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!

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