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.

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.