Creative Cogitation

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.

I love cre­at­ing.  I have to cre­ate.  If I could find a way to con­tin­u­ously paint or what­ever and keep a roof over my head, food in my belly and keep myself in art sup­plies, I would.   I am still work­ing on that.  A lot of my pre­vi­ous writ­ings have been about the busi­ness side of what I am try­ing to do, but I really would like to write more about the cre­ative process.

I have stuff that wants to get out.  It has to be expressed.  I have a need to do this thing.  It is very frus­trat­ing not to be able to do it and I have been frus­trated a very long time.  I was a good stu­dent, but I was always doo­dling in class.  I don’t doo­dle much any­more as my cre­ative time is very lim­ited these days.  I think I would like to doo­dle again.

The Ran­dom Reverie part of the blog is for peo­ple who have the same need as me, the need to cre­ate.  It’s a very spe­cial brand of insan­ity.   I have to be insane to want to keep doing some­thing like this after hav­ing my pegs knocked out from under me again and again.

These days when I decide to art, I art; I don’t want to lose the spirit of the thing before it gets done.  I have to focus intensely as my time is lim­ited.  Just like many of you I also have to keep doing the stuff that keeps the roof over my head, the lights on, food in my belly, food in my crit­ters’ bel­lies etc. The way I accom­plish my goal is through my process.

I usu­ally do some prepa­ra­tions before I paint as I gen­er­ally need to know where my paint­ing is going before I lay brush to can­vas, but I do not spend so much time prepar­ing that I don’t get to the can­vas.  Recently I built a skele­ton of a dragon out of pipe clean­ers so I could fig­ure out how the dragon would work. I did sev­eral sketches then loaded the result into Pho­to­Shop to do my lay­out and fool with the col­ors.  I’ve cre­ated trans­par­ent over­lays so I can see how the lay­out is inter­act­ing with the Golden Mean and the the­o­ret­i­cal ideal loca­tions of focal point.  A lot of times it is spot on, but some­times I break the rules.  Once I start paint­ing it usu­ally goes pretty fast.  That is my process, but it may not be yours.  I know sev­eral other artist’s whose tech­nique for get­ting it done is the com­plete oppo­site of mine; maybe they flip on their favorite tunes, spend some time select­ing their pal­let then let the brush and the paint on the can­vas tell them where they are going, let the his­tory develop real-time.  (Some­times I do it that way too.) The point: You have to have a process for get­ting it done, a cre­ative work ethic if you will.  I can’t tell you what that process will be as you need to fig­ure it out for your­self.  If you do not have the will to fin­ish what you start, if you do not have a process that leads to com­pleted work, then you prob­a­bly will not get it done.  Your process may change over time. Your process may vary.  The goal is to get it done, get it out, com­plete the thought of the moment and set if free.

Focus serves another pur­pose as well.  When you are con­cen­trat­ing on your art, you are not indif­fer­ent, you are set­ting your cre­ative ani­mal free.  It doesn’t mat­ter what you pro­duce, it mat­ters that you care about what you syn­the­size.  Some artists do pure abstracts while oth­ers do photo-realistic still-life, some artists paint por­traits while oth­ers paint big-eyed char­ac­tures, some artists paint cityscapes while oth­ers do pas­toral scenes, some artists paint ani­mals while oth­ers paint flow­ers, some artist don’t paint at all, they do car­toons, sculp­ture, jew­elry, quilts.  No mat­ter what the result, there will be those who like it. But there will be  those who can’t stand it; they are not your con­cern.  Your con­cern con­vey­ing your pas­sion to your audi­ence.  If you don’t enjoy it, if it is just a job, I think it will show.  If you do not feel enthu­si­as­tic about what you are doing, I think that the con­nois­seurs of your sub­ject mat­ter will be able to tell.  Art must come from the heart.

PS.  As you cre­ate, you may be tempted to go fool with some­thing that you pre­vi­ously com­pleted.  I would say, “Don’t do that!”  The com­pleted thing is a com­pleted thought at that moment.  If you want to change some­thing, start a brand new thought.  Before you know it you may have a series.  You can learn a lot about your process while you explore vari­a­tions on a theme.  One thing that I have dis­cov­ered over time is that the paint­ing I like in a series, the one that I think most com­pletely expresses my thought of the moment, is very sel­dom the one that is the most pop­u­lar with my patrons.  Imag­ine if I had painted it over  in an attempt to per­fect my thought instead of let­ting it be; I would never find that my col­lec­tors had dif­fer­ent ideas.

Yours in art — Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!