pick up the color of the square kitty-corner to it.  I don’t know how Andy Picked is color vari­a­tions, but the idea of using a pat­tern appealed to me-I like to cre­ate pat­terns, it is just the way my brain is wired. In my mind all four images are linked in a closed loop with one another via color.

Mov­ing on to the binary…

The phrase “Social Net­work­ing” has 17 char­ac­ters and 17 is a prime num­ber.  There is no way to break it down into any­thing other than one and sev­en­teen.  I wanted an edge to edge binary pat­tern in the back­ground.  It occurred to me if I added punc­tu­a­tion I would have 18 char­ac­ters times 8 bits per ASCII binary char­ac­ter, or 144 char­ac­ters, which  would form a per­fect 12 x12 square of ones and zeros.  Social Net­work­ing became Social Net­work­ing!

This paint­ing is part of the 100 Paint­ings thing, but I am drop­ping 100 Days part as it was no where near a real­is­tic goal.  Today is Day 52 and I have com­pleted 18 paint­ings.  I accept that life hap­pens and it has been hap­pen­ing to me a lot lately.  At my cur­rent rate of pro­duc­tion it is going to take at least 300 days to do 100 paint­ings.  That’s not to say I can’t crank out a paint­ing a day, I just do not seem to have the time to.  Also one thing I did not fac­tor in is all the post pro­duc­tion work that has to hap­pen.  This week­end I spent an entire day pho­tograph­ing, resiz­ing, label­ing and upload­ing 7 newly fin­ished works.  This morn­ing I have spend the entire time on just one piece.  This exer­cise is teach­ing me a great deal about how much time a sin­gle small­ish paint­ing really takes-for me it is a min­i­mum of three days: Sketch day, paint day, post-production day.  Of course that does NOT take into account any time spent on mar­ket­ing the thing.  Thank good­ness I quit using oil, I’d never fin­ish any­thing.

So those are the real life artist thoughts behind Social Net­work­ing! If you would like more infor­ma­tion about the paint­ing or per­haps would like to buy it, see its page 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.

The lack of art pro­duc­tion is incred­i­bly depress­ing. What have I been doing?

I did get most of the tax class web­site up, all but 3 pages-but they are for part 3 which is not even going to be taught until Octo­ber.  I have spend 82 hours on it so far.  I also did my prepa­ra­tions for the part of the class I teach too, which is a sep­a­rate time investment.

I pur­chased an AC floor unit from Costco for 1/10 the cheap­est  bid for a new heat pump.  After it arrived I had to wait 24 hours as they deliv­ered it upside down; so much for the this-end-up markings.  The man­u­fac­turer rec­om­mend it be sit­ting upright for 24 hours before fir­ing it up. Any­way, after 24 hours I finally got to turn it on.  It was not quite as sim­ple as plug and play.  The exhaust hose that came with the unit was very short and not insu­lated either.  The power cord was also short.   The net result is I got the thing parked with great dif­fi­culty.  It’s up on cin­der blocks to help the hose reach the win­dow, and sev­eral feet from where I really wanted it (to improve air flow in the area) owing to the short power cord.  I also had to insu­late the exhaust pipe & the win­dow where the exhaust exits through as both were heat­ing up the room, right next to the AC. Now that all that is done it works fairly well, keep­ing the air dry and in between 85 (in my stu­dio) and 90 (in my office).  I’d like it to be a lit­tle cooler, but it is bet­ter than work­ing in the rain for­est by far.

Still no frames, still no travel plans for NYC.  I feel the need to start obsess­ing about that.  Fall show sea­son is loom­ing. I put in an appli­ca­tion for the Octo­ber Sun­nys­lope Art­walk already. Several peo­ple made noises about join­ing me on the NYC trip, but as the time draws closer, they have other plans.  It looks like I will be trav­el­ing solo.

the web, by Jake Beck­man. A canary sings in tree branches con­nected with gos­samer webs.

Yes­ter­day I finally got back to paint­ing and 7 of the 9 paint­ings I started 3 weeks ago got fin­ished: six, seven, eight, nine, Hash, Splat! and the web.  Today I pho­tographed them, did a bunch of Pho­to­shop work, uploaded the result to my web­site, and sched­uled posts on Daily Painters of Ari­zona. I real­ized today that I have about 20 paint­ings to reg­is­ter with Fine Art Reg­istry, but that is not a pri­or­ity at the moment.  Any­way com­plet­ing six of these paint­ings allowed me to finally com­plete the cell phone composite.

Cell Phone Key­pad Com­posit of 15 indi­vid­ual paint­ings by Jake Beckman

Tomor­row is another work­week with my day job.  I have to focus at least some time on get­ting ready for New York.  Toward that end I pur­chased sev­eral 24″ x 24″ gallery wrapped can­vases and I have some ideas already.

It feels good to finally be paint­ing again.  I was get­ting pretty crabby with­out it.

Any­way if you would like to find out more about the newly com­pleted work, or would like to buy some­thing, please check out their pages at my web­site: six, seven, eight, nine, Hash, Splat! and the web.

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.

It’s been 13 days since I last blogged.  What have I done?  Not much to be per­fectly hon­est.  I went up to Oak Creek again, this time with a raft of peo­ple includ­ing 3 kids.  It was 5 days and a lot of fun (for the most part).  I did enjoy tak­ing the lit­tle ones on this or that adven­ture like hik­ing up Munds Creek or going to the deep hole; it is nice to see the unfil­tered joy of discovery.

After 3 days the enter­tain­ment com­mit­tee started to wear out though.  Kids had to redis­cover the ancient Nin­tendo in the trailer, which was rather amus­ing, the joy of the ring game (kinda like horse­shoes), Yahtzee and other such pas­times.  Most of the adults and one child left on Sun­day after­noon, as they had to work Monday.

I got some paint­ing done but I still haven’t fin­ished any of the paint­ings I dis­cussed in my last blog.  I was really hop­ing to get more done. Silly me.  Les­son learned.  If you plan a retreat that involves non artists, you are not going to get much of a chance to paint.  I am not upset really; I did need a lit­tle sum­mer retreat and tak­ing it in 2 5-day seg­ments is bet­ter than not.  On the other hand part of me is bugged because I did *waste* this time-and I know I shouldn’t be bugged.

A group of chil­dren and adults hunt for craw­dads in Oak Creek AZ. Photo by Jake Beck­man © 2010

When I arrived back in Phoenix I dis­cov­ered my air con­di­tioner had busted again.  This time the com­pres­sor shorted out. $1445 to replace it and the AC/heater we are dis­cussing is about 45 years old.  If I fix the com­pres­sor what else is going to break? It still has sev­eral other ancient parts.  In the mean time I fired up the swamp cooler, which only pro­vides a lit­tle bit of relief as its mon­soon sea­son and the humid­ity means it just does not work well. I unloaded the van and put a few things away, but some things just got put away today-that is so unlike me.  The house is a mess.  I do not want to deal with it.

I got a few bids on new heat pumps.  Holy Cow!  Need­less to say I do not have that kind of cash lying around right now.  That was last Tues­day after­noon.  I ordered a floor unit from Costco, which is sup­posed to be deliv­ered tomorrow. That post­pones the deci­sion about what to about the busted AC indefinitely, I can han­dle that, just as soon as I feel cold air wash­ing over me again. In the mean­time it has been hot and sticky and it is very hard to get moti­vated to do any­thing.  In the heat of the day I feel like tak­ing a nap directly in front of a fan.

In my *spare* time, (ha, ha, ha) I have been work­ing on the tax class website.  The web­site is 40 or cross linked/indexed pages com­plete with Q&A and sam­ple tax returns (there are probably100  pdfs attached to these pages).  The SEE study web­site is actu­ally pretty big. I am updat­ing the infor­ma­tion to cover the 2009 tax year and there are all sorts of lit­tle bits that are spe­cific only to that year that have be located and changed from the pre­vi­ous tax year. I don’t have time to do it.  I am doing this again, why?

The same group I am doing this vol­un­teer work for asked me to take over their web­site to.  I said no.  I said no.  I said no.  I think I said no on the phone for about 3o min­utes.  Finally they heard no.  As for the tax class web, I tend to be a per­son of my word so if I say I am going to do some­thing for some­one else, I gen­er­ally do it, even if I dis­cover I have bit­ten off more than I can chew.  I am not so good at hon­or­ing those promises to myself and as I sit here writ­ing this I rec­og­nize this dis­par­ity is def­i­nitely some­thing I need to address, quickly. I have got to say no a hell of a lot more often.

So the short ver­sion is I got back, melted, did my day job, shopped for AC options, met with at least 4 HVAC guys, and have been forc­ing myself to work in the *rain for­est,* which is what I am call­ing my office right now and have not really painted in about 2 weeks.  The 100 paint­ing thing has been on hia­tus for 2 weeks and it doesn’t look like I am going to have time to pick up the thread this week either.

I have to make the bleep­ing time.  More later.

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.

Hang Up by Jake Beck­man. A Yel­low Canary pur­chase atop the tele­phone icon of an “end call” cell phone but­ton. The ASCII Binary arch­ing over the top reads “Hang Up”

So it is day 23 of 100 paint­ings in 100 days.  I have com­pleted 9 paint­ings and I have 9 oth­ers in var­i­ous stages of com­ple­tion.  With a good days work I prob­a­bly can com­plete all of them, but my life is a con­tin­u­ous jug­gling act and I don’t know when I am going to get a moment to paint again in the next sev­eral days.

I came back from my trip to Oak Creek on Day 16.  I painted all day, then packed it in and drove back to Phoenix.  I decided I’d rather start off my short work­week refreshed in the rel­a­tive cool of the Phoenix AZ morn­ing rather than fried from dri­ving back down the hill in the heat.  It was an unevent­ful trip home.  The usual stuff, my day job and all, awaited me.

In the last week I fin­ished Vuvuzela’s, five, zero, Call Me, Hang Up & Do It!, pho­tographed them and got the images up on my web­site.  I still need to reg­is­ter them with my prove­nance ser­vice.  I also blogged about Vuvuzela’s sep­a­rately since it was directly related to the 2010 Soc­cer World Cup, which wrapped up last week too.

Do It! by Jake Beck­man, a yel­low canary angle flies before the “do it” but­ton of a cell phone. The ASCII Binary reads, “Do It!”

I have found time to start 6 new pieces in addi­tion to the three 11x14-inch paint­ings I started in Oak Creek.  The three inspired by my last visit to Oak Creek are ten­ta­tively named www (or web or net I am not sure yet), MySpace and My World.  The 6 new paint­ings are all 6x8 inch ones that will fin­ish out my key pad: six, seven, eight, nine, Hash and Splat! I need to fin­ish paint­ing the Tweet­ies in 7 of these and over­lay the binary.  My World and MySpace are some­what less devel­oped at this point.

As you can see, I am falling behind-I should have 23 com­pleted and only 9 done with 9 more in the works-well short of my goal. And I still have a tax class web­site to prepare, tax class to teach, an artshow in NYC, a mess of art to frame, etc.  I haven’t even pur­chased the frames, nor have I solid­i­fied my travel plans for NYC.  OMG I am so far behind!

Breathe.

This week­end I am going back to Oak Creek canyon.  A fel­low artist JChristi wanted to camp out and I sug­gested Oak Creek as it sim­pli­fies “camp­ing” a lit­tle bit.  But unlike my last trip, this is more or less JChristi’s show, which means I am going to have to work around her sched­ule.  We are sup­posed to leave Fri­day morn­ing.  Since it is a lit­tle after mid­night Thurs­day has just started and I have many things to do before I can leave for Sedona.  I am look­ing for­ward to going back though; it is really hot here in Phoenix (112 at the air­port today, 116 in some parts of the val­ley) and it will be cooler up there.  Also being unplugged does get my cre­ative juices flow­ing.   JChristi told me to “bring my paints” so I am going to, but I am unsure how much paint­ing I will actu­ally get done.

DH is demur­ing about going with again, so our cats will have one of their peo­ple around.

Back to the sub­ject at hand. Maybe 100 paint­ings in 100 days is not a real­is­tic goal given all the other things I have going on in my life — after all I have missed my mark by 61% at this point-not count­ing the par­tially fin­ished pieces.  Embrace the real­ity.  Maybe it will be 100 paint­ings by the end of the year (at this rate-even that is push­ing it).  I don’t know, but I am going to keep at this.

In the mean­time you can cer­tainly check out the paint­ings I have com­pleted on this project, and of course if you’d like to buy one that would be lovely as well.  Enjoy.    two, three, four, five, zero, Vuvuze­las, Call Me, Do It!, Hang Up

Also the cell phone key­pad is approach­ing com­ple­tion and I really think it needs a place to be displayed-in fact I have already laid out the pieces and had a look-see for myself. It’s def­i­nitely com­ing along.  So if you know of any place that might be inter­ested in dis­play­ing it and per­haps sell­ing it, please let me know.  I’ll post the entire work some­where when its done.

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.