Creative Cogitation

One of my favorite fables is the one of the Scor­pion and the Frog. It basi­cally says some will be true to their nature no mat­ter how they are treated or what the con­se­quences are.   Vari­a­tions of the story swap a youth, man, kan­ga­roo or tur­tle in place of the frog, and/or a snake in the place of the scor­pion.  The tale? A scor­pion and a frog are at the shores of a river, when the scor­pion asks the frog to ferry him across the water. The frog is afraid the scor­pion will sting him, but the scor­pion assures him that he will not and they begin the jour­ney across river. In the mid­dle of the river the scor­pion stings the frog, and as the frog founders in the water he asks the scor­pion, “Why? Now we will both drown.” and the scor­pion sim­ply replies, “I am a scorpion.”

So the story came up in con­ver­sa­tion sev­eral times in one day and being true to my nature as an artist I got a cou­ple of ideas.  Aimee Davi­son, @onehundredjobs on twit­ter, asked, “Why don’t you paint it?” and so I did.

The first ver­sion, The Scor­pion & The Frog, is rather literal.

The Scor­pion & The Frog 14 x 11 inch acrylic paint­ing on water­color paper by Phoenix, AZ artist, Jake Beckman

There is a golden spi­ral in the back­ground, which coin­cides with the tip of the scorpion’s curl stinger.

One of my online art bud­dies, Dave Con­rey, told me on Face­book that he has a tat­too of a scor­pion on his back ref­er­enc­ing this fable.  As for me I think doing a paint­ing or two is enough.

The sec­ond ver­sion, Scor­pi­ons & Frogs, is a lit­tle more abstract.

Scor­pi­ons & Frogs, 14 x 11 inch acrylic on water­color paper, by Phoenix AZ Artist Jake Beckman

The pat­tern is a Pen­rose Sun, it is a tiling based on 2 tiles, in this case a scor­pion tile & a frog tile.  I have left two tiles blank.  One is pre­sum­ably from the escaped scor­pion in the image and it is up to the viewer to won­der where the frog got off to.

Both works are for sale.  Make me an offer.  I hope you like them. 

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.

Work­ing on the Social Media thing.  Started a Face­Book fan page, AKA­Jake if you are inter­ested.  Become a fan!

I have no idea what to do with this fan page yet.  Tomor­row evening I am sup­posed to have an “Intro to Face­Book” class — I am hop­ing to walk out of there a bit more clued in.

For exam­ple I really would like to have a snip­pet of my blogs appear in other places with a link, but I have no idea how to set that up.  I did find my RSS feed address so at least I can link that.

Of course I have my “real job” to do and I am find­ing it had to make a bal­ance and still move for­ward with inten­tion.  Still I must endeavor.  2010 will be the “Year of Mar­ket­ing” for me because I have put it off too long and really need to fig­ure it all out. Art is a real job too.

Any­way, I have about a mil­lion projects.  OK it is actu­ally less than that, but I stoop to hyper­bole because some­times it feels like that.  Def­i­nitely got a few gators nib­bling on my butt and the bosses just called down that the swamp drain­ing project is on hold.    One of those alli­ga­tors is “the estab­lish a dis­tinc­tive style and / or the­matic ref­er­ence to make myself rec­og­niz­able as an artist”-gator. Once I have this con­sis­tent style I will build a body of work based on that… and mar­ket it of course.

That is the bat­tle plan.What is it they say about bat­tle plans? Oh yeah, the don’t tend to sur­vive first con­tact with the enemy.

Toward that end I painted some­thing last Fri­day; I already have a bunch of vari­a­tions on the theme in my head.  I like it of course, but then again I tend to like all of my art more or less, but some­body else liked it too.  It has already flown away to live in Wisconsin.

Bird on a Wire, rep­re­sen­ta­tional abstract by Jake

The ASCII Binary reads Twitter.com tweet. You can tell where my head is at. What do you think?

Alter­na­tively, got any Face­Book Fan page or other social media tips? Love to hear from you.

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.