Creative Cogitation

In 2010 I par­tic­i­pated in the first #twit­ter­ar­tex­hibit.  It was a char­ity event set up by David San­dum and oth­ers to ben­e­fit a library in Moss Nor­way.  The funds raised from that exhibit pur­chased 221 new chil­drens books.  David San­dum got over 260 twit­ter artists from 24 dif­fer­ent coun­tries to participate.

Well David is at it again.  This year the #twit­ter­ar­tex­hibit will help fund The Women’s Cri­sis Cen­ter in Moss, where abused women and chil­dren can get help. The cen­ter also pro­vides a 24 hour phone-service, coun­sel­ing, food and shel­ter etc.

And of course David came back to the artists who help him before. I thought, “Okay, I can do that again,” but I didn’t actu­ally read his instruc­tions first.  Appar­ently David learned some things from his first event and made some changes to the for­mat. Mean­while I hap­pily crank out Heart of a woman.

heart of a woman, by Jake Beck­man. 8.5 inch x 5.5 inch acrylic paint­ing on water­color paper fea­tur­ing a goddess/woman and a glow­ing fly­ing canary

So after I fin­ished paint­ing my lovely “heart of a woman” I went to the sec­ond #twit­ter­ar­tex­hibit web­site to find the mail­ing address, and as luck would have it, I found out David had imposed size lim­its on this year’s sub­mis­sion.  She was nearly twice the size she should have been.  Of course I did ask for a rul­ing from the coor­di­na­tor and he said he really needed the post card sized limit.

(sigh) my bad.  Later on David changed his mind, but then of course “cher­ish” was nearly complete.

So “heart of a woman” is for sale …make me an offer. Ship­ping should be quite rea­son­able as she fits in a cat­a­log sized enve­lope.  She is made from qual­ity pro­fes­sional artist mate­ri­als: 140 cold press water color paper, coated with gesso on both sides, painted in Golden pro­fes­sional grade acrylic paints and var­nished with Liq­ui­tex matte var­nish.  The sub­ject mat­ter was drawn from the char­ity that she was sup­posed to ben­e­fit, but also link­ing to my binary birds social media inspired series.  The col­ors are vivid.  She already as a FAR tag 17563 attached to the back.  The cap­tion with title, copy­right & con­tact infor­ma­tion over­lay­ing the image shown here is merely a water­mark made with Pho­to­Shop; it is NOT part of the actual painting.

As for what is wing­ing its way to Moss Nor­way now?

cher­ish, acrylic paint­ing by Jake Beck­man. 4x6 inches. Image of a child hold­ing a canary in the palm of her hand

I intro­duce “cher­ish.” As much peo­ple liked my “heart of a woman” this paint­ing has also been well received.  I still drew upon the ben­e­fi­ciary of this exhibit for inspi­ra­tion, while main­tain­ing my link to social media & twit­ter via the binary birds con­nec­tion.  I think my child came out equally well. 

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.

The paint­ing made its pub­lic debut last night at the Scottdale Fes­ti­val Art­walk.  It was a chilly night to be out and about. My free cof­fee and Reeses were very pop­u­lar.  Any­way, meant to post this blog yes­ter­day, but I didn’t get a roundtoit.

In this paint­ing I explore the darker side of the inter­net, one which has been in the news lately, PleaseRobMe.com.  PleaseRobMe.com works off an appli­ca­tion FourSquare.com, (or any geo­t­ag­ging soft­ware such as Google Buzz or Bright Kite etc.) which allows peo­ple to track their friends via twitter.com to pre­sum­ably to make it eas­ier to con­nect in the big blue box.  PleaseRobMe.com basi­cally notes when peo­ple using this appli­ca­tion tweet things like “I am going away for the week­end,” or “Going to the gym now, be back in a few hours” or “I am at the mall now.” etc.  The folks at PleaseRobMe.com say they are basi­cally re-listing these tweets to make peo­ple more aware of the dan­gers of telling peo­ple where you are and where you are not.  Essen­tially their ser­vice is a dressed up Twit­ter search. It gen­er­ally does not take too many tries to find a per­son, who is listed on PleaseRobMe.com, and whose home address is also listed on the inter­net.  The own­ers of PleaseRobMe.com do say it is not their inten­tion to have anyone’s house bur­gled, but clearly show this is one pos­si­ble nefar­i­ous use of this pub­lic information.

“2nd Story Job” by Jake Beck­man. A crow with bur­glary on its mind lis­tens to geo­t­agged tweets look­ing for an empty home to rob.

In this paint­ing the binary code on the wires all read,

• “I’m leav­ing” (the color binary),
• “FourSquare.com” (up (b or d) and down (p or q) binary),
• “RobMyHouse.com” (right (b/p) or left (d/q) fac­ing binary).

I chose a crow as they are one species of bird known for thiev­ery.  Besides I like crows, ravens, and the other clever mem­bers of the fam­ily corvi­dae.  The sym­bol on the nose of the crow is a dis­torted ver­sion of the FourSquare.com logo — I think the round thing in the logo is sup­posed to be a dodge ball, or is it a track­ball? I dunno. But I have trans­lated it into the eye of the crow that is lis­ten­ing to the buzz of the wires.  Also I have cho­sen a dif­fer­ent color pal­let of red,  green­ish black with shad­ings of green and pur­ple.  I hope you like this lat­est in the Social Media Birds series (I really need a bet­ter name — help?)

I am notic­ing my high res­o­lu­tion pho­tos are really not doing jus­tice to the color gamut of my backgrounds-I don’t think there is much I can do about that, except maybe get a new cam­era, which I can’t afford right now.

Any com­ments? Do you like it, hate it, think its too dark, think its funny…”

Update: Some­one sug­gest I put the size of the paint­ing in the blog; details about 2nd Story Job are avail­able 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.

In this fourth install­ment of the Social Media Birds (work­ing title), I have bro­ken down the rigid lin­eal struc­ture of the binary and turned it into a kind of rib­bon shape. The canary flares for a land­ing car­ry­ing the bit of news; it fills the small can­vas so much that it over­flows it to some extent. I am also play­ing with the col­ors a bit, break­ing away from the blue and yel­low of the pre­ced­ing works.

“RSS Feed” by Jake Beck­man, an orange canary flares for a land­ing car­ry­ing a rib­bon of binary; it appears to be singing as it lands.

The ASCII binary reads “RSS Feed” from Lower Left to Upper Right, and Top to Bot­tom. In this ver­sion I explic­itly included a spi­ral in the back­ground as a line of con­flu­ence for other things in the paint­ing. What do you think? Which one do you like best so far?

Update: Details about RSS Feed, 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.

As I pre­vi­ously stated while I was work­ing on Bird on a Wire a whole series of paint­ings came to me.  This series is a result of my recent immer­sion into social media.  I am a noob (a neo­phyte) to things like Face­Book and Twit­ter, but I hope to get bet­ter.  I even took a class for Face­Book, just before they com­pletely redid the lay­out.  ARGH!

I am still look­ing for Face­Book fan page tips.  My RSS feed is dou­ble post­ing and since they redid the lay­out I can’t find where the RSS Feed link is at on the fan page anymore.

Any­way, when I posted Tweet­Deck, one of my com­men­ta­tors said that Retweet came to mind.  Of course I was already work­ing on it as it was such an obvi­ous follow-on.  And now it is done-enjoy.

Retweet by Jake Beck­man. An orange canary sings to four other yel­low ones who seem to be lis­ten­ing. The binary in the back­ground reads “Retweet.”

Its a lit­tle abstract in con­cept, but also kind of lit­eral too.  The ASCII binary reads “Retweet” from Left to Right, and Top to bot­tom.  In this ver­sion I explic­itly included a spi­ral as a place for my canaries to perch.  I opted to fill the entire back­ground with binary so the upper most bird would have some­thing to stand on, oth­er­wise it would have been hang­ing upside down like an orang­utan.   What do you think?

Update: Details about Retweet, 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.

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.