Creative Cogitation

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.

OK tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties had me down for a while. My 2-year old lap­top started shut­ting down ran­domly.  It would appear to be an over heat­ing issue with the moth­er­board.  Any­way, I had to pur­chase a new lap­top and migrate over to it, right at the end of tax sea­son (my day job) and just before some friends blew into to town.  Need­less to say, I barely got the new machine up and run­ning before I dis­ap­peared to the toolies with my guests (no cell ser­vice or inter­net).   My apologies. Still work­ing the bugs out even now, but I think I am back up to speed for the most part now. 

So I get back online and find over 100 spam com­ments, many with links to sites that really have noth­ing to do with a given subject. A lot of the spam just says some­thing generic like, “thx for the post,” but at least one was insult­ing (as if that is going to get them past my mod­er­a­tion).  Many are absolute gib­ber­ish, with ran­dom let­ters for their user id, and ran­dom words with tons of links.  After weed­ing through them I was left with a few com­ments that might be some­thing but, which are too vague to deter­mine for sure. 

After going through all that I went to see what I had hang­ing around in my drafts folder and found this one.  This next paint­ing debuted at the Sun­nys­lope art­walk where it was well received.  Again the color gamut of the pho­to­graph really does not do jus­tice to the real thing, but you should be able to get at least a sense of what it might look like.  Of course see­ing it in per­son it always better. 

When I did Born of Fire,  I was very happy with the result, but I was aim­ing for some­thing a lit­tle more fluid and abstract and less con­crete than that paint­ing turned out. I revis­ited the con­cept this time try­ing to keep it looser.  I still have not reached for what I am aim­ing for, so there will prob­a­bly be a few more incar­na­tions before the vision in my mind’s eye is met.

Infer­nal Instinct. A dragon dances in vol­canic fire.

For me fire drag­ons and fire­birds kind of merge.  My drag­ons do tend to have bird-like ele­ments.  So if you ask me if this is a Phoenix or a Dragon, the answer is, yes. 

In the west­ern lex­i­con a dragon is an evil, war­like thing per­haps drawn from the ser­pent in the gar­den of Eden, where as the Phoenix, because of its immor­tal­ity & rebirth has been asso­ci­ated with the res­ur­rec­tion of Christ. 

Of course drag­ons sym­bol­ize gen­er­ally pos­i­tive attrib­utes in Asian cul­tures; drag­ons have power over water, floods and rain and can sym­bol­ize hid­den wisdom. 

One of my thoughts: The ser­pent in the gar­den of Eden gave mankind the gift of knowl­edge — so was the ser­pent really evil? Is our myth­i­cal ser­pent all that dif­fer­ent from the ori­en­tal ones? To me drag­ons seem more like Prometheus, giv­ing the gift of fire to man. 

The world over drag­ons do seem to sym­bol­ize a pro­tec­tive power-even in west­ern mythol­ogy they were guardians of great treasure.

So my take on drag­ons is that they are divine crea­tures with gen­er­ally pos­i­tive attributes.  I espe­cially like the idea that they can fly.

As for fire­birds, Phoenix were gen­er­ally con­sid­ered benev­o­lent, although some­times haz­ardous to mankind. Many leg­ends speak to the note only the glory of its plumage but also the beauty of its song.  In Chi­nese mythol­ogy, some­times the Phoenix is con­sider the fem­i­nine coun­ter­part to the mas­cu­line dragon, therefore my thought that they are dif­fer­ent faces to the same thing is not nec­es­sar­ily unheard of.  

Finally I note that in evo­lu­tion­ary terms, birds arose from rep­tiles at some point in the remote past, a final con­nec­tion between dragon and bird. 

For more details about Infer­nal Instinct see  its art page at AKAJake.com.

Any com­ments? Do you think drag­ons and phoenix have sim­i­lar qualities?  Do you think of them as good, evil, or neu­tral? I am curi­ous as to what oth­ers think about this subject. 

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.

This week­end, now nearly over is the big annual down­town Phoenix Art Show called Art Detour now in its 22 year.  The event kicks off with First Fri­days, which has become the tail wag­ging the dog so to speak.  Although Art Detour was the big event for many years, the monthly party called First Fri­day receives a lot more atten­dance on the whole these days. I had planned to go to First Fri­day but just couldn’t make myself join the mad­house that event has become. It really doesn’t seem to be about art, but more about the party, which is fine — but not nec­es­sar­ily some­thing I auto­mat­i­cally think is a great idea on any given day.  But I still felt like I had to make it down­town at least once to see the peo­ple who rou­tinely sup­port me at the local art shows I do.  So I force myself to be a social ani­mal and kicked myself out of my studio.

It was good to inter­sect with sev­eral peo­ple I had not seen in a while, but while the stu­dios were open I think many artists/owners were absent & recu­per­at­ing from the night before.  It was a quiet day to be about, but it was a clear-blue-sky brag­ging weather day in Phoenix AZ.   Gor­geous, absolutely gor­geous.  So, I didn’t just go to the stu­dios but did a gen­eral walk­a­bout in the down­town Phoenix area to inves­ti­gate how the Con­ven­tion Cen­ter remodel went, to see how the new ASU down­town cam­pus came together and the over­all progress of gen­tri­fi­ca­tion.  It appears gen­tri­fi­ca­tion was well under­way but the reces­sion has def­i­nitely halted things for now.  As for the art stu­dios, some that were open before are closed now, some have changed hands, some have moved, and maybe there are a few new kids on the block as well.  The Art Detour Head Quar­ters was listed at the Phoenix Cen­ter for the Arts so I was expect­ing a pretty decent dis­play there; in the old days it had a sam­ple of art from all the par­tic­i­pat­ing gal­leries. Unfor­tu­nately this year it was lit­er­ally a trol­ley stop with a few brochures — no art that I could see.  My over­all impres­sion of Art Detour on Sat­ur­day was under­whelmed. Any­way I took lots of pic­tures and edited them when I got home so you can check them out here if you like.

In the last few min­utes I have receive a cou­ple of tweets regard­ing this final day of Art Detour 22 1) Bring an Umbrella and 2) Greg Esser is pro­mot­ing his new ven­ture at West­wind Stu­dios, 16th Street and Cypress. I didn’t make it over to West­wind yes­ter­day; I wish Greg all the best.

So onto new art. While I was work­ing on 2nd Story Job, which will be posted next, I did not have a sec­ond paint­ing to par­al­lel process in mind.  I got a piece of water color paper out, gesso-ed it on both sides then thought­fully dripped, drooled and spat­tered paint on it while I waited for lay­ers of paint to dry on 2nd Story Job.

As 2nd Story Job neared com­ple­tion the abstract aux­il­iary work looked like this.

Born of Fire under­paint­ing (by Jake Beckman)

The color gamut of this pic­ture appears a lit­tle skewed toward the blue, and the range of the photo does not do the under-painting/background jus­tice, but I think you can get an idea of how it looked.

I have been on a major bird kick for years and I often default to some­thing related to that — in this case a bird-like dragon.  It took me a few min­utes to sketch the crit­ter out on to my can­vas.    I did a glaze of man­ganese blue to fill in the bird-like dragon’s body for no other rea­son than I had a big glob of it on my wet pal­let left over from pre­vi­ous Social Media Bird paint­ings and I intended to make the dragon dark.   I did not antic­i­pate I would love the effect of the under-painting show­ing through, but I did.   I very care­fully applied glazes of black to the ser­pent to define its struc­ture while retain­ing as much of the trans­parency as was possible.

Detail of Born of Fire by Jake Beck­man show­ing the under­paint­ing revealed through the glaze

Born of Fire, by Jake Beck­man, A dragon gazes sky­ward, obliv­i­ous to the fiery inferno that sur­rounds it.

So this results from me not hav­ing a plan when I start paint­ing. What do you think?

Update: Details about Born of Fire, 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.