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.

In the midst of the Binary Birds series I was con­tacted out of the blue by an artist out of  Florida.  She com­mented on my paint­ing Mother Night, which made me think about it some.  Since I am in the midst of my 100 Paint­ings projects I do not turn down any ideas that feed the muse.  So I revis­ited Mother Night this week­end while I was fin­ish­ing hoot­suite.

Both paint­ings had me in the night mode.  I am noc­tur­nal.  I love the night, the stars, the moon, and the gen­eral qui­etude.  I am mar­ried to a morn­ing per­son, so from about 8 PM to when­ever I decide to rest, I get a big block of unin­ter­rupted time; such a thing is pre­cious to all artists-it allows you to get deep into your zone.

Mother Night’s Embrace, by Jake Beck­man. An abstract dragon unfurls its starry wings, embrac­ing the moon. The neg­a­tive space of the night sky forms the watch­ful eye of Mother Night.

I have been work­ing in a square for­mat for the last cou­ple of paint­ings.  The NYC art show is com­ing up and the max­i­mum dimen­sions of the works allowed are 25 x 25 inches, or other vari­ant, so long as they do not occupy more than 50 x 25 inches.  25 x 25 is an odd size, but 24-inch square can­vases are easy enough to come by. I don’t usu­ally work in  a square for­mat; I pre­fer rec­tan­gu­lar can­vases which lend them­selves bet­ter to apply­ing the golden sec­tion. So I embarked on a new ver­sion of Mother Night work­ing in this alien square for­mat.  After cre­at­ing sev­eral sketches using my Wacom tablet in Pho­to­shop, the image of the dragon cre­at­ing neg­a­tive space in the sky sug­ges­tive of an eye started to emerge.  Once I had that idea, every­thing sort of fell into place.

I think it is a such a cool idea I may have to explore it fur­ther. I love the images of the night, the moon and stars.  I also have an affin­ity for drag­ons and other fly­ing crit­ters as well.  And the idea of using neg­a­tive space in this way also intrigues me some.

Mother Night’s Embrace clearly has noth­ing to do with the Binary Birds, but belongs to another series Abstract Con­cepts, so I have gone off the reser­va­tion for this one paint­ing, and I hope you like it.

If you would like to pur­chase Mother Night’s Embrace, please see its page on my web­site; you can pur­chase it using Pay­pal.  Thanks for stop­ping by.

If you are in the New York City area between Sep­tem­ber 16 and Sep­tem­ber 30, 2010 — you can see Mother Night’s Embrace and a work from the Binary Birds series, hoot­suite, at the Broad­way Gallery, 473 Broad­way in SOHO.  The Gallery is open Mon-Fri 10 AM-6 PM. The artists’ recep­tion is from 3–6 PM Sat­ur­day Sep­tem­ber 25, 2010.  Look­ing for­ward to see­ing you there. 

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.

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.