Creative Cogitation

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.

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.