Creative Cogitation

I fin­ished this paint­ing more than a month ago.  I can’t believe it has taken me that long to upload the images to my web­site and to sit down and blog about it.  As John Lennon said, “Life is what hap­pens while you are mak­ing other plans.”  So true for me too.  I found myself spend­ing sev­eral weeks deal­ing with feral cat issues, softy that I am.  Adding that one thing really put me behind on every­thing and so these paint­ings lan­guished in the obscu­rity of my studio.

But no more.  Since June 27, 2010 was a total washout on paint­ing I endeav­ored to “catch up” on my blog­ging, and my web­site main­te­nance among other things. I cranked out quite a few so I can post them later. It’s now later for this blog, enjoy.

Bridge is a spin off on iPod Tweety and iPod ads in gen­eral, but it is also a con­trast as well. Once I did iPod Tweety, one of the first things that came to mind was a per­son who con­ducts an imag­i­nary orches­tra while lis­ten­ing to a record­ing of some kind. The cock­a­too became the obvi­ous bird because of the crest. I dunno but I think of con­duc­tors as hav­ing shocks of unruly hair stick­ing up.  Con­duc­tors usu­ally wear dark suits so the bird in sil­hou­ette also tracked in my mind. 

But unlike the music behind Rock Me! clas­si­cal music has lay­ers, move­ments, changes in melody, key and other such devices that gen­er­ally imply a more com­plex arrange­ment; besides most clas­si­cal works are much longer than your aver­age pop radio tune.  With this in mind I set out to make my abstract back­ground con­vey­ing this com­plex­ity and pas­sage of time.  I chose green.  The back­ground is a very dark green, which is over­laid with bright green and then light sea green. I did sev­eral waves of color sweep­ing from the top of the can­vas to the bot­tom around the con­duc­tor bird as a melody.  I placed a series of thick bright spires behind the cock­a­too oppo­site these waves, I think of them as a deep throb­bing base­line.  Finally I painted some thin ver­ti­cals that were much lighter in color to con­vey a sprin­kling of high notes.  The top of the paint­ing is lighter in color and the bot­tom is still bright green but much darker, the waves and ver­ti­cal lines “bridge” the two zones. I also have some tex­tural ele­ments in the waves and the thick bright spires. Of course while I was paint­ing it I was not in this lit­eral “this means that mode,” I was feel­ing the music. 

Bridge, by Jake Beck­man. A crested cock­a­too con­ducts and imag­i­nary sym­phony while lis­ten­ing to its iPod. The green back­ground is an abstract rep­re­sen­ta­tion of clas­si­cal music.

That was the thought behind Bridge.  I hope you like this dif­fer­ent take on Binary Birds, iPods and music.  Any com­ments?  If you would like more details about Bridge or would like to buy it, please see its page at AKAJake.com.

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.

As I sit down to write this blog I real­ize I fin­ished Rock Me! a month ago.  I can’t believe that much time has passed before I finally got it posted on my web­site and of course do this thing.  But I guess I must push on as I really do want to paint tomor­row, oh wait it’s 2 AM which means I want to paint today!

One thing I decided to do start­ing with Rock Me! was to cre­ate a series of smaller more afford­able paint­ings.  I have heard per­son want­ing to start col­lect­ing me might want to start small and work up to a larger piece.  There is an advan­tage in these smaller works in addi­tion to afford­abil­ity to my collectors; to some extent they do go together faster, my invest­ment in mate­ri­als is a lit­tle less, and they take up less space in my stu­dio while being stored.  The down­side is, I am not used to work­ing this small, to some extent work­ing in the smaller scale with smaller brushes takes as much time as work­ing with larger brushes on a larger scale and doing abstract back­grounds on this scale is limiting. It feels odd to cre­ate non rep­re­sen­ta­tional flow of color on some­thing so tiny.  But I am endeav­or­ing to do this very thing.

I love the idea behind Rock Me! It’s a spin off the idea behind of iPod Tweety and iPod print ads in gen­eral.  My first sketches had the full body of umbrella crested cock­a­too includ­ing the spread wings.  As I fooled around with the sketch in pho­to­shop I realzed what enam­ored me most about this idea was the full head of back lit feath­ers.  I really felt like it con­veyed Rock & Roll’s energy.  The sug­ges­tion of the open beak com­pletes the image of the rock affi­cianado howl­ing and grind­ing to his or her favorite song. I decided not to zoom in any futher as it would have been too much black.  DH thinks I went too far… 

Red also seemed appro­pri­ate.  I love the energy of blood red.  And black is a very pow­er­ful color too.  As for the back­ground I just wanted it to appear splat­tered with sound, vol­umn, energy.  As I do my abstract back­grounds I real­ize I think they not only rep­re­sent emo­tion, but are accom­pa­nied by music as well.

Rock Me! by Jake Beck­man. An umbrella crested cock­a­too rocks out to iPod tunes.

I think I resem­ble this ani­mal, I am pretty much a rocker babe. I hope you like this lat­est Binary Bird as much as I do.  Rock on!

If you would like to find out more about Rock Me! or buy it, check out it’s page on my web­site. Feel free to comment-like it, hate it? 

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.

For a while I have been think­ing Social Media Birds was not the best title, and then I am talk­ing it over with some­one at the Sun­nys­lope Art­walk and the phrase Binary Birds pops out.  At least its allit­er­a­tive, so I think that is going to stick.

Tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties dis­tracted me from paint­ing, as well as the end of tax sea­son & some out of town com­pany (which was fun, but not pro­duc­tive).  Then it was imme­di­ately back to doing Spring shows, but in Phoenix AZ USA it is start­ing to get pretty hot; yes­ter­day was around 96 F & it was prob­a­bly a lot warmer on the black top. I have one more show on May 20th, then noth­ing else sched­uled until Sep­tem­ber in New York City.   Here is a pic­ture of me schmooz­ing patrons at the Val Vista Lakes Com­mu­nity Mar­ket Sat­ur­day May 8, 2010.

Jake Beck­man with patrons at the Val Vista Lakes Com­mu­nity Mar­ket May 8, 2010. Photo by Kristina Konen.

Yes, I am work­ing it.  I used to say, “My art had bet­ter speak for itself, because I stink at it.” At this last show, one patron com­mented that I com­mu­ni­cated my abstract sub­ject mat­ter very well. Even I can learn. 

I call my lat­est paint­ing iPod Tweety.  It is such an obvi­ous deriva­tion I am sur­prised it did not occur to me imme­di­ately.   I think music shar­ing is one of the fore­run­ners of social media.  Remem­ber peo­ple cre­at­ing and hand­ing out CDs of their favorite tunes?  I know some peo­ple with hun­dreds of songs on their iPods, but these days an iPod is so much more than a music player, it’s and enter­tain­ment device,but my paint­ing ref­er­ences the music usage.

iPod Tweety by Jake Beck­man. One of Jake Beckman’s sig­na­ture Binary Birds dances to tunes on its iPod.

In addi­tion to the title, iPod Tweety, which is the ASCII binary string at the extreme right, the code also reads: iTunes, eMu­sic, Rhap­sody, Nap­ster, Ama­zon, MP3, Zune, down­load, Songs from right to left and top to bot­tom.  When I debuted this work at the April Sun­sets on the Plaza a young woman was plead­ing with her par­ents to buy it, but they did not relent so it is still available-for now.

For more details about iPod Tweety see  its art page at AKAJake.com.

What do you all think? Do you like it? Hate it? Think it’s deriv­a­tive dreck or haute pop?  Inquis­i­tive minds must know.  I have two more Binary Birds in the works.  Stay tuned.

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.