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.
