Creative Cogitation

I have been insanely busy this year already.

First I would like to give a shout out to Two orga­ni­za­tions who have fea­tured me in the last month. Most recently I am the Fea­tured Artist at Artsyshark.com. Also ArtofDay.com included me in 18 Great Paint­ings, Illus­tra­tions, Draw­ings, Sculp­tures & Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy. Both fea­tured works from the Binary-Birds series, which is Art that proudly pro­claims your are a mem­ber of the Social Media Tribe. They are some­what geek-y, nerd-y, usu­ally humor­ous obser­va­tions of Social Media & other forms of elec­tronic com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Thanks to both of these web­sites for includ­ing me in their venues. 

Retweet by Jake Beck­man. An orange canary sings to four other yel­low ones who seem to be lis­ten­ing. The binary in the back­ground reads “Retweet.”

Right away I did a 4-day artshow in the 5th Ave shops dis­trict in Scotts­dale, AZ.  It was lovely weather to be out­side inter­act­ing with the pub­lic.  That was fol­lowed by Art­bridge Thurs­days, which is an event I reg­u­larly par­tic­i­pate in. This week I am tak­ing a week off because I am attend­ing in the SmArtist Tele­sum­mit. I find myself being ener­gized with lots of ideas about how to mar­ket my art bet­ter.  I am cur­rently lis­ten­ing to the ses­sion on Cor­po­rate Art Con­sul­tants while writ­ing this blog.  The same thing hap­pened last year, but I found it hard to sus­tain the emo­tion.  I am learn­ing some new stuff at the 2011 ses­sions, but I am reminded of all the balls I let roll away last year that I must pick up again.  I need to move my newlet­ter to mail chimp, I need to work on this blog a lot more often, I need to keep pro­duc­ing art while work­ing on my mar­ket­ing & sales.  It feels overwhelming. 

Still I guess I should enjoy my lit­tle vic­to­ries too.  I did get more adept as social media in 2010-I am dejakester on Twit­ter & Face­book and I have an art fan­page on Face­book too.  Binary-Birds came to light in 2010.  I did res­ur­rect my newslet­ter & blog in 2010.  I did have my NYC artshow in 2010.  I met all kinds of won­der­ful online Tweet­ies in 2010, includ­ing David San­dum who got me inter­ested in #twit­ter­ar­tex­hibit, which is hap­pen­ing in Moss Nor­way through the end of January. All good things I can build on. It looks like 2011 is off to a roar­ing start! Hope­fully I can sus­tain the momen­tum. )

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 have been send­ing pic­tures and writ­ing about my adven­tures in New York City on Face­book and Twit­ter.  If you want fre­quent updates you prob­a­bly should fol­low me there.  Mov­ing along…

Trans­porta­tion: I set up a car rental, but var­i­ous folks said, “You don’t need one.” so I didn’t pick it up-throwing myself to the ten­der mer­cies of local pub­lic tran­sit.  Gen­eral overview? Not bad except for the wait­ing part, but a book or phone with the mobile web can help with that. The hotel I am in offers a free shut­tle to Newark Air­port where I pick up the train to NY’s Penn Sta­tion (not to be con­fused with the Newark Penn sta­tion) for $25 round trip. A week unlim­ited pass on the sub­way costs $27.  I have yet to find out what a cab costs as other than that I have been hoof­ing it.  Sug­gest very com­fort­able shoes. 

Sub­way at Penn Station

Why am I in Newark NJ? Mediocre hotels in NYC after taxes start at $300, my dou­ble with pri­vate bath etc in NJ $50 a night. Even with the cost of trans­porta­tion it’s still less than a third of what I would be pay­ing on Man­hat­tan, and at least half of rooms else­where such as Queens or Hobo­ken. No bed bugs here. YMMV.

Food.  Prices range from very rea­son­able to vary expen­sive.  There is a cer­tain amount of con­ser­va­tion of enjoy­ment that goes on too.  Being able to sit down costs extra, hav­ing ambi­ence costs extra, a view costs extra, and if you have a view at a rea­son­able price the food is likely to be so so.  I find myself aim­ing for tasty sit down-as I am din­ing alone, ambi­ence is not nec­es­sar­ily required.

Cen­tral Park. Pretty, but in the end it is just a park whose real claim to fame is that it was not gob­bled up by sky­scrap­ers long ago.  There are city streets that go right through it, plus bicy­clists and jog­gers so you have to watch your step. 

Boy chases ducks at cen­tral park reservoir

A lot of parks pro­hibit dogs or pro­hibit dogs in cer­tain places so dog poo is not usu­ally an issue, but I would be care­ful about sit­ting down on the ground next to a wall as New York­ers do have pooches and all those canines need to whiz some­where.  The own­ers do carry bags to col­lect their animal’s drop­pings though.  I have not noted very many cats in this city. 

Met­ro­pol­i­tan Museum of Art.  I thought it would be open longer than it was the day I vis­ited.  It took me a while to get ori­ented so I viewed some things I had no inter­est in (such as mas­sive amounts of dead Egypt­ian things) and missed out on some things I wanted to see (such as half of the con­tem­po­rary art col­lec­tion).  For $20 2 hours was not enough time.  Advise you get there ear­lier if you are doing MoMA dur­ing the week­days as the close at 5:15 PM sharp.  In addi­tion to con­tem­po­rary art, and the Egypt­ian funer­ary items, there is fur­ni­ture form var­i­ous peri­ods, musi­cal instru­ments, paint­ings from var­i­ous peri­ods includ­ing Cezanne, Monet, Manet, Van Gogh, even a Kuinji (which sur­prised me), Pol­lack, Japan­ese stuff, Chi­nese stuff, a bam­boo instal­la­tion on the roof, stat­ues, a tourist shop, a cou­ple of cafes, etc.  You prob­a­bly could roam around for 4 or 5 hours with­out get­ting bored, starv­ing or get­ting thirsty. 

River walk parks.  Lovely this time of year and there are lots of them — at least in lower Man­hat­tan — I don’t know about uptown.  There are also other parks sort of stuffed in odd cor­ners of the city. 

SoHo and Nolita.  Lots of shop­ping.  Ditto the main drags south from Penn Sta­tion (6th & 7th AVE).  Cer­tain areas of the city seem a lit­tle grungy to me.  YMMV.  Lots of var­ied and spec­tac­u­lar architecture. I also cruised around ground zero — you can’t see much except for cranes and the new build­ing grow­ing sky­ward.  Street ven­dors sell­ing food and fresh fruit every­where. There are also ven­dors sell­ing “Rolex” watches, I (heart) NY T-shirts, etc here and there, but espe­cially in Chi­na­town and SoHo/Canal Street.

Airan Kang sculp­ture, Light Read­ing, at Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery NYC USA

So mostly what I have been doing other than hoof­ing it from point A to point B suck­ing in lower Man­hat­tan fla­vor is walk­ing about Chelsea (arts dis­trict).  The arts used to be in SoHo but now the cool kids are hang­ing out West of 10th AVE between say 20th and 27th ST. Open­ing nights tend to be Thurs­days, which I find to be an odd day for open­ings.  Most Gal­leries are open­ing from 10 AM to 6 PM Tues­day through Sat­ur­day, and show open­ings to close on Thursday.  

A lot of the art I have seen in Chelsea is what I would describe as “dead serious.” There are also a num­ber of instal­la­tions. I won­der if some of the art I see in Chelsea is of the “art you can live with” vari­ety for your aver­age col­lec­tor in NYC. It is inter­est­ing to be sure, but I per­son­ally could not “live with” dark and dis­af­fected very long… to each his or her own (although there was this one artist who did some­thing called “Flow­ers” which reminded me of Hello Kitty so…) There are also some mas­sive works includ­ing very min­i­mal­ist stuff.  I guess these sig­nif­i­cant pieces are for col­lec­tors who have space, which is some­thing I hear a lot of New York­ers are short on.   

Maybe art for the com­mon New Yorker is lim­ited to chara­ca­tures drawn by street artists and prints sold on the street.  I dunno.

US Bien­nale Group art being hung at Broad­way Gallery 473 W Broad­way 7th FL NYC

My show opens on Sat­ur­day (tomor­row as off the date of this blog).  I was told the open­ing is off the NYC Thurs­day open­ing sched­ule because of Yom Kip­pur. I don’t know how that will affect turn out.  The gallery owner enjoys my work, but he said it was priced too low, which was the sec­ond time in a week I had heard that — so I am rais­ing my prices. He also wanted to know if I did any­thing big­ger than 24 x 24 (I do — in fact I pre­fer large, I just don’t enjoy stor­ing it). We dis­cussed where I could go with the Binary Birds in the future.  It was an inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion over 3 dif­fer­ent days.  I find myself with a lit­tle more insight into the art­work of this city.  But I don’t know if my tweet­ies will ever be that gritty. 

Before I leave I do intend to visit the Museum of Mod­ern Art.  As for the rest of the stan­dard touristy stuff, it’s not usu­ally my cup of tea but I may get around to some of it if I have time.  I am sup­posed to leave in less than a week so we will see. 

A blast of impres­sions. I find the activ­ity and energy of the city to be very fre­netic.  The Thurs­day open­ings are packed.  When you walk down the streets there are tons of peo­ple going this way and that.  Pedes­tri­ans seem to view lights as a sug­ges­tion.  It seems like half the cars fly­ing down the streets are taxis.  At night there are lights every­where — less than say Las Vegas, but still pretty bright.  I have not expe­ri­enced the packed sub­way phe­nom­e­non but I don’t think I want to.  Peo­ple are close and dis­tant at the same time.  My talk­a­tive nature seems to catch peo­ple off guard — they laugh ner­vously while main­tain eye con­tact and back­ing away.  The weather for my visit has  been in the 70s-80s & partly cloudy except for the first day, when I could have been car­ried off to Kansas by not one but two tor­na­dos; I got soaked to the bone before haunt­ing the Thurs­day night open­ings with New Yorker and artist, Assunta Sera. I come back from the city with a 100 pic­tures, exhausted, every night.  My feet are very tired. 

A park in the mid­dle of the street in NYC

Right now I think NYC is a nice place to visit, but I am a lit­tle home­sick for my mate, cats, kitchen, bed, car, my stu­dio and of course lower cost of liv­ing.  But I am not miss­ing the heat of of my home in Phoenix AZ.

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.

A friend recently twit­tered me, “Has tech­nol­ogy pro­gressed to the point that I can live out the remain­der of my life with­out face to face con­tact?” I told him he still needed to get his car emis­sions tested in per­son.    But is does raise the ques­tion, are we head­ing for Isaac Asimov’s dystopia, Solaria?

I dunno, but I recently learned a new slang term, e-lationship.  It’s a cyber rela­tion­ship, where friends, lovers and other strangers never meet face-to-face, they just carry on vir­tu­ally, be it via Face­Book, Twit­ter, IM-ing, chat or what have you.  For years peo­ple have known that cyber cutie might be a three-hundred pound guy, an 84-year-old grandma, or a tee­nie bop­per look­ing for a thrill.  But there is the whole other level I had not con­sid­ered and that is peo­ple who really do not want to meet in per­son, but who feel ful­filled with a harem of cyber-mates.  e-lation, it’s a great punny in my opinion.

e-lation by Jake Beck­man. Two cyber-canaries stare dream­ily into each oth­ers eyes.

e-lation was a nat­ural follow-on piece for the social media birds.  I have place two canaries star­ing dream­ily into each oth­ers’ eyes-that alone should give pause for thought-after all you really can’t see the per­son on the other end of the wire.  The back­ground is mot­tled, sug­gest­ing an insub­stan­tial venue.  The birds are perched on a swirly, green, heart-shaped con­tour.  One half of the out­line is over­laid with ASCII binary which reads e-lation.

I had a great deal of fun let­ting the acrylic flow in the back­ground of this paint­ing.  There was quite a bit of splat­ter­ing, drip­ping, flow­ing and all sorts of uncon­trolled activ­ity, which con­trasted strongly with paint­ing binary on the heart out­line (that took me three tries to find a good lay­out).  I hope you like it.

What do you think of the paint­ing, or cyber rela­tion­ships, or …?

Update: Details about e-lation, 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.

In this fifth install­ment of the Social Media Birds series, I explore binary with birds. As peo­ple have talked about the pre­ced­ing paint­ings I have been asked, “What do the ones and zeros mean?” Yes, I did write a code in ASCII binary, and, yes, it does mean some­thing, and I have no prob­lem with telling the viewer what the binary means. But… Like all art, it’s in the eye of the beholder who is free to apply what­ever inter­pre­ta­tion they want to the paint­ing includ­ing the code. I could have put the actual words in the paint­ing, but I chose to put rep­re­sen­ta­tions of words instead. That is one rea­son for the binary, being lit­eral with­out being lit­eral. That there is this abstrac­tion of lan­guage is suf­fi­cient. I would like the viewer to explore mean­ing a lit­tle more deeply than the face value. What are those birds talk­ing about? Why is one bird orange? Are canaries a valid way to rep­re­sent “Social Media?” Is cyber-communication real, or just a fac­sim­ile of real? Feel free to come up with your own, ques­tions, answers, inter­pre­ta­tions and “code;” after all, how many peo­ple can actu­ally read ASCII binary just to look at it? Your story could be bet­ter than mine.

ASCII Bird, by Jake Beck­man. 80 birds are encoded with the binary messages.

In this paint­ing I took off on a tan­gent, rep­re­sent­ing the binary code with a code. Each bird rep­re­sents three dis­tinct pos­si­bil­i­ties and there­fore three dis­tinct binary states. The bird can be perched or fly­ing, the bird can be black or white and the bird can face left or right. This allowed me to layer three dif­fer­ent “mes­sages” in the binary coded by the states of the birds. You don’t need ones and zeros, you just need some­thing that can be dis­tinctly one thing or another.

Beyond that I broke with using bright col­ors and also laid the birds out in a grid pat­tern to re-enforce the “code.” I think it has a vaguely Egypt­ian feel. If you want to know what the binary means, you can check it the ASCII Bird page on my web­site, where I have decoded the messages.

What do you think? Which one do you like best so far?

Update: Details about ASCII Bird, 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.

As I pre­vi­ously stated while I was work­ing on Bird on a Wire a whole series of paint­ings came to me.  This series is a result of my recent immer­sion into social media.  I am a noob (a neo­phyte) to things like Face­Book and Twit­ter, but I hope to get bet­ter.  I even took a class for Face­Book, just before they com­pletely redid the lay­out.  ARGH!

I am still look­ing for Face­Book fan page tips.  My RSS feed is dou­ble post­ing and since they redid the lay­out I can’t find where the RSS Feed link is at on the fan page anymore.

Any­way, when I posted Tweet­Deck, one of my com­men­ta­tors said that Retweet came to mind.  Of course I was already work­ing on it as it was such an obvi­ous follow-on.  And now it is done-enjoy.

Retweet by Jake Beck­man. An orange canary sings to four other yel­low ones who seem to be lis­ten­ing. The binary in the back­ground reads “Retweet.”

Its a lit­tle abstract in con­cept, but also kind of lit­eral too.  The ASCII binary reads “Retweet” from Left to Right, and Top to bot­tom.  In this ver­sion I explic­itly included a spi­ral as a place for my canaries to perch.  I opted to fill the entire back­ground with binary so the upper most bird would have some­thing to stand on, oth­er­wise it would have been hang­ing upside down like an orang­utan.   What do you think?

Update: Details about Retweet, 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.