Creative Cogitation

When I first started doing art all those years ago I drew pic­tures.  Even when I painted I more or less drew pic­tures.  But one day I became a painter, and my first foray into the paint­ing realm was using water col­ors.  You can get all kinds of nifty effects using water color but because of their trans­par­ent nature once you do some­thing you are kind of stuck with it.  Sure you can do lifts, etc, but I ulti­mately tran­si­tioned into acrylic paint because it dried fast, was opaque and allowed me to do “water­color” the way I wanted to do it.  How­ever there are a few things that acrylic paint does not lend itself well to that water­color did bril­liantly — it did not do the wet on wet fuzzy blend and it really did not run very well.

How­ever things have changed in the land of acrylic paints.  More medi­ums and types of paint are now avail­able than ever before.

Recently I spend a decent chunk of change on some new art sup­plies, Golden Fluid Acrylics.  I pur­chased 18 bot­tles of paint and some flow released for about $300. Some of you out there are prob­a­bly think­ing, “Wow that is a lot of money for that paint.  I can pick up my Series 7 for a lot less than that.”  I have used Series 7 and other stu­dent grade paints.  They tend to have a much lower pig­ment load so it lim­its what you can do with them. I find using pro­fes­sional paints and medi­ums to be fairly cost effec­tive, and a lot more versatile-I can’t go back to using cheap paint hav­ing expe­ri­enced using the good stuff. I also pur­chased locally instead of online, which prob­a­bly could have saved me some coin, but I have another phi­los­o­phy about sup­port­ing local retail­ers when I can.

Had to show an image of my new art sup­plies. We artists get excited about things like that-Jake Beckman

Any­way, the rea­son I did this pur­chase is because I wanted to play with runny paint.  As I move into the abstract realm with my art I felt a bit lim­ited in the effects I could achieve using my heavy bod­ied paints and medi­ums.  Some­times I like splat­ter­ing, drip­ping and runny paint.  Of course I started play­ing with them right away.  So far I have deter­mine if you use the flow release as directed, you do indeed get paint that is as watery as you want it to be.  It splat­ters well out of a mist­ing bottle.

One way I have been using the flow release is to make a 10 water to 1 flow release mix in a mist­ing bot­tle then spray it onto the wet paint on the can­vas.  Gives you a bit more con­trol over fuzzy blend­ing effects.

I have also mixed paint and flow release in a small cup (I got some dis­posi­ble 2.5 oz plas­tic cups at a restau­rant sup­ply to use for mix­ing small quan­ti­ties of this or that) and then drooled it on a ver­ti­cal can­vas.  Very nice.

If you want to drip paint ala Jack­son Pol­lock, thin­ning down tar gel & paint mix in a squeeze bot­tle cre­ates a thicker stringier paint strand.

The fluid acrylics have nice high pig­ment load & a slightly vis­cous con­sis­tency. They paint smoothly. Because of the pig­ment load you can use water as a thin­ner with­out hav­ing the color break.

In the abstract paint­ing Solar Flare I made use of the spray­ing flow release and water on wet paint & drool­ing paint tech­niques I just describe to cre­ate some nice ran­dom pat­terns on my painting. 

After I decided it was drooled on enough, I splat­tered it with orange paint, then used a fine brush to pick out edge detail I liked.  Some­time the idea of doing the con­cen­tric cir­cles occurred to me, and then I worked it over to unify the paint­ing better.

Solar Flare, abstract paint­ing 11 inch x14 inch in red, yel­low, orange and brown acrylic paint on water­color paper by Jake Beckman

I hope you like it.  Solar Flare is painted on a sheet of 11x14 inch cold press water color paper, which was painted on both sides with gesso before apply­ing the acrylic paint.  Solar Flare is for sale, make me an offer.

Yours in Art

Jake, Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

The artist has fed­er­ally copy­righted all the art­work in this blog. The artist retains all repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights. You may not copy, re-distribute, imi­tate, derive OR oth­er­wise use these images in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.

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.

Ever since I started doing PopCult paint­ings I have wanted to do some­thing inspired by Andy Warhol.  But I have never been one to just copy some­thing.  The germ of the idea behind Social Net­work­ing! came to me as soon as I started doing the Binary Birds, but it did not erupt as a full blown con­cept until this weekend.

Social Net­work­ing! by Jake Beck­man. Four brightly-colored canaries socially net­work form their own squares. The ASCII Binary back­ground reads, “Social Networking!.”

Call to action: Buy Social Net­work­ing.  Mama needs new canvases. 

I looked over some of Andy Warhol’s work, let­ting the vibe flow through me, ana­lyz­ing it in an abstract way. The iconic Andy Warhol image was the Marylin Mon­roe rep­e­ti­tion, there­fore I opted to embrace some part of this con­cept and do a four square Binary Birds paint­ing.  Andy Warhol appears to have loved the color red (so do I), so I decided there would be  a lot of red in the paint­ing. Finally I adopted the out­ra­geous color vari­a­tion that appeared in those images.  Ini­tially I enter­tained the notion of repeat­ing my own icon, the canary, in the boxes, but there the my anal­ogy and Andy’s anal­ogy parted ways.

My tweet­ies rep­re­sent ordi­nary peo­ple, not famous peo­ple who would be rec­og­niz­able at a glance.  My canaries had to be indi­vid­u­als. I departed from absolute repetition.

From there the con­cept moved into the sketch phase.  Warn­ing, some quasi-technical stuff ahead.

 Hav­ing already com­pleted many Binary Birds paint­ings with canaries, I just rounded up 4 of my favorite canary sketches, which had been scanned and saved to my com­puter.  I required an angel-winged fly­ing one of course.  I liked the one where the bird is hang­ing off a ver­ti­cal wall.  For what­ever rea­son I like the one I call the “side­ways singer,” as it looks like an Egypt­ian glyph to me.  Finally I set­tled on a perched canary with a long flow­ing tail for the fourth bird-I kind of like the idea of hav­ing its tail invade the next square.

I moved these into a new Pho­to­shop doc­u­ment and began mess­ing around with the col­ors. If you have sev­eral ele­ments you need to play around with Pho­to­shop is great for that.  Its also superb for color lay­out as well, which is pri­mar­ily how I used it in this instance.  At first I thought I would have four solid boxes, but that turned out to be bor­ing.  I recalled Andy Warhol did a rep­e­ti­tion with a panda bear toy that had lit­tle frames around the image so I tried that.  So the frames are shades of red: Pink, Brick Red and Cad­mium Red.  I opted for red, light blue, yel­low and light green as the col­ors for my vari­a­tions.  The canary in a given square picks up the color of the back­ground in the square counter-clockwise from it, and the eyes, feet and beak pick up the color of the square kitty-corner to it.  I don’t know how Andy Picked is color vari­a­tions, but the idea of using a pat­tern appealed to me-I like to cre­ate pat­terns, it is just the way my brain is wired. In my mind all four images are linked in a closed loop with one another via color.

Mov­ing on to the binary…

The phrase “Social Net­work­ing” has 17 char­ac­ters and 17 is a prime num­ber.  There is no way to break it down into any­thing other than one and sev­en­teen.  I wanted an edge to edge binary pat­tern in the back­ground.  It occurred to me if I added punc­tu­a­tion I would have 18 char­ac­ters times 8 bits per ASCII binary char­ac­ter, or 144 char­ac­ters, which  would form a per­fect 12 x12 square of ones and zeros.  Social Net­work­ing became Social Net­work­ing!

This paint­ing is part of the 100 Paint­ings thing, but I am drop­ping 100 Days part as it was no where near a real­is­tic goal.  Today is Day 52 and I have com­pleted 18 paint­ings.  I accept that life hap­pens and it has been hap­pen­ing to me a lot lately.  At my cur­rent rate of pro­duc­tion it is going to take at least 300 days to do 100 paint­ings.  That’s not to say I can’t crank out a paint­ing a day, I just do not seem to have the time to.  Also one thing I did not fac­tor in is all the post pro­duc­tion work that has to hap­pen.  This week­end I spent an entire day pho­tograph­ing, resiz­ing, label­ing and upload­ing 7 newly fin­ished works.  This morn­ing I have spend the entire time on just one piece.  This exer­cise is teach­ing me a great deal about how much time a sin­gle small­ish paint­ing really takes-for me it is a min­i­mum of three days: Sketch day, paint day, post-production day.  Of course that does NOT take into account any time spent on mar­ket­ing the thing.  Thank good­ness I quit using oil, I’d never fin­ish any­thing.

So those are the real life artist thoughts behind Social Net­work­ing! If you would like more infor­ma­tion about the paint­ing or per­haps would like to buy it, see its page 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.

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.

A friend recently twit­tered me, “Has tech­nol­ogy pro­gressed to the point that I can live out the remain­der of my life with­out face to face con­tact?” I told him he still needed to get his car emis­sions tested in per­son.    But is does raise the ques­tion, are we head­ing for Isaac Asimov’s dystopia, Solaria?

I dunno, but I recently learned a new slang term, e-lationship.  It’s a cyber rela­tion­ship, where friends, lovers and other strangers never meet face-to-face, they just carry on vir­tu­ally, be it via Face­Book, Twit­ter, IM-ing, chat or what have you.  For years peo­ple have known that cyber cutie might be a three-hundred pound guy, an 84-year-old grandma, or a tee­nie bop­per look­ing for a thrill.  But there is the whole other level I had not con­sid­ered and that is peo­ple who really do not want to meet in per­son, but who feel ful­filled with a harem of cyber-mates.  e-lation, it’s a great punny in my opinion.

e-lation by Jake Beck­man. Two cyber-canaries stare dream­ily into each oth­ers eyes.

e-lation was a nat­ural follow-on piece for the social media birds.  I have place two canaries star­ing dream­ily into each oth­ers’ eyes-that alone should give pause for thought-after all you really can’t see the per­son on the other end of the wire.  The back­ground is mot­tled, sug­gest­ing an insub­stan­tial venue.  The birds are perched on a swirly, green, heart-shaped con­tour.  One half of the out­line is over­laid with ASCII binary which reads e-lation.

I had a great deal of fun let­ting the acrylic flow in the back­ground of this paint­ing.  There was quite a bit of splat­ter­ing, drip­ping, flow­ing and all sorts of uncon­trolled activ­ity, which con­trasted strongly with paint­ing binary on the heart out­line (that took me three tries to find a good lay­out).  I hope you like it.

What do you think of the paint­ing, or cyber rela­tion­ships, or …?

Update: Details about e-lation, 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.