Creative Cogitation

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.

I met Jonathan Man­ning, @BladeTheArtist, via Twit­ter. He imme­di­ately embraced the idea of doing an inter­view. I am excited because Jonathan pro­motes his art using online video. He is self-described techy and his entire artis­tic jour­ney is online. Jonathan’s answers reflect a cer­tain play­ful out­look on life. I hope you enjoy his art as well as find­ing out more about this artist who has embraced com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nol­ogy in such an inter­est­ing way. (more…)

Howdy Sport Fans,

Update: I must have been chan­nel­ing same vibe as Paul, the Octo­pus from Ober­hausen Ger­many, when I made this paint­ing, chos­ing red vuvuze­las and opt­ing for a yel­low tweety. The octo­pus appar­ently was pre­dict­ing win­ners of the var­i­ous soc­cer matches and ulti­mately selected Spain in the world cup. Me, I just started a paint­ing in red and yel­low about 3 weeks ago. Any­way, Spain won in OT or some­thing like that.

This Binary Bird paint­ing is because of you.  For weeks Vuvuzela was listed as one of the top 10 trend words on places like Twitter.com, all because the annoy­ing lit­tle horns were omnipresent at the 2010 Foot­ball World Cup in South Africa-or so I have been told. Vuvuzela has been suplanted by LaBron James and assorted Harry Pot­ter char­ac­ters, but by now you’d have to be liv­ing in a cave not to know a) the Soc­cer Cham­pi­onships are going on b) what a vuvuzela is because of a).

Nat­u­rally I fol­lowed the United States team (or at least DH did)  until they fell out of contention.  Today, when I went to pick up my lamp from fel­low artist, JA Jure, she told me all about some Span­ish guy with a lot of hair (Car­les Puyol?) making a spec­tac­u­lar play against the German’s yes­ter­day to advance Spain to the final.  Me I don’t watch so I can’t say for sure. I do not have the sports gene.  How­ever, I do love pop cul­ture and right now Soc­cer is pop and there­fore Binary Birds fair game. 

Back to Vuvuzelas-since it was the word of the day for so long, I, like the rest of the con­nected world had to find out what the heck that was, given that a do not actu­ally watch soc­cer, and of course why every­one was talk­ing about vuvuze­las. Imme­di­ately a Binary Bird image sprang to mind. I have finally fin­ished paint­ing it before the World Cup tour­na­ment ends, so with­out fur­ther ado, I reveal Vuvuze­las.

Vuvuze­las, by Jake Beck­man. A yel­low canary Soc­cer fan rolls a foot­ball against a back­drop of red vuvuzela horns.

The paint­ing fea­tures my trade­mark yel­low tweetie, with a foot­ball, and a back­ground of red vuvuze­las.  The binary across the bot­tom trans­lates as “Vuvuze­las.”   Ini­tially I though about mak­ing the horns assorted col­ors (like red, white and blue ) but it made for a very busy pic­ture. I chose red because I like the color and for no other rea­son.  The fact that Spain’s jer­seys are that color is purely coin­ci­den­tal.  I am sure sev­eral other teams sport that color as well.  As for the tweetie I think he is con­vey­ing, “Hell Yeah!” just fine. 

If you would like to find out more about Vuvuze­las or per­haps buy it, check it out on its page on this web­site.  I hope you like my Foot­ball inspired Binary Bird. 

  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.

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.