Creative Cogitation

I planned on tak­ing the week­end off to paint.  I got on my com­puter, Saturday, and just spend the whole day there. I had eight paint­ings I needed to get on my web­site com­plete with all the lovely pic­tures, most of PopCult Gallery Three got uploaded.   Then I needed to start get­ting the word out there via social media, post­ing pic­tures on my Face­book fan­page which auto­mat­i­cally goes to var­i­ous places.  Once that was done I was finally able to post a blog about two of the new pieces and deep link on a cou­ple of other posts that are in the que wait­ing their turn.

On the upside I started five, zero and a paint­ing called Vuvuze­las in honor of all that soc­cer stuff I keep hear­ing about; I don’t have the sports gene so I was nit watch­ing the matches. What that means is that I am still on track with respect to a paint­ing a day for the first week, assum­ing I fin­ish them by tomor­row  You should hear me right now… I am chuck­ing at the unre­al­is­tic dead­line I just set myself. In addi­tion to this blog I want to write a bit about the other two paint­ings I uploaded so I can do some deep link­ing to them too.

I am find­ing social media is tak­ing a lot of time.  I am try­ing to work in some more Linkedin and today I hit a bunch of new Face­book friends with a request to become a fan of my Fan­page.  While I was at it I uploaded the 8 new paint­ings to the photo album on my fan page and changed my avatars on my fan­page and Face­book page all the while chat­ting away via Tweet­Deck.  Oh my. 

I keep hear­ing that I need to auto­mate newslet­ter sign up.  I have a newslet­ter — it tends to go out when I am have a show, but right now it’s too hot locally so no email newslet­ter, so I won­der what am I going to put in a newslet­ter.  Then there is affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing, mon­e­tiz­ing the site, etc. etc. - those are just words to me right now — I don’t know what they mean.  Any­way while I was blog­ging I fig­ured out how to put links to Twit­ter, my Face­book fan­page, Linkedin and MySpace etc at the top of my art blog.  When I set up the blog that idea never occured to me, now of course it’s, “Like Duh…”

By the time this post gets done I will have five and zero done, but will they be uploaded to my web­site, I am mak­ing heavy sigh­ing noises even as I think about it. 

five, by Jake Beck­man. Five yel­low canaries cavort about an orange num­ber 5. The back­ground is an abstract of warm pur­ple bub­bles. The binary reads “five” and “5”.

So this is five, finally posted in this blog, and zero is below.  Vuvuze­las got its own blog on the eve of the World Cup final.  I had to post it before the end.  It was coin­ci­den­tally painted in the col­ors of the win­ning coun­tries flag-red vuvuze­las and a bright yel­low canary (excuse me, gold canary) .

zero, by Jake Beck­man. An out­line of a canary, rep­re­sent­ing the canary null set, flies before a gilt num­ber 0.

OK I guess by now you know what 6, 7, 8 and 9 will look like.  But zero was a puz­zle for me until I came up with my “null set” canary.   I am enjoy­ing the minia­ture abstract back­grounds more too.  As much as I love paint­ing my big ones, some of my effects take a long time and a long time to dry.  Work­ing on this scale def­i­nitely speeds things up. 

As I write this blog on day five (pic­tures to be inserted later) I real­ize time-management is def­i­nitely and issue for me.  Got any tips? 

Also all this art is for sale.  Mama needs some more can­vases.  Want to buy some? Check out five and zero’s pages 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.

On June 22 I decide to attempt 100 paint­ings in 100 days. I don’t know if I can even do this.  Its a daunt­ing task to con­tem­plate, but I am going to give it a try.  Why? I watched Julia & Julia and it gave me this ridicu­lous idea.  Sure I have heard about it before as a method to develop a dis­tinc­tive style. The the­ory is when you have to crank it out, your style will happen. 

There are peri­ods of time when my pro­duc­tiv­ity goes through the roof, but there are lulls, some­times long ones where I let my life get in the way of my pas­sion.  I also intend to blog about it.  Short blogs prob­a­bly, but blog­ging about it is going to be part of this exer­cise.  I have a hard time talk­ing about my art, it just doesn’t flow eas­ily.  I also want to write bet­ter blogs and there is no sub­sti­tute for, well, just doing it.  I am prob­a­bly going to be exper­i­ment­ing with the plug-ins and what not as I attempt to get more advice on pre­sent­ing the blog, so this will involve a lot of blog­ging too. Jeepers. 

Day 1.  I fin­ished up 2 paint­ings that had been lay­ing around.  One was very nearly done.  The sec­ond I thought was fin­ished, but when I went to pho­to­graph it I hated it and had to edit it sub­stan­tially.  So the edit­ing job became the the first paint­ing in 100 paint­ings in 100 days. I fin­ished two for day 1 and I started a sec­ond and a third paint­ing.  I had orig­i­nally painted one and decided to paint two with­out really know­ing where I was going with this idea. 

two by jake beck­man, two canaries perched with the num­ber 2, and ASCII binary of two & 2

As usual, the binary code has every­thing to do with the paint­ing, spelling out two and 2 in ASCII binary. 

Day 2.  three and four were barely started yes­ter­day, I had got beyond a sketch, but not by much, however they are fin­ished today. Of course I have to pho­to­graph them etc now.  Since these are all 6x8 inch paint­ings I have decided they are going to be arranged like a phone key­pad and be grouped that way; I have to do 5,6,7,8,9,0 #, *, and maybe answer, hangup and do it but­ton too.  So I have the idea for the next 8–11 paint­ings, which will give me time to con­tem­plate what comes after the cell phone num­ber pad. 

I don’t know what you all think about this idea, but Julia’s mother’s com­ment about, “Why,” espe­cially when I am so busy with other things does come to mind.  So if any of you all have ever under­taken a self-commited pro­gram for only rea­sons you can under­stand I’d like what­ever advice you might chip in or what ever gen­eral com­ments come to mind as I embrace this insanity. 

If you’d like to find out more about one and two or per­haps buy them please check out their pages at AKAJake.com, one and two. 

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.