Creative Cogitation

The lack of art pro­duc­tion is incred­i­bly depress­ing. What have I been doing?

I did get most of the tax class web­site up, all but 3 pages-but they are for part 3 which is not even going to be taught until Octo­ber.  I have spend 82 hours on it so far.  I also did my prepa­ra­tions for the part of the class I teach too, which is a sep­a­rate time investment.

I pur­chased an AC floor unit from Costco for 1/10 the cheap­est  bid for a new heat pump.  After it arrived I had to wait 24 hours as they deliv­ered it upside down; so much for the this-end-up markings.  The man­u­fac­turer rec­om­mend it be sit­ting upright for 24 hours before fir­ing it up. Any­way, after 24 hours I finally got to turn it on.  It was not quite as sim­ple as plug and play.  The exhaust hose that came with the unit was very short and not insu­lated either.  The power cord was also short.   The net result is I got the thing parked with great dif­fi­culty.  It’s up on cin­der blocks to help the hose reach the win­dow, and sev­eral feet from where I really wanted it (to improve air flow in the area) owing to the short power cord.  I also had to insu­late the exhaust pipe & the win­dow where the exhaust exits through as both were heat­ing up the room, right next to the AC. Now that all that is done it works fairly well, keep­ing the air dry and in between 85 (in my stu­dio) and 90 (in my office).  I’d like it to be a lit­tle cooler, but it is bet­ter than work­ing in the rain for­est by far.

Still no frames, still no travel plans for NYC.  I feel the need to start obsess­ing about that.  Fall show sea­son is loom­ing. I put in an appli­ca­tion for the Octo­ber Sun­nys­lope Art­walk already. Several peo­ple made noises about join­ing me on the NYC trip, but as the time draws closer, they have other plans.  It looks like I will be trav­el­ing solo.

the web, by Jake Beck­man. A canary sings in tree branches con­nected with gos­samer webs.

Yes­ter­day I finally got back to paint­ing and 7 of the 9 paint­ings I started 3 weeks ago got fin­ished: six, seven, eight, nine, Hash, Splat! and the web.  Today I pho­tographed them, did a bunch of Pho­to­shop work, uploaded the result to my web­site, and sched­uled posts on Daily Painters of Ari­zona. I real­ized today that I have about 20 paint­ings to reg­is­ter with Fine Art Reg­istry, but that is not a pri­or­ity at the moment.  Any­way com­plet­ing six of these paint­ings allowed me to finally com­plete the cell phone composite.

Cell Phone Key­pad Com­posit of 15 indi­vid­ual paint­ings by Jake Beckman

Tomor­row is another work­week with my day job.  I have to focus at least some time on get­ting ready for New York.  Toward that end I pur­chased sev­eral 24″ x 24″ gallery wrapped can­vases and I have some ideas already.

It feels good to finally be paint­ing again.  I was get­ting pretty crabby with­out it.

Any­way if you would like to find out more about the newly com­pleted work, or would like to buy some­thing, please check out their pages at my web­site: six, seven, eight, nine, Hash, Splat! and the web.

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.

It’s been 13 days since I last blogged.  What have I done?  Not much to be per­fectly hon­est.  I went up to Oak Creek again, this time with a raft of peo­ple includ­ing 3 kids.  It was 5 days and a lot of fun (for the most part).  I did enjoy tak­ing the lit­tle ones on this or that adven­ture like hik­ing up Munds Creek or going to the deep hole; it is nice to see the unfil­tered joy of discovery.

After 3 days the enter­tain­ment com­mit­tee started to wear out though.  Kids had to redis­cover the ancient Nin­tendo in the trailer, which was rather amus­ing, the joy of the ring game (kinda like horse­shoes), Yahtzee and other such pas­times.  Most of the adults and one child left on Sun­day after­noon, as they had to work Monday.

I got some paint­ing done but I still haven’t fin­ished any of the paint­ings I dis­cussed in my last blog.  I was really hop­ing to get more done. Silly me.  Les­son learned.  If you plan a retreat that involves non artists, you are not going to get much of a chance to paint.  I am not upset really; I did need a lit­tle sum­mer retreat and tak­ing it in 2 5-day seg­ments is bet­ter than not.  On the other hand part of me is bugged because I did *waste* this time-and I know I shouldn’t be bugged.

A group of chil­dren and adults hunt for craw­dads in Oak Creek AZ. Photo by Jake Beck­man © 2010

When I arrived back in Phoenix I dis­cov­ered my air con­di­tioner had busted again.  This time the com­pres­sor shorted out. $1445 to replace it and the AC/heater we are dis­cussing is about 45 years old.  If I fix the com­pres­sor what else is going to break? It still has sev­eral other ancient parts.  In the mean time I fired up the swamp cooler, which only pro­vides a lit­tle bit of relief as its mon­soon sea­son and the humid­ity means it just does not work well. I unloaded the van and put a few things away, but some things just got put away today-that is so unlike me.  The house is a mess.  I do not want to deal with it.

I got a few bids on new heat pumps.  Holy Cow!  Need­less to say I do not have that kind of cash lying around right now.  That was last Tues­day after­noon.  I ordered a floor unit from Costco, which is sup­posed to be deliv­ered tomorrow. That post­pones the deci­sion about what to about the busted AC indefinitely, I can han­dle that, just as soon as I feel cold air wash­ing over me again. In the mean­time it has been hot and sticky and it is very hard to get moti­vated to do any­thing.  In the heat of the day I feel like tak­ing a nap directly in front of a fan.

In my *spare* time, (ha, ha, ha) I have been work­ing on the tax class website.  The web­site is 40 or cross linked/indexed pages com­plete with Q&A and sam­ple tax returns (there are probably100  pdfs attached to these pages).  The SEE study web­site is actu­ally pretty big. I am updat­ing the infor­ma­tion to cover the 2009 tax year and there are all sorts of lit­tle bits that are spe­cific only to that year that have be located and changed from the pre­vi­ous tax year. I don’t have time to do it.  I am doing this again, why?

The same group I am doing this vol­un­teer work for asked me to take over their web­site to.  I said no.  I said no.  I said no.  I think I said no on the phone for about 3o min­utes.  Finally they heard no.  As for the tax class web, I tend to be a per­son of my word so if I say I am going to do some­thing for some­one else, I gen­er­ally do it, even if I dis­cover I have bit­ten off more than I can chew.  I am not so good at hon­or­ing those promises to myself and as I sit here writ­ing this I rec­og­nize this dis­par­ity is def­i­nitely some­thing I need to address, quickly. I have got to say no a hell of a lot more often.

So the short ver­sion is I got back, melted, did my day job, shopped for AC options, met with at least 4 HVAC guys, and have been forc­ing myself to work in the *rain for­est,* which is what I am call­ing my office right now and have not really painted in about 2 weeks.  The 100 paint­ing thing has been on hia­tus for 2 weeks and it doesn’t look like I am going to have time to pick up the thread this week either.

I have to make the bleep­ing time.  More later.

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.

Hang Up by Jake Beck­man. A Yel­low Canary pur­chase atop the tele­phone icon of an “end call” cell phone but­ton. The ASCII Binary arch­ing over the top reads “Hang Up”

So it is day 23 of 100 paint­ings in 100 days.  I have com­pleted 9 paint­ings and I have 9 oth­ers in var­i­ous stages of com­ple­tion.  With a good days work I prob­a­bly can com­plete all of them, but my life is a con­tin­u­ous jug­gling act and I don’t know when I am going to get a moment to paint again in the next sev­eral days.

I came back from my trip to Oak Creek on Day 16.  I painted all day, then packed it in and drove back to Phoenix.  I decided I’d rather start off my short work­week refreshed in the rel­a­tive cool of the Phoenix AZ morn­ing rather than fried from dri­ving back down the hill in the heat.  It was an unevent­ful trip home.  The usual stuff, my day job and all, awaited me.

In the last week I fin­ished Vuvuzela’s, five, zero, Call Me, Hang Up & Do It!, pho­tographed them and got the images up on my web­site.  I still need to reg­is­ter them with my prove­nance ser­vice.  I also blogged about Vuvuzela’s sep­a­rately since it was directly related to the 2010 Soc­cer World Cup, which wrapped up last week too.

Do It! by Jake Beck­man, a yel­low canary angle flies before the “do it” but­ton of a cell phone. The ASCII Binary reads, “Do It!”

I have found time to start 6 new pieces in addi­tion to the three 11x14-inch paint­ings I started in Oak Creek.  The three inspired by my last visit to Oak Creek are ten­ta­tively named www (or web or net I am not sure yet), MySpace and My World.  The 6 new paint­ings are all 6x8 inch ones that will fin­ish out my key pad: six, seven, eight, nine, Hash and Splat! I need to fin­ish paint­ing the Tweet­ies in 7 of these and over­lay the binary.  My World and MySpace are some­what less devel­oped at this point.

As you can see, I am falling behind-I should have 23 com­pleted and only 9 done with 9 more in the works-well short of my goal. And I still have a tax class web­site to prepare, tax class to teach, an artshow in NYC, a mess of art to frame, etc.  I haven’t even pur­chased the frames, nor have I solid­i­fied my travel plans for NYC.  OMG I am so far behind!

Breathe.

This week­end I am going back to Oak Creek canyon.  A fel­low artist JChristi wanted to camp out and I sug­gested Oak Creek as it sim­pli­fies “camp­ing” a lit­tle bit.  But unlike my last trip, this is more or less JChristi’s show, which means I am going to have to work around her sched­ule.  We are sup­posed to leave Fri­day morn­ing.  Since it is a lit­tle after mid­night Thurs­day has just started and I have many things to do before I can leave for Sedona.  I am look­ing for­ward to going back though; it is really hot here in Phoenix (112 at the air­port today, 116 in some parts of the val­ley) and it will be cooler up there.  Also being unplugged does get my cre­ative juices flow­ing.   JChristi told me to “bring my paints” so I am going to, but I am unsure how much paint­ing I will actu­ally get done.

DH is demur­ing about going with again, so our cats will have one of their peo­ple around.

Back to the sub­ject at hand. Maybe 100 paint­ings in 100 days is not a real­is­tic goal given all the other things I have going on in my life — after all I have missed my mark by 61% at this point-not count­ing the par­tially fin­ished pieces.  Embrace the real­ity.  Maybe it will be 100 paint­ings by the end of the year (at this rate-even that is push­ing it).  I don’t know, but I am going to keep at this.

In the mean­time you can cer­tainly check out the paint­ings I have com­pleted on this project, and of course if you’d like to buy one that would be lovely as well.  Enjoy.    two, three, four, five, zero, Vuvuze­las, Call Me, Do It!, Hang Up

Also the cell phone key­pad is approach­ing com­ple­tion and I really think it needs a place to be displayed-in fact I have already laid out the pieces and had a look-see for myself. It’s def­i­nitely com­ing along.  So if you know of any place that might be inter­ested in dis­play­ing it and per­haps sell­ing it, please let me know.  I’ll post the entire work some­where when its done.

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.

Photo of Oak Creek taken by Jake Beck­man on or about July4, 2010. Isn’t it beautiful?

I think I last blogged Day 5–6 of 100 paint­ings in 100 days.  In the­ory we are now at Day 13. So in the­ory I have had 7 more days to work and I con­fess I have not.  Sun­day started with the best of inten­sions, but I didn’t fin­ish any­thing.  Mon­day was back to work day and I car­ried out affairs of my other busi­ness.  Some­time this week DH inter­rupted me with a com­puter repair that sucked up a day & ½.  Wednes­day I did some book­keep­ing and deliv­ered it Thurs­day.  This week I also dealt with get­ting my AC fixed-so paint­ing, which I did do, was squeezed in 30-minute chunks of time wait­ing for this or that to hap­pen.  Another advan­tage of work­ing small-you can actu­ally *do* some­thing with a 30-minute chunk of time. 

Tra­di­tion­ally my friend Mayna, who retired after 20 years in the Marine Corps, and DH would join me on this 4^th of July vaca­tion break; we usu­ally stay a week or more.  Some friends and fam­ily have a dumpy trailer in Oak Creek canyon, with a lovely lit­tle deck hid­den in the trees next to the creek-when I say dumpy I mean it an affec­tion­ate way. It is bet­ter than “lit­er­ally” camp­ing out as there is a gas grill, a gas stove, restroom facil­i­ties and even a shower.  It also is stocked with things like sleep­ing bags, air mat­tresses, lights and lawn chairs.  Basi­cally you need to bring your enter­tain­ment, food, drink, cloth­ing, and shower sup­plies. There’s a coun­try store within walk­ing distance-their prices are high, but you pay for the con­ve­nience of being able to get ice in the wilder­ness. Oth­er­wise Sedona is a short drive away; it has all the usual accou­trements of a town.  

I usu­ally take a bunch of pic­tures, we build a dam to make a swim­ming hole, hike about and I really enjoy being in a place where there is no cell phone ser­vice what so ever. 

So this year Mayna is stick­ing to home as she is out of work and try­ing to con­serve funds.  DH, I dunno-we did dis­cuss com­ing up here-I cleared it with the friends and fam­ily, pur­chased sup­plies, the plan was com­ing together. Then he did the heel-dragging thing all day Fri­day rather than flat out say­ing he didn’t want to come. I ulti­mately decided I needed to get out of town, even if it was by myself, but owing to DH’s pro­cras­ti­na­tion, I showed up here some­time after 9 PM, well after sunset.  

For­tu­nately for me some of those friends were already up here; they fired up the elec­tric­ity and water for the trailer so I didn’t have to find those things in the dark. I really appre­ci­ated them doing that; they are in a dif­fer­ent trailer so they didn’t have to do that, but they did because they knew I would be com­ing. I also remem­bered to bring some pre­cooked chow so when I finally did get sit­u­ated I would have some­thing easy to make and eat. 

Last night I slept under the stars.  When the moon rose some idiot bird started singing wak­ing me up, but I drifted back to sleep until sun­rise when a squir­rel demol­ish a pine cone began throw­ing its orts at me.  The umbrella is up now so that won’t hap­pen anymore.

This is where I slept and painted. A “Deck in the Trees.”

 I did notice when I turned my lap­top detected 4 wire­less net­works includ­ing an unse­cured one. One I rec­og­nize as belong­ing to a per­son who lives up here year round.  I bet if I asked nicely he’d let me use it.  But I don’t want to.  Mostly I do come up here to “unplug” but it is get­ting harder and harder to do.  You prob­a­bly can find an unse­cure net­work on the top Machu Pichu these days.  Any­way, I am ignor­ing those net­works as if they do not exist-hey the sig­nals are “low,” they might cut out on me in the mid­dle of some­thing.   Cur­rently this blog is in a word doc­u­ment to be cut and pasted later.

I brought the com­puter up so I could work on a Spe­cial Enroll­ment Exam Class I am sup­posed to teach in August.  I am respon­si­ble for updat­ing a web­site full of mate­r­ial on all three parts and I teach the sec­tions on depre­ci­a­tion and basis.  So I turned the box on, dragged out the part one mate­ri­als, and find I have absolutely no desire to do it. Instead, I spent a leisurely morn­ing unwinding-made break­fast, drank tea and read half a book, The Tomb of Her­cules, by Andy McDer­mott, which is exactly the delight­ful escapist trash it sounds like.  Finally I am think­ing of doing some­thing con­struc­tive.  I am here in all this reek­ing fresh air and stink­ing nature com­plete with the full com­ple­ment of bugs and other wild­fire so I guess I should get my cre­ative juices flow­ing.  Instead of work­ing on the tax class website, I decided to blog.  And now to paint-maybe. 

A bit later.  I wan­dered down to the creek, Blackberry and Lumix in hand. There is this one tree creek­side which reminds me of a tree ent ala JRR Tolkien. Don’t know how I can turn that into a binary bird.  But three other images did come to me-in the morn­ing as the squir­rel was throw­ing pine cone at me, I noted an abstract pat­tern in the branches of the trees over­head.  It was almost black and white (and blurry because I was not wear­ing my glasses).  The sec­ond image came to me as I watched a sucker swim­ming in a rel­a­tively still part of the creek.  The third image came later as the shad­ows started cross­ing from the West leav­ing a shaft of light weav­ing through the thicket of trees to illu­mi­nate a sin­gle stone.  When I fin­ish them at least one will be posted here.  I don’t know what the ulti­mate ver­sion of these images will be as they are barely drafted at the moment. 

Enjoy­ing the peace of the canyon, being unplugged, and hav­ing a moment to read for the joy of reading. I wish Mayna and DH were here to enjoy it with me.  The weather is gorgeous.

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 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.