Creative Cogitation

Howdy My Fans.  Going to try giv­ing stuff away to find collectors-specifically 8x10 inch prints mat­ted to 11x14 inches.  Haven’t worked out the details yet.  Also think­ing of set­ting up stuff on FineArtAmerica.com as well.  Stay tuned.

Mean­while on of my MonOrchid Bunch (MOB) bud­dies, Kris­tine Bram­billa, took up roller derby in the guise of Raven’s Night.  This even­tu­ally leads her to start up Seven13Sk8, a roller derby proshop, in down­town Phoenix AZ.  Appar­ently the alter­na­tives are either quite a drive from the cen­ter of town, or online/mail order.  As with all such things, it is tak­ing longer than expected to get going and so she decided to throw open her doors to her fel­low MOB-sters.

I check out the space on First Fri­day last week.  It is a small­ish space, but more than enough room for 10 artists with mod­est sized pieces.  She has painted the walls black with glitter.

While I was there, I got to meet her busi­ness part­ners. One is another Roller Derby gal, Gracy Dah­mer AKA Amanda Queen, and the other is Free­dom Crump.  In addi­tion sev­eral other roller derby girls were there at the shops grand open­ing and they are a hoot.  After a few hours down­town with these lovely ladies,  I found myself turn­ing to thoughts of the upcom­ing show, binary birds, and roller derby.  The prod­uct is a dig­i­tal paint­ing, pic­tured below.

Unti­tled digia­rt­work by Jake Beck­man — Name This Paint­ing contest

You will notice there is no binary in the paint­ing yet.  That is because it is part of a Name This Paint­ing Con­test I decided to have.  The win­ner gets an 8x10 print of the paint­ing.  Since this work is dig­i­tal art, the print is con­sid­ered “Orig­i­nal Art” because the printed image is its final form, much like a photograph.

Any­way, this will be the 6th show for the MOB (we renamed our­selves the Mob, after the MonOrchid Mys­tery Gallery shut down) and this is our first gath­er­ing in 3 years.  I am very excited about the prospect.  The show will begin on Novem­ber 26th and runs through Decem­ber 10. The shop is slated to have hours, Tues­day through Sun­day and of course part of the sales of any art­work go to the shop.

So check out the Name This Paint­ing Con­test –maybe you  will win, and I hope to see you at the Mob’s reunion artshow in down­town Phoenix, AZ.

Jake
Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!
The artist has fed­er­ally copy­righted all art­work in this blog. The artist retains all repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights. You may not copy, re-distribute, imi­tate, derive OR oth­er­wise use this con­tent in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.

Sorry to take this long to post some­thing new.  Back to back art mar­kets wiped me out.  I have com­pleted sev­eral paint­ings in the interim, and even wrote a cou­ple of draft posts about a week ago.  Then I got busy. Oops. It hap­pens.  Even though Con­spir­acy The­ory is not yet done, I did wan­der into another social media topic — online gam­ing, which turns out to be a very rich source of mate­r­ial indeed.

Avatar, I’ve always thought it was kind of a cool word back when it was only men­tioned in con­junc­tion with earthly incar­na­tions of Vishnu. Then I read a novel by Poul Ander­son, called The Avatar,  which intro­duced me to an alter­nate def­i­n­i­tion, the  embod­i­ment of a principal.

I can’t remem­ber when the word came to refer to the image that is the “embod­i­ment” of online per­sona, but in gen­eral I feel many avatars are the quin­tes­sence of our aspi­ra­tions rather than who we really are.  Avatars can be the pic­ture of a per­son 20 min­utes ago, or 20 years ago, like the news­pa­per columnist’s pic­ture that never ages.  They can be a photo from a day that a per­son just hap­pened to look par­tic­u­larly good.  They can be pic­tures of objects of desire. They can be the image of the moment;  some peo­ple change their avatar as often as they change their socks.  But like all things in cyber­space they are not nec­es­sar­ily a reflec­tion of reality.

Avatar by Jake Beck­man. A yel­low house finch uses a fierce, god­like scream­ing rap­tor as his avatar.

In the con­text of RPG, avatars gen­er­ally are illu­sory.  Even if a scrawny social mis­fit in real-life can be project as the unbeat­able war­rior, or irre­sistible sor­cer­ess. And so  a house finch could take on a fiercely divine rap­tor as his avatar.

Update: Some­one sug­gest I put the size of the paint­ings in my blogs. Details of this work are avail­able on the Avatar Art Page

What avatars do you use and why? Do they bear any resem­blance to real­ity or are they firmly lodged in fan­tasy? Do you think avatars should rep­re­sent the true self ? Or are they just good fun?

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.