Creative Cogitation

Hang Up by Jake Beck­man. A Yel­low Canary pur­chase atop the tele­phone icon of an “end call” cell phone but­ton. The ASCII Binary arch­ing over the top reads “Hang Up”

So it is day 23 of 100 paint­ings in 100 days.  I have com­pleted 9 paint­ings and I have 9 oth­ers in var­i­ous stages of com­ple­tion.  With a good days work I prob­a­bly can com­plete all of them, but my life is a con­tin­u­ous jug­gling act and I don’t know when I am going to get a moment to paint again in the next sev­eral days.

I came back from my trip to Oak Creek on Day 16.  I painted all day, then packed it in and drove back to Phoenix.  I decided I’d rather start off my short work­week refreshed in the rel­a­tive cool of the Phoenix AZ morn­ing rather than fried from dri­ving back down the hill in the heat.  It was an unevent­ful trip home.  The usual stuff, my day job and all, awaited me.

In the last week I fin­ished Vuvuzela’s, five, zero, Call Me, Hang Up & Do It!, pho­tographed them and got the images up on my web­site.  I still need to reg­is­ter them with my prove­nance ser­vice.  I also blogged about Vuvuzela’s sep­a­rately since it was directly related to the 2010 Soc­cer World Cup, which wrapped up last week too.

Do It! by Jake Beck­man, a yel­low canary angle flies before the “do it” but­ton of a cell phone. The ASCII Binary reads, “Do It!”

I have found time to start 6 new pieces in addi­tion to the three 11x14-inch paint­ings I started in Oak Creek.  The three inspired by my last visit to Oak Creek are ten­ta­tively named www (or web or net I am not sure yet), MySpace and My World.  The 6 new paint­ings are all 6x8 inch ones that will fin­ish out my key pad: six, seven, eight, nine, Hash and Splat! I need to fin­ish paint­ing the Tweet­ies in 7 of these and over­lay the binary.  My World and MySpace are some­what less devel­oped at this point.

As you can see, I am falling behind-I should have 23 com­pleted and only 9 done with 9 more in the works-well short of my goal. And I still have a tax class web­site to prepare, tax class to teach, an artshow in NYC, a mess of art to frame, etc.  I haven’t even pur­chased the frames, nor have I solid­i­fied my travel plans for NYC.  OMG I am so far behind!

Breathe.

This week­end I am going back to Oak Creek canyon.  A fel­low artist JChristi wanted to camp out and I sug­gested Oak Creek as it sim­pli­fies “camp­ing” a lit­tle bit.  But unlike my last trip, this is more or less JChristi’s show, which means I am going to have to work around her sched­ule.  We are sup­posed to leave Fri­day morn­ing.  Since it is a lit­tle after mid­night Thurs­day has just started and I have many things to do before I can leave for Sedona.  I am look­ing for­ward to going back though; it is really hot here in Phoenix (112 at the air­port today, 116 in some parts of the val­ley) and it will be cooler up there.  Also being unplugged does get my cre­ative juices flow­ing.   JChristi told me to “bring my paints” so I am going to, but I am unsure how much paint­ing I will actu­ally get done.

DH is demur­ing about going with again, so our cats will have one of their peo­ple around.

Back to the sub­ject at hand. Maybe 100 paint­ings in 100 days is not a real­is­tic goal given all the other things I have going on in my life — after all I have missed my mark by 61% at this point-not count­ing the par­tially fin­ished pieces.  Embrace the real­ity.  Maybe it will be 100 paint­ings by the end of the year (at this rate-even that is push­ing it).  I don’t know, but I am going to keep at this.

In the mean­time you can cer­tainly check out the paint­ings I have com­pleted on this project, and of course if you’d like to buy one that would be lovely as well.  Enjoy.    two, three, four, five, zero, Vuvuze­las, Call Me, Do It!, Hang Up

Also the cell phone key­pad is approach­ing com­ple­tion and I really think it needs a place to be displayed-in fact I have already laid out the pieces and had a look-see for myself. It’s def­i­nitely com­ing along.  So if you know of any place that might be inter­ested in dis­play­ing it and per­haps sell­ing it, please let me know.  I’ll post the entire work some­where when its done.

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 planned on tak­ing the week­end off to paint.  I got on my com­puter, Saturday, and just spend the whole day there. I had eight paint­ings I needed to get on my web­site com­plete with all the lovely pic­tures, most of PopCult Gallery Three got uploaded.   Then I needed to start get­ting the word out there via social media, post­ing pic­tures on my Face­book fan­page which auto­mat­i­cally goes to var­i­ous places.  Once that was done I was finally able to post a blog about two of the new pieces and deep link on a cou­ple of other posts that are in the que wait­ing their turn.

On the upside I started five, zero and a paint­ing called Vuvuze­las in honor of all that soc­cer stuff I keep hear­ing about; I don’t have the sports gene so I was nit watch­ing the matches. What that means is that I am still on track with respect to a paint­ing a day for the first week, assum­ing I fin­ish them by tomor­row  You should hear me right now… I am chuck­ing at the unre­al­is­tic dead­line I just set myself. In addi­tion to this blog I want to write a bit about the other two paint­ings I uploaded so I can do some deep link­ing to them too.

I am find­ing social media is tak­ing a lot of time.  I am try­ing to work in some more Linkedin and today I hit a bunch of new Face­book friends with a request to become a fan of my Fan­page.  While I was at it I uploaded the 8 new paint­ings to the photo album on my fan page and changed my avatars on my fan­page and Face­book page all the while chat­ting away via Tweet­Deck.  Oh my. 

I keep hear­ing that I need to auto­mate newslet­ter sign up.  I have a newslet­ter — it tends to go out when I am have a show, but right now it’s too hot locally so no email newslet­ter, so I won­der what am I going to put in a newslet­ter.  Then there is affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing, mon­e­tiz­ing the site, etc. etc. - those are just words to me right now — I don’t know what they mean.  Any­way while I was blog­ging I fig­ured out how to put links to Twit­ter, my Face­book fan­page, Linkedin and MySpace etc at the top of my art blog.  When I set up the blog that idea never occured to me, now of course it’s, “Like Duh…”

By the time this post gets done I will have five and zero done, but will they be uploaded to my web­site, I am mak­ing heavy sigh­ing noises even as I think about it. 

five, by Jake Beck­man. Five yel­low canaries cavort about an orange num­ber 5. The back­ground is an abstract of warm pur­ple bub­bles. The binary reads “five” and “5”.

So this is five, finally posted in this blog, and zero is below.  Vuvuze­las got its own blog on the eve of the World Cup final.  I had to post it before the end.  It was coin­ci­den­tally painted in the col­ors of the win­ning coun­tries flag-red vuvuze­las and a bright yel­low canary (excuse me, gold canary) .

zero, by Jake Beck­man. An out­line of a canary, rep­re­sent­ing the canary null set, flies before a gilt num­ber 0.

OK I guess by now you know what 6, 7, 8 and 9 will look like.  But zero was a puz­zle for me until I came up with my “null set” canary.   I am enjoy­ing the minia­ture abstract back­grounds more too.  As much as I love paint­ing my big ones, some of my effects take a long time and a long time to dry.  Work­ing on this scale def­i­nitely speeds things up. 

As I write this blog on day five (pic­tures to be inserted later) I real­ize time-management is def­i­nitely and issue for me.  Got any tips? 

Also all this art is for sale.  Mama needs some more can­vases.  Want to buy some? Check out five and zero’s pages 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.

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.