Creative Cogitation

On June 22 I decide to attempt 100 paint­ings in 100 days. I don’t know if I can even do this.  Its a daunt­ing task to con­tem­plate, but I am going to give it a try.  Why? I watched Julia & Julia and it gave me this ridicu­lous idea.  Sure I have heard about it before as a method to develop a dis­tinc­tive style. The the­ory is when you have to crank it out, your style will happen. 

There are peri­ods of time when my pro­duc­tiv­ity goes through the roof, but there are lulls, some­times long ones where I let my life get in the way of my pas­sion.  I also intend to blog about it.  Short blogs prob­a­bly, but blog­ging about it is going to be part of this exer­cise.  I have a hard time talk­ing about my art, it just doesn’t flow eas­ily.  I also want to write bet­ter blogs and there is no sub­sti­tute for, well, just doing it.  I am prob­a­bly going to be exper­i­ment­ing with the plug-ins and what not as I attempt to get more advice on pre­sent­ing the blog, so this will involve a lot of blog­ging too. Jeepers. 

Day 1.  I fin­ished up 2 paint­ings that had been lay­ing around.  One was very nearly done.  The sec­ond I thought was fin­ished, but when I went to pho­to­graph it I hated it and had to edit it sub­stan­tially.  So the edit­ing job became the the first paint­ing in 100 paint­ings in 100 days. I fin­ished two for day 1 and I started a sec­ond and a third paint­ing.  I had orig­i­nally painted one and decided to paint two with­out really know­ing where I was going with this idea. 

two by jake beck­man, two canaries perched with the num­ber 2, and ASCII binary of two & 2

As usual, the binary code has every­thing to do with the paint­ing, spelling out two and 2 in ASCII binary. 

Day 2.  three and four were barely started yes­ter­day, I had got beyond a sketch, but not by much, however they are fin­ished today. Of course I have to pho­to­graph them etc now.  Since these are all 6x8 inch paint­ings I have decided they are going to be arranged like a phone key­pad and be grouped that way; I have to do 5,6,7,8,9,0 #, *, and maybe answer, hangup and do it but­ton too.  So I have the idea for the next 8–11 paint­ings, which will give me time to con­tem­plate what comes after the cell phone num­ber pad. 

I don’t know what you all think about this idea, but Julia’s mother’s com­ment about, “Why,” espe­cially when I am so busy with other things does come to mind.  So if any of you all have ever under­taken a self-commited pro­gram for only rea­sons you can under­stand I’d like what­ever advice you might chip in or what ever gen­eral com­ments come to mind as I embrace this insanity. 

If you’d like to find out more about one and two or per­haps buy them please check out their pages at AKAJake.com, one and two. 

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.

So while I was work­ing on Bird on a Wire an whole series of ideas came into my head.  Tweet­Deck is one of them.  It took sev­eral days from inkling in the old brain hous­ing group to fin­ished can­vas.  I hope you like it.

The series is the result of my immer­sion in social media lately (and prob­a­bly for some time to come).  I have a Face­Book fan page started (and only started).  It is going to take me a while to fig­ure out how to really use that tool prop­erly.  And there is all the link­age between Face­Book, Twit­ter, my blog and to a lesser extent, MySpace and LinkedIn.  MySpace seems to be yesterday’s news.  LinkedIn seems more busi­ness minded.  But I think the whole thing can work.  In the­ory Twit­ter­Feed is feed­ing this blog or the RSS feed to sev­eral locations.

In fur­ther­ance of my edu­ca­tion, I par­tic­i­pated in a kind of Face­Book for Dum­mies class this week.  I didn’t learn too much except how to stop being ham­mered with all the games.  Yes, I know, its easy, but I have not had the time to sit around and play with this stuff a lot.  Learn­ing how to get rid of Far­mVille Spam was pretty cool.  Also learn­ing what infor­ma­tion is being shared and how to con­trol it to some extent was also impor­tant.  The class actu­ally did not sug­gest any rec­om­men­da­tions in this regard, which I found to be an inter­est­ing omission.

It was a hands on class, so the moment I logged on, all my Face­Book friends could see I was there and engage in chat. That was a new expe­ri­ence for me.  I spent a bit of time chat­ting with sev­eral peo­ple includ­ing my nephew who seems to think Apple/Macintosh is the be-all-end-all-here and can’t under­stand why I am still using a clunky HP lap­top or why I think my next phone is going to be a Blackberry.

Any­way, so my mind is chew­ing on this stuff and out comes this series of ideas with canaries and binary.  I enjoyed paint­ing my lit­tle tweetie bird com­mune so much another one is under­way.  Any­way, with­out futher ado, Tweet­Deck.

Tweet­Deck, paint­ing by Jake Beck­man. Five canaries perch on a wire.

Its a lit­tle abstract in con­cept, but also kind of lit­eral too.  The ASCII binary reads “Tweet­Deck” from Left to Right, and Top to bot­tom.  In addi­tion to the binary I have attempted to imply a golden spi­ral in the arrange­ment of the birds and the wire and to a lesser extent the tonal vari­a­tion of the col­ors in the back­ground.  Mostly I think this series is going to be about whimsy.  What do you think?

Alter­na­tively, got any Face­Book Fan page or other social media tips? Love to hear from you.

Details about Tweet­Deck, 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.

—-

Tried to fig­ure out a way to reply to my own blog but couldn’t, so to all my com­men­ta­tors, thanks for all the social media applause.    I really appre­ci­ate you stop­ping by.  — Jake