Creative Cogitation

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.