The Skoalarian

Life Just Got Better

2011-12-19T13:43:00.000-05:00

When it comes to preferences of which environments to live in, urban, small town, or country, my choice without hesitation is urban. Give me city life, and by city nothing smaller than Indianapolis. I could do bigger. Chicago would be possible and I even considered relocating there briefly some years ago. San Francisco is the only city I have visited that hands down would pick to be my favorite place to live. Life however put me here in Indy and I am not a big fan of moving so here I stay.

There are of course aspects of urban life that are not so desirable, noise and trash come to mind readily but these drawbacks in my estimation are far out weighted by the positive benefits of city life. High on my list, if not at the very top of reasons to live in a city is access to a major public library system. In this regard, the Indianapolis Marion County Public Library is stellar. For years I have made use of its vast collections of books, video and music recordings and most recently the audio book collection. This is all made very conveniently available to me via the IMCPL website where I can search for and request material from any location in the city to be delivered to my neighborhood branch for pick up. I even get an email notification when items are ready for pickup and when it is time to return. My weekly visit to the library to pick up and return items is as dependable as going to the grocery store once a week.

Could life (at least in this regard) get any better? Yes! For sometime I have noticed listings for eBooks mixed in with the regular listings when on a search on the library website. Each type of media has its own little icon so it is easy to pick out books from CDs or DVDs or LARGE PRINT or what have you. The eBook icon has been on the library website for maybe a couple of years I would guess. I don’t know for sure because I am not interested in eBooks. Several weeks ago though I noticed a new icon on the IMCPL website that did interest me, a book wearing headphones for “downloadable Audiobook” Now that really intrigued me, checking out and downloading to my computer audio books this winter to listen to while I am busy painting and no bother of getting in the car to drive to the library.

So last night I downloaded and started listening to my first downloaded library audio book. There were some preliminaries I had to go through first. I had to download from the library something called an Overdrive Media Console and there was a license upgrade to Windows Media Player that was required. It all took maybe 20 minutes to figure out and set up before I was good to go. The downloading of a book, I selected Sharpe’s Company by Bernard Cornwell took less than 5 minutes and I started listening at that point.

One of the minor glitches in the system is that downloading, checking out and tracking of checked out downloaded materials is on a separate website from the regular IMCPL website that I am accustomed to using for these many years. Otherwise I might have explored this new world earlier. Getting to the right page wasn’t that hard and I can live with having to jump back and forth between the two worlds, but it would be nice if at some point the IMCPL IT people integrated the two worlds a little bit better. Even so, my world of quality listening just got a whole lot richer thanks to having access to a quality municipal library system. I still plan to visit my library branch once a week for browsing and pick ups. The collection of downloadable material is new and needs to grow before it replaces print and CDs completely, if ever. Besides, I don’t think I will ever give up the enjoyment of holding and reading a real book, at least in this lifetime.

Art Bank

2011-12-02T09:52:00.000-05:00

Never say never is always good advice I suppose. Once again I find I myself eating words I perhaps should have not spoken. For some time now I have remarked that I would never again be interested in selling my art work in galleries. I may have said as much in this blog. Art Galleries in Indianapolis are not a thriving business model. The typical life span of an Indy art gallery is maybe four years. There are a number of possible reasons for this. One, I suspect, is that there are too many areas competing for the distinction of being the art gallery district dividing the available customer base too thinly. Or perhaps it is just as simple as that there aren’t enough customers buying art in Indianapolis galleries to sustain any thriving business model. It isn’t that Hoosiers don’t spend money on art. A day at any of the major art fairs in the year will dispel that notion. That is why some years ago I abandoned the Indy gallery scene in favor of art fairs.

In fairness I should note that when I was showing in galleries I did make sales. They just weren’t sufficient sales to cover the costs and effort. Typically a gallery will open a show on the first Friday of the month with big crowds of viewers on that Friday perhaps even reaching 100 in number. The rest of the month, if they even bother to open, it will be as quiet as a ghost town. It all comes down to traffic. No traffic means no sales. At a fair like Penrod in that one day perhaps 1 or even 2 thousand people will pause long enough to consider my work. At best I can expect to make a sale to 1 or 2 percent of those passersby. So lets say 30 sales which is typical for a day at Penrod. If the monthly traffic in a gallery is no more than 200 people and the percentages hold the same then 3 sales should result. It’s just a matter of the numbers. Actually, 3 sales a month, and in most cases we are talking about $30 print sales not original painting sales, would be optimistic.

Having said all of that, I will tonight be on hand at the Art Bank Gallery on Massachusetts Ave showing 11 paintings and an assortment of prints for the December First Friday. So why you may ask the change of heart? Hope! Hope that things have changed since my last venture in the Indy gallery scene. A lot of new condos have been built in the Mass’ Ave area and more are on the way. The condo construction in that part of the city could almost be described as explosive. That means a lot of new walls to be filled with, one could hope, Skoalar paintings. Then there is the Super Bowl factor. In a couple months a lot of the nation’s 1 percenters will be in town and the hope is they will spend some of their big bucks buying local art. I doubt this but it has energized a lot of local artists to think it could happen. Finally there is the hope that the folks who do walk into Indy galleries in 2012 will at least go in with the possibility of considering buying something on their minds. Five years ago that was not the case. The 1^st Friday crowd I remember from five years ago were gawkers looking for free sips of wine and cheese cubes to nibble as they socialized with their friends. If at all, the art on display was tertiary. And from month to month the faces never changed. Be that as it may and setting hopes aside, as I have noted here recently, the sales at art fairs have been off for two years in a row, and though I am not getting any younger those 40lb weights that hold my art fair tent down seem to somehow get heavier every year. Consequently I am open to reconsidering having once said never.

Projects and Priorities

2011-11-18T09:02:00.002-05:00

It has been a great autumn season. For the most part the weather has been mild and I have had fun playing in the garden and with a couple of special projects which I have described here. This morning the mercury dipped down to 26 which is by no means unseasonable, but still it is a reminder that old man winter is not far off and the coming of winter means a shift in priorities and projects.

The garden with all of its various projects is, with the exception of some ongoing leaf raking, ready for winter. The tulips are planted, all the frost bitten plants have been cleaned away, the geraniums are in the winter quarters and the outside water taps have been shut off. The pouring of more concrete walkways has been suspended until next spring to be included on a 2012 to do list along with repair of the garden shed which didn’t quite make it on to the 2011 to do list.

The Hobby House project will also grind to a halt in a few days. I got about half of the interior painted so the plant room, storage room and varnish room are functional. Two years ago, not wishing to pay for heating, I had the water shut off over there to avoid frozen pipes. So with the exception of the plant room, it is going to get cold in the hobby house which is what will bring further wall painting to a halt. That of course will delay any consideration of setting up a model railroad in the large room anytime soon. Realistically it will take me most of 2012 to finish the scrubbing, painting and repair work the house needs before any consideration of setting up a train table is on the agenda let alone laying track. I might be seriously designing a train layout this time next year with the possibility of construction beginning in the spring of 2013.

I could of course heat the hobby house and work single mindedly on it this winter but that is not the priority. Winter is when I do most of the paintings I will be showing at the following summer’s art fairs. So presently painting art not walls will take the spotlight. This past art fair season was, in terms of sales, almost as lackluster as the year before. I haven’t booked the last sale of 2011 yet of course, but it looks like the numbers will be nearly identical to the year before. The only ray of hope in that prediction is that I did slightly fewer shows this past year than the year before. I am less inclined to get up at the crack of dawn, lug out all of my equipment and set it up, sit out in the blistering sun all day, then take all of it down again for a couple hundred bucks. For that reason I have lost my appetite for the smaller shows. There are at most six shows that I like to do and are worth doing in the Indianapolis area and I look forward to doing them. I can still make a profit for the year doing just six shows but in the present economy that profit is rather slim and the consideration of whether or not to bother at all has crossed my mind. Alternatively I have considered stretching out and applying to shows outside the Indy area. Back in the day when times were flush I did 12 to 16 shows a year. I need to find three or four more good shows within a days drive to get back to the kind of sales I had in those good old days. It can be done, so that is what I am planning to look into for 2012. So I need to start painting pictures.

Model Railroading

2011-11-11T21:16:00.000-05:00

If ever there was a hobby that could be described as Kafkaesque, it would have to be model railroading. The model railroader is forever at work pursuing a layout completion that never arrives. I have since my first electric train set when I was a lad attempted to build 4 separate model railroad set ups. The first I started when I was maybe ten years old and was on a 5 foot by 9 foot table in the basement of the family house. The trains were “O” scale, American Flyer and there were two engines on two separate tracks. It wasn’t strictly speaking my train set, at least at first. Mom and dad were always fair about treating my brother and I equally and so the train set was a shared possession. It quickly became evident though that my younger brother’s primary interest in the trains was to see how fast he could run them heedless of the effects of speed around curves and the proximity of those curves to the edge of the table. The resulting plunge to the concrete basement floor was not good on the engines and rolling stock and so my brother was encouraged to find other amusements. This de facto ceding of the trains to my care solidified over the next few years as I added to the layout from subsequent birthday and Christmas booty as well as what monies I could acquire from my weekly allowance for chores. By the time I was a teenager, the trains were virtually mine. I don’t remember when I finally took the trains down. It was probably after college when I no longer lived in my parents house. I remember selling them for some quick cash sometime in the early 70s. It was not a particularly astute financial move actually. Those trains today would likely be worth 50 times what I got for them.

My second adventure in model railroading began sometime after I had moved into my first house of my own.. I can pin point the approximate time of the second train layout to be in the early 80’s which coincides with my employment at Allison Gas Turbine. Model railroading is not cheap. I have always treated this house as an experiment in living space. Back in the early 80’s I saw no pressing need for a kitchen so I moved the sink and refrigerator into the utility room and converted the erstwhile kitchen into wall to wall trains. This time it was “N” scale. I had a layout approximately 10 feet by 4 feet and I could run 5 separate trains at a time. The thing about “N” scale is the track has to be very evenly set or the small cars will derail. I didn’t fully appreciate this at the outset so my second train layout was plagued with derailing problems. I didn’t have to live long with these problems though, because in 1984 I met Sara who moved in shortly there after and required that the trains go and the kitchen be put back in place. This was a condition of our getting married which at the time I thought was a good idea.

Undaunted by this matrimonial setback, I quickly hatched a plan to build an attic space for my trains. My third train layout in the attic was by square feet the largest yet. I laid down a plywood floor space in the attic 20 feet by 12 feet. You couldn’t stand up in the space of course. In the center it was only 5 feet to the roof gable. At the sides it sloped down to less than 3 feet. Access to the attic was through a 4 foot by 4 foot hole in the ceiling reached by a rather steep and narrow stairway that dropped down into the back bedroom. The trains didn’t actually take up the whole attic space, but were contained on an 16 inch high plywood deck that ran 2 feet wide around the perimeter of the 20 by 12 foot space. Though I still planned to run my five “N” scale trains, I had to lay much more track than I had ever tried before and so I perfected the skills of laying a smooth roadbed for the temperamental small “N” scale trains. I worked on this layout for the next 7 years, through my 5 year marriage to Sara until 1992 when Phyllis and her daughter Dana moved in and I moved over to live the next 7 years in what is now known as the hobby house. Dana was 6 years old and she took possession of the attic train room and converted it into a doll and stuffed animal sanctuary. I barely got my trains out before the dolls moved in.

I built my 4^th train layout shortly after moving over to the hobby house in 92. In terms of space and size it was a reprise of the 2^nd setup in the kitchen before Sara. This one came the closest to completion but it failed to reach that goal because I became infatuated with automated operation. I discover leaf switches and relays that would actuate switches when a tiny magnets glued to the underside of the trains passed various point in the track. The wiring became very complicated and although the track was ribbon smooth the trains often crashed into each other because I could not remember how to work all the controls. This was especially true if it had been a few months since I last operated the trains. When I moved back into my original house in 99, I took the trains in the extra house down once again. I also converted the attic room back into an open attic space and had a heat pump installed where the trains had once been. I sold all the “N” scale engines and all the accessories that were of any value and swore off model railroading for good.

That is until last week.

Painting The Hobby House

2011-11-04T12:59:00.000-04:00

The other house, the one I don’t sleep in or in any other way live in has for the past five years been left as it was when Kyle the person who was renting it from me died of a heart attack. Kyle was a “salt of the earth” kind of guy but among his many virtues, taking care of his living space was not one of them. Not that I should want to reflect negatively on the departed, but to put it plainly, Kyle left the inside of my rental a wreck.

I should note that the interior presently is not as bad as it was when I first bought the house in 89. Prior to my purchase of the property it was owned by a single mother with her young daughter living with her. Oddly she also passed away from a heart attack leaving the property to be sold by her family. It truly was a wreck back then inside and out. I purchased the house for $20K in 89 and over the next couple of years spent another $15K and a lot of time fixing it up. I won’t go into all that needed to be done that is ancient history. I just mention it here to give the reader of this blog a feeling for all the effort I put into making my extra house a nice place to live (I lived there myself for 7 years) and the heartbreak of seeing so much of it trashed out again in exchange for some rent money. OK at the time I needed the money so I shouldn’t complain, but the experience of renting out my extra house, as necessary as it was at the time, convinced me that I never want to be in that position again.

For five years then I haven’t had the heart to do much with the interior space. Mostly I have used the space to store other people’s furniture which is another story I won’t go into. It is also where I store tulip bulbs over the summer and it is where I varnish paintings which is a particularly nasty job and appropriate to a nasty place. This fall though a couple of things happened to get me going on fixing up the inside of the extra house. First a friend, Phyllis who has tackled more than her share of home rehab projects, told me about this stuff called Oder Blaster by ForceField. Which she had recently discovered in her latest home rehab adventure. Phyllis had purchased 5 gallons of the stuff and wondered if I might want what she had left over for my other house. One of the issues there was the tobacco smell and residue that coated every surface in the house. It sounded like a good offer so I took her up on it.

The second thing to happen was about 2 weeks ago a woman panhandler in the neighborhood approached me asking for work, anything to make a few bucks. At the time I was breaking up some concrete edging and I offered her a few bucks if she would haul the chunks of concrete and some pieces of wood around to the carport and stack them neatly and out of the way. She did a good job and I gave her ten bucks which was very generous for the amount of work involved. Two days later she was back ringing my front doorbell wanting to know if I had any more work for her. I told her no so she went into this long sob story about her electricity being cut off yada yada. For all I know it was a true story but chances are it was just a con. That sort of thing happens around here. I gave her $20 bucks and said that was it, no more, don’t come back, knowing full well that she would be back. Then I got to thinking, there is one job she could do for me, spray that Oder Buster stuff and do some painting next door.

So I was ready for her when she came back the third time. This time she was after bus fare with yet another cockamamie story. So this time I said that I had some work for her. I gave her the bus fare she was after and said she could come back the next morning and work it off along with the previous $20 I had given her and make more after that cleaning walls and floors and possibly even doing some painting in the house next door. That was a week ago last Tuesday and I haven’t seem her since. I guess panhandling is easier money than scrubbing walls and floors. Well, I did learn how to get rid of panhandlers fast, just offer them a job. Also it got me motivated to do some cleaning and painting. As of this posting 90% of the scrubbing is done and the two bedrooms and the former dining area have been painted and I have been thinking how I should make better use of this space and get it better organized.

The front bedroom is now designated the other people’s furniture storage room. The back bedroom will be the new varnish room and the dining area which has the big south facing window is the plant room. The kitchen and bathroom are still disasters with issues that will require a lot more than a bit of cleaning and paint to fix. Which leaves the living room, the biggest room in the house, ready for something new. When this thought occurred to me I knew immediately what the new room was for and what the new name of my extra house would be. The big room will be the train room, as in HO electric trains, and the extra house is now officially renamed “The Hobby House”

Window Quilts

2011-10-23T22:28:00.001-04:00

The past few days have been busy with potting up geraniums and planting tulip bulbs. This winter I have 42 geraniums that I plan to winter over in a semi dormant state. Last year I kept a dozen geraniums over the winter in 4 inch pots in the back entryway where there was a sunny east window and the temperature stayed between 40 and 50 degrees. The 42 plants I will be keeping this coming winter are in 8 inch pots so a lot more space will be needed. This is where my extra house will come in handy. The back door entry way over there is about twice as big with a larger window that faces south. The only issue is heat. Last year with the water shut off I didn’t heat the house. With the plants over there I have to have enough heat to assure that the plants don’t freeze. So the task is to heat just the small space where the geraniums will live. To do that I have to close off one regular doorway 32 by 80 inches to the kitchen and one large 72 by 80 inch opening to the living room. And that is what has had me thinking.

At first I thought of building a light partition out of 1 by 2 inch sticks covered with plastic sheeting much like the partition which I built two years ago to separate my kitchen from the back entryway in the house I live in. That I knew would be pricy, at least $100 and I wasn’t so keen on that and I knew it would be labor intensive. So as a second though I pondered just tacking up some plastic over both openings. I have four large pieces of heavy duty plastic, the sidewalls actually from my first art fair tent. The one that blew over and broke two of its legs three years ago. I tried it out. I thumb tacked one of the 6 foot by 10 foot side walls up over the larger opening. That would do I supposed but it had got me started thinking about another big opening that needed a heat barrier. Specifically the sliding glass door in the backroom of my house also called the garden room and or studio room or work room or sunroom.

During winter days especially in the morning one wants to let as much light in the east facing door and windows in the sunroom. At night though you can almost feel the heat being sucked out into the cold winter outside and to date my best solution was to tack a blanket up over the expanse of glass. That works but it is not the most convenient arrangement. I don’t have a lot of extra blankets and besides the ones I have don’t exactly fit the shape of the door which is again 72 inches wide by 80 inches tall. It would be rather nice I mused if I could find a custom fit blanket for my sliding glass door, possibly a little heavier than the light cotton blankets I had been using. Something quilted would be just the thing.

It was then that a memory lost it the reptilian recesses of my mind broke free and drifted up to my conscious awareness. “Furniture Moving Pads” Decades ago my first gainful employment after graduating from college was with the Mayflower Moving Company. As part of my training there I was introduced for the first time to furniture moving pads and I now realized that what I wanted now for my sliding glass door was a furniture moving pad. In less than a minute I had located on the Internet a supplier of all sorts of furniture moving stuff, pads included and to great astonishment I discovered that furniture moving pads were exactly 72 by 80 inches in size. So I ordered one to experiment with. Three days later Fed Ex had delivered a box to my side door with my first furniture moving pad. The Pad cost $16 and the delivery was another $9 which I considered to be an acceptable cost. The next time I will order 4 at a time which will cut the cost down considerably.

In great anticipation before the pad had arrived I had been thinking of how I would attach the pad to the frame of the door. In the end I decided on Velcro. I have used Velcro a lot in the past couple of years in connection with my art fair kit and have come to appreciate its versatility and simplicity. Normally I am a hammer and nail sort of guy but I can swing a needle and thread when it is necessary. I expect I will be sewing window quilts for several windows this coming winter.

Additional Notes On The Georgia Street Hoosier Pantheon

2011-10-10T15:09:00.003-04:00

On October 1st I posted an article on the proposal to rename Georgia Street In downtown Indy and the additional proposal to place memorials to as many as 30 noteworthy Hoosiers there to adorn the new pedestrian mall. Since then I have exchanged a number of emails with a reader of that article on who might be on the list of candidates for this honor. At first blush it looked as though one would be hard pressed to come up with 30 candidates but that fear soon faded with well over 30 potential candidates on our list. What has emerged as the real challenge is coming up with the criteria for selecting candidates.

The criteria problem first emerged with the suggestion of Abraham Lincoln as a candidate. Indiana has already tried to annex a portion of the Lincoln limelight by dubbing itself as Lincoln’s boyhood home. Lincoln was born of course in Kentucky and began his public adult life in Illinois with Indiana being his residence in between the two. My first impulse regarding the Lincoln candidacy was to reject it as too thin to be included on the famous Hoosiers list. I was more inclined to declare myself a birther purist in candidate selection. This position though soon proved to be untenable. With a bit of research I discovered that two of the three candidates put forth in the IBJ article which broke the story of the memorial proposal, Eli Lilly and Madam CJ Walker, were as Lincoln not native born Hoosiers. The only criteria that so far seems to stand is that candidates must be deceased.

So then should the criteria be such that, as is the case with both Lilly and Walker, honorees must have achieved their notoriety in the context of being a resident of our fair state? Tricky. If that is the case then a whole bunch of names get kicked off of the list. One of my first suggestions Michael Jackson from Gary Indiana for example gets the boot, not to mention Cole Porter, James Dean, Steve McQueen and Red Skelton to name a few. One might even end up pulling Gus Grissom from the list for this reason.

In the end though tough choices will have to be made. Mayor Ballard or Melina Kennedy, whoever wins next month’s race for the mayor’s office, I hope you are reading this and take note of my warning. This is going to be a political hot potato. The complete list of suggestions as of this writing, including Abraham Lincoln is (in no particular order) as follows;

1. HOAGY CARMICHAEL, composer, pianist, singer, actor, bandleader
2. JAMES DEAN, film actor
3. EUGENE V. DEBS, union leader, Socialist Party Candidate for President of the United States
4. JOHN DILLINGER, bank robber
5. VIRGIL "GUS" GRISSOM, Project Mercury astronaut
6. BENJAMIN HARRISON, 23rd President of the United States
7. MARK C. HONEYWELL, electronics industrialist
8. MICHAEL JACKSON, recording artist, dancer, singer-songwriter, philanthropist
9. ELI LILLY, pharmaceutical chemist, entrepreneur
10. ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 16th President of the United States
11. LITTLE TURTLE, Miami chief, military leader
12. MARJORIE MAIN, character actress
13. STEVE MCQUEEN, film actor
14. WES MONTGOMERY, jazz guitarist
15. OLIVER P. MORTON, 14th Governor of Indiana
16. COLE PORTER, songwriter
17. ERNIE PYLE, journalist
18. ORVILLE REDENBACHER, businessman
19. JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY, poet
20. RED SKELTON, comedian
21. T. C. STEELE, painter
22. GENE STRATTON-PORTER, author, naturalist
23. BOOTH TARKINGTON, author
24. TECUMSEH, Native American leader
25. HAROLD UREY, physical chemist
26. KURT VONNEGUT, JR., author
27. MADAM C. J. WALKER, hair care entrepreneur
28. LEW WALLACE, author, Union general
29. WENDELL WILLKIE, presidential nominee
30. WILBUR WRIGHT, aviation pioneer
31. KARL MALDEN, actor
32. JOHN WOODEN, basketball coach
33. JIM JONES, religious mass murderer
34. TONY HULMAN, entrepreneur
35. CARL FISHER, entrepreneur
36. MARSHALL “MAJOR” TAYLOR, athlete, bicyclist
37. SCHUYLER COLFAX, US vice president
38. CHARLES FAIRBANKS, US vice president
39. THOMAS HENDRICKS, US vice president
40. THOMAS MARSHALL, US vice president

Zinnias, Good Call

2011-10-08T11:11:00.002-04:00

I mentioned in the previous posting that last spring I decided to plant zinnias in the beds where I had tulip bulbs. This choice turned out to be better than I had imagined. My reasons for choosing zinnias in the first place were that I could grow them from seeds which meant that the cost would be minimal and that they would grow fast which since they wouldn’t go in the beds until the tulip bulbs were out, it would be mid to late June before they really got a good start. I also new that zinnias would grow big so 40 or 50 plants would be more than adequate for the space I intended to fill. I figured a couple packets of seeds was all I needed and so I grabbed two packets at the hardware without giving much thought to the variety or colors.

To get a little bit of a head start I actually planted the seeds, both packets in a prepared seed bed on June 1st. This made it easier to water and guard against bugs eating the seedlings. Within a week I had my first sprouts. By the 2nd week I started digging up tulips and transplanting the biggest seedlings to their new homes. By the 1st of July all the tulips were out and the zinnias moved in. On the most vigorous zinnias which were by now a foot tall I could see buds starting to form. By mid July Blooms were opening and the plans were filling in the spaces.

I have planted zinnias before so I knew what to expect and was pleased with the results. I figured I would have nice plants at least through the end of August. Zinnias tend to get a bit ratty looking toward the end of the summer. The leaves are inclined to get mildew on them and the branches get leggy. This past summer was different though. July set records for both temperature and scarcity of rainfall. July was the driest on record and Indianapolis set a record for the longest streak of days above 90 degrees that had held since 1936. As a consequence mildew which thrives in warm humid conditions never appeared. That was also true for the lilac leaves which also typically mildew as the summer wears on. I hadn’t planned on such a hot dry summer but if I had, zinnias were the perfect choice.

Another bonus of the zinnia choice were all the admirers they brought to the garden. Hummingbirds. monarch butterflies and goldfinches all loved feasting on the blooms. The colors I ended up with weren’t the most stunning but the overall effect was quite attractive. Back in July a squirrel bit off one of the plants leaving a five inch stalk but eventually it sent out new branches and grew into a plant somewhat shorter and more spread out than the other plants. I ended up cutting the plants back a couple of times just to keep the pathways open. The few plants I left uncut grew to well over four feet in height and as of this posting all plants are still fresh looking and full of blooms. Alas, now I must start cutting them down and digging them out. It is time for the tulips to go back in the ground.

Old Friends

2011-10-04T15:07:00.001-04:00

I have been enjoying this bright blue October day sitting in the garden musing over the summer past, remembering several of the garden surprises that might at the time have been material for this page and it occurred to me that now would be as good a time as is likely to come along to put one of those stories down. This is the story of old friends. By which I mean the leafy green garden friends.

Over the years the garden has evolved as my interests and inclinations have changed and so have the species of plants that I have chosen to cultivate changed. Decades ago I grew veggies. That was a lot of work and many years ago I switched to growing flowers which require no harvesting to speak of so no late summer freezing or canning mania of produce. With flowers just a bit of weeding and watering does nicely.

Another garden change a decade or more ago was the shift from predominately annual flowers to perennial flowers. Perennials are expensive to start off but over the long haul are cheaper as one learns how to propagate them as opposed to buying new annuals every year. Perennials are also easier when it comes to watering and feeding. For all these reasons I prefer perennials. One of the more recent shifts in the garden has been to the more drought tolerant varieties, low growing sedums and shrubs with deep root systems for example. And the most recent shift to spring flowering bulbs, tulips to be specific which bloom and die back long before the hot dry summer months set in.

Gardeners love to plan next year’s garden but anyone who has any experience with gardening will tell you there will always be surprises. One source of surprise is the volunteer. This is a plant, typically an annual that manages to grow from a seed cast off by a plant from a prior year. Seeds can lie dormant for several years in the soil until conditions are right and germinate when and where you least expect them. The trick is to recognize them when they first appear and not mistake them for a weed.

Last May when I was weeding, I wasn’t thinking of volunteers. I was thinking of what sorts of plants I might put in the beds where in a month or so I would be digging up the tulip bulbs. I pretty much had decided on zinnia because they grow fast and a couple of packets of seed would be all I would need so cost effective was as well a big plus for zinnia. A couple of other contenders that I thought of were cleome and nicotiana or flowering tobacco. Both are tall plants especially the cleome and nicotiana has a particularly fragrant bloom when it opens in the evening. I wasn’t so much interested in the cleome which I could have bought as sets at the nursery but I thought I really would like to have some nicotiana. Two problems with that. The nicotiana available in the nurseries is a dwarf variety that I don’t much care for. The variety I prefer is called Nikky and I hadn’t save any Nikky seeds for several years. I tried to find a source on the Internet but all the supplies of Nikky seeds were out for the year so alas no seeds. It is such a shame I thought because Nikky is one of those plants that with even a slight amount of attention will come back as volunteers year after year. But it had been a good five years since I last saw one in my garden. Oh well.

Now it is a curious fact about nicotiana seeds that they need to be exposed to sunlight to germinate. If they get covered by even a quarter inch of dirt they will not set. And, as it happened the previous fall I had turned over a lot of dirt preparing new tulip beds and in fact even through the spring I was moving a lot of dirt around so the stage had been set. A couple of weeks after my musings about cleome and nicotiana I found in a most unlikely corner of the garden three tiny nicotiana seedlings and one cleome seedling all within a space of about two feet of each other. I was stunned. Later I found several more nicotiana seedling bringing my total of nicotiana plants to seven and of course all of the Nikky variety. It was like running into a couple of old friends. Nicotiana comes in several colors all shades of pink, mauve, white and even lime green. I hoped for a white which is my favorite and was rewarded with three white plants and one plant a striking deep maroon. I potted all up and have been giving them special attention all summer with the intention of saving seeds for many summers to come.

Indianapolis, Georgia Street Renaming

2011-10-01T09:18:00.003-04:00

The weekend past was the last outdoor art fair for the year. It is about time to fire up the blog again. All that is needed is a bit of inspiration and this morning a local news item caught my attention and engendered enough inspiration to get the ball rolling. Tucked away in the obscurity of local news items for the past few weeks has been the proposal to rename one of the downtown area’s oldest streets. Georgia Street the three block stretch of pavement two blocks south of Washington Street is to become a pedestrian mall and with this do over the city fathers with the mayor’s blessing have thought it a splendid idea to rename the street. Voices of protest have been raised. The street has born its present name for 190 years, a not insignificant chunk of history. I lent my voice a couple of weeks ago to the protest of the renaming by posting my thoughts on the city website page soliciting new name suggestions. So far though the controversy hasn’t reached a city wide boiling point. Nevertheless, I read today in the Indiana Business Journal article that the mayor has deferred the renaming until after super bowl 2012. The last thing the city fathers would want would be pickets on a newly renamed “Hospitality Plaza” mingling among the hoped for tens of thousands of super bowl fans in the heart of the city. The mayor is no dummy.

This bit of local trivia is not however what inspires this posting. In the same article I read where it is further intended to place on whatever this new pedestrian mall is to be called as many as 30 monuments to famous Hoosiers. Possible candidates suggested to be so honored were Col. Eli Lilly, Madam CJ Walker, and Virgil Gus Grissom. All truly are worthy candidates I am sure, but I can foresee turbulent times ahead as the list proceeds to develop. To get the ball rolling I have two names to offer that will no doubt chafe the city fathers. The first, Eugene V. Debs who was perhaps the most famous of American socialists. The second might arguable be the most famous Hoosier ever if we are noting world wide fame, the “King of Pop” Michael Jackson. I can’t wait to see a moon walking Michael Jackson statue in downtown Indianapolis. Let the brouhaha begin.

A post script to this blog entry, a friend suggested including Kurt Vonnegut among the 30 famous Hoosiers. I agree completely.

Ajuga, A Twenty Year Argument

2011-06-22T09:50:00.000-04:00

Many of us, if not all, have over the years experienced the occasion of an argument that doesn’t really resolve but for lack of energy just fades away. We agree to disagree and let the matter rest until perhaps at some future date it flares up again. Such has been my twenty year relationship with the plant know as ajuga. Ajuga is a ground cover and by all accounts very easy to grow. A healthy specimen will get maybe 5 inches tall and in the spring will display spikes of blue flowers. The variety I have been familiar with has a dark green leaf with purple bronze variegations. Ajuga also goes by the name Bugleweed.

I got a start from a gardener friend about two decades ago and at first all was quite wonderful in my relationship with ajuga. The plant spreads like strawberries sending out runners and establishing daughter plants. This makes it very easy to multiply and after a few years I had a very nice big patch growing. As it happened the spot I had chosen for it was just what it liked best, not too much sun, not too much shade and plenty of water. Then we had a spring with a late cold spell and a couple nights of frost. The ajuga didn’t like that at all and though it didn’t die off completely it got off to a bad start in what was to be a difficult year all around. Spring was brief that year. On the heals of the last frost hot dry weather ensued. Ajuga does not like hot and dry. By the end of summer my nice patch of ajuga nurtured over several years was in tatters. The following year I took the survivors and transplanted them to other locations in the garden to see if a more protected spot would be more to their liking.

For the next several years the ajuga and I struggled along trying to find that Goldilocks spot, not too shaded, not too sunny, not too dry, not too wet. At times I thought I had found the spot but then the next year would bring disappointment. I could never get ajuga to grow in a place where I could see it growing and admire its lovely spring blooms and lush summer foliage. The places where it would grow were for example behind an arborvitae or next to a downspout on the house. A patch in the front yard had even spread runners out into the lawn and was mixing in with the grass. Eventually I just let it go and a few die hard individuals reliably came back year after year but never spread much. The last few plants in the back yard to go had gotten under the edge of the privacy fence and when it became necessary to reset the fence they got dug up and composted. The only progeny of that first start of ajuga to survive to this day are the renegades who escaped to the front yard lawn which I mow over every week from April to October. Never getting more than a couple of inches tall, it hasn’t bloomed in well over a decade, nor does it spread much. It just hides in the grass and other weeds and so my argument with ajuga has rested. We just agreed to disagree.

That is until this past week. The garden has changed a lot in the intervening years and I have decided to open negotiations with ajuga one more time. I have dug up half a dozen specimens from the front yard patch and for the present have them in improvised yogurt cup pots in my back yard nursery. I am not sure where I will eventually put them but I am hoping something will come to mind.

Tales From The Garden: The Monster Poison Ivy

2011-06-17T17:03:00.000-04:00

About three weeks ago maybe four, time goes by so fast in the garden, but definitely back in May as I was cutting back the brush that invades every year from the neighboring yards, I came upon a rather large specimen of poison ivy, in full bloom no less. At this first sighting little did I realize that I had found just one extended branch of the mother of all poison ivy plants. The core of the growth had located itself in a no man’s land between a shed and behind some stockade fence on my side and a chain link fence on Neighbor Lee’s property. For years a regular garden variety ivy had owned this space and Lee and I just kept our respective sides chopped back to a reasonable degree and neither of us took any interest in chopping down to the core of the area between the fences to dig it out.

Little did I know that for years the monster had been hiding un seen from my side and unrecognized from Lee’s side. I say years because it had to have taken at least five years to grow as large as it had. In any event, the next time I saw Lee out in his backyard I flagged his attention for a conference. Lee is about 78 years old and quite hard of hearing. Once a communication link had been established and Lee unchained his back gate, I took him over to the plant and I saw for the first time just how huge it was. Most of it was hanging over on his property since that is the direction it was getting sun. Later I would find that a substantial branch had gotten on top of my shed and was sunning up there as well. Lee, I said this is poison ivy. Yes indeed and a big one to boot. Notice the three part leaves and how the young leaves at the tip of the vines have a glossy reddish tinge to them. Be careful messing with this or you will get poison ivy. Lee then said, oh I wonder if that is what this is and he showed me his right forearm which was covered with poison ivy blisters. As a kid growing up on the country edge of suburbia I know poison ivy all to well and I told Lee he needed to get some calamine lotion for that pronto. Also if he tried to mess with the vine he should wear long sleeves and gloves and after messing with it wash up real good with soap and water. He thanked me for the info and we agreed to attack the situation from both sides as time permitted.

On my side I chopped out three 30 gal trash bags full of vines and I presume Lee cleaned out an equal amount. With the poison Ivy out of the way we decided to cut out the rest of the regular ivy as well which had taken a heavy toll on the side of my shed and the privacy fence, another 3 bags of vines. In all Lee and I cleared about 30 feet of fence line of the two vines. Despite my precautions I did get two small bumps of poison ivy on my right wrist. A dab of hydro cortisone cleared that up in a day or so. The shed needs a new roof I discovered, yet another summer fun project and with the no man’s land clear of all vegetation, Lee and I plan to patrol the area with Roundup to be sure no ivy reappears. I lost about 16 feet of stockade fence which disintegrated when we pulled all the vines away from it I have a major stockade fence project on tap for next month anyway so a couple more sections is no big deal. I went around Lee’s yard with him and pointed out a couple more poison ivy shoots which he has since dealt with. And that is the tale of the Monster Poison Ivy of 2011

Don’t Let Ignorant People Vote?

2011-04-15T09:19:00.000-04:00

CNN contributor LZ Ganderson in his column this morning proposes to cure the ills of bad government by requiring that ignorant people not be allowed to vote. This would be accomplished by some sort of testing regime. Mr. Ganderson’s idea is a looser on a myriad of levels. I won’t go into the pitfalls of rigged testing or the creation of yet another government bureaucracy, let alone the disenfranchisement of a very large number of our fellow citizens. (It would be a very large number indeed.) I just wish to point out that as a remedy for bad governance it wouldn’t work.

The authors of the constitution actually figured that the yokels (that would be you and me) would from time to time elect dopes, crooks and idiots to high office. That is what the House of Representatives is for. The Senate on the other hand was to be chosen not by popular vote but in back room deals arranged in the various state legislatures thereby assuring that in at least one chamber of congress wisdom might put a check on popular stupidity. That of course was all changed in 1913 with the 17th amendment to the constitution. The amendment to change the election of senators to popular vote was necessary since the rich power brokers had found it all too easy to just buy up state legislatures and in turn control the senate.

I am not really concerned that the morons who couldn’t pass a citizenship test are voting in droves. In fact I don’t think they are voting all that much. It takes some intelligence just to get registered and find the polling location. My own polling station, for example, has changed to a different place for the past 5 elections. The morons that more concern me are the willfully ignorant who could pass just about any test and still would vote like morons. I am thinking here of the sort who in the face of overwhelming proof maintain that evolution of the species is a falsehood and that their own brand of religious mumbo jumbo should be taught in its place. Another example would be those who deny climate change. These are not inadvertently dumb people. These are willfully stupid people who could pass Mr Ganderson’s test and unfortunately vote.

If we are going to require testing of any group, it ought to be for those who wish to run for high office. That wouldn’t solve the bad government issue but at the very least it would take off the table some of the more embarrassing candidates lining up for the next big election. To really get at the problem I think we need to get to the sort of system envisioned in Plato’s Republic where the governing class were to be selected in early childhood based on intelligence and then weeded out over a lifetime of training and testing. There would need to be checks and balances of course. The House of Representatives needn’t be included in this. The House was designed to be a forum for morons and it seems to be functioning as designed quite well.

In the end though I am afraid that there is no solution to the current state of governance. As I have pointed out before, the whole thing is a charade anyway. Plutocrats really run the show. Elected officials are a puppet show for the entertainment of the yokels. Why should we have to take a test for that?

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Stieg Larsson, an audio book review

2011-04-14T19:46:00.001-04:00

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is the third book of the Millennium trilogy which began with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. All three of the books are engaging and I would enthusiastically recommend them. My recommendation is based primarily on the fascinating main character of the trilogy, Lisbeth Salander. As I indicated in reviews of the first two books of the series, I felt that there were a couple of glitches in secondary plot lines that didn’t really add to the main plot and that over all as crime novels go the first two books were just ok. The third book doesn’t have these shortcomings. It is a compelling fast paced narrative that maintains focus from beginning to end. It is easily my favorite of the three.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest starts right where The Girl Who Played With Fire ends. It pretty much had to since book two ended in cliff hanging fashion with our heroine shot up rather seriously, her survival very much in doubt. With that as the starting point for book three, the second main character of the trilogy, Mikael Blomkvist becomes the focus of the action. The rest of the book is a gripping combination of rogue spies vs. investigating reporter vs. corrupt public servants, and a couple of psychotic killers thrown in for good measure, that comes to a climax in a classic courtroom showdown. Fireworks abound both in and out of the court. Book one, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo could be read as a stand alone novel. Books two and three must be read as a part one and part two of the same story. I wish there were more of “The Girl Who . . .” novels to look forward to. These three books were of course published only after the death of the author Stieg Larsson at the age of 50 in 2004.

TED

2011-04-06T00:02:00.001-04:00

One of the last vestiges of interest I harbored as a justification for watching television was as a source of news and current events. As recently as two years ago I was a regular viewer of the Nightly News Hour with Jim Lehrer on PBS and would catch the occasional Frontline episode thinking that this was TV worth watching. Long ago I had abandoned 24 hour cable news as vapid and sensationalist garbage designed to sell advertising and secondarily perhaps to promote some political agenda. Viewers who tune into any of these news media regularly as their only source of information on world events are likely the least well informed of those who at least want to know about current events. What the broadcast media, the cable news as well as the traditional broadcasters of 6 o’clock news provide is an homogenized perspective consistent with the power elite spin on events, perhaps tilted a bit to the left or right politically. The really deplorable aspect of this reporting of the news is not that it is contrived to titillate and slanted in perspective. The news so reported is for the most part accurate once the opinions are weeded out. The really deplorable aspect of this news is that there is so little of it. For every story reported several other stories go completely unreported not to mention points of view on the reported stories that are never considered.

What replaced my watching broadcast news media was of course the Internet. At first I would go to the websites of the major media outlets and of course I got the same old stories with perhaps a bit more information. I added the New York Times to my sources. Print media in Indianapolis is actually a worse source of information than cable news. My interest in following the New York Times didn’t last long. Their coverage of the lead up to the Iraq war was just a slipshod and slanted as any of the cable sources. Again one gets more details in print but it is still the same common wisdom being handed down.

Soon I started branching out to see what was being reported on, for example, the BBC and Al Jazeera. Google News was my entry way into global news reporting. Google will offer three news sources under each headline but below the first three is a link to open up a multitude of world wide news sources on each headline. News reporting no matter where it comes from is biased but by diversifying sources the biases begin to become more apparent and can the issues can be seen in a broader perspective.

There is still a deeper level of information to be found especially on the topics that never make the headlines but are nevertheless of crucial importance to understanding the world we live in. One source of such information can be found at TED.com. The contents of the site are video clips of speakers addressing a wide range of subjects. The videos run typically 20 minutes with some longer or shorter. I have known about this website for a few years now but recently revisited it after an absence of sometime. Some of the information I have gathered from a few TED videos over the past week is astounding. Some might suggest that a site as well know as TED would not merit a blog posting but my own quick survey informs me that TED is still under the radar for a lot of people. So people if you haven’t checked out TED, get with the program and ditch TV news.

Art Czar, The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg by Alice Goldfarb Marquis - book review

2011-03-31T00:02:00.001-04:00

This is a book I tracked down with the intent of learning more about the legendary art critic Clement Greenberg. My first exposure to the influence Greenberg had on the development of modern art was with the reading some years ago of a biography of Jackson Pollock by Steven Naifeh. My preconceived impression of Clement Greenberg from the Pollock biography and subsequent bits and pieces picked up along the way was that of an egotistical loudmouth with at best a questionable taste in art. Reading the “Art Czar” certainly reinforces that first impression. Clement Greenberg with no formal education in art history and only the exposure to the art of New York galleries and museums proclaimed himself an art critic. His primary talent was an impressive vocabulary which he used to bully and browbeat the art world into a frame of mind consistent with his theory of art evolution. My own gripe with Greenberg’s taste in art has as much to do with the genre he excoriated as it does with the genre he promoted. Surrealism was a style he consistently denounced.

It is a very interesting story of how he managed to accomplish this. Many factors came into play leading to this result. World War II to begin with had devastated the European art scene. In America the art establishment was slow and timid in their approach to modernist trends in art. Seeded by refugee artists from Europe an American modernist movement was struggling for recognition. Into this environment stepped Clement Greenberg with audacity and bombast quickly latching on to Jackson Pollock as the next new leader of modernist art. Everything fell into place for Greenberg including support from the two of the most unlikely players, the American State Department and even the CIA. It was a time of intense rivalry between The US and the Soviet Union an all fronts including the arts. American modernist art was enlisted into this effort as an expression of real true freedom and promoted as such with world wide tours with Greenberg as the natural cultural ambassador.

Greenberg’s decline came with the eclipsing of modern art by post modernism, but even before this he had been fighting a rearguard action against pop art. In the latter half of the book Marquis tells this story too. In the story of Greenberg’s decline, I found myself feeling some sympathy for the once art czar. His beloved modernists had been displaced. Even his style of criticism had been replaced. The new breed of art historian critics avoided Greenberg’s judgmental style of criticism in favor of explaining art. Perhaps, I must concede, a little Greenberg style bombast is a good thing every now and then. In her preface Marquis states that it is her belief that this biography of Greenberg is the most complete and fair-minded to date. That it could induce me to see Clement Greenberg in any positive sense at least attests to its fair-mindedness More than that, one is compelled to say this is a very well presented story.

Daylight Savings Time

2011-03-29T00:02:00.000-04:00

Over the past weekend there was a news item that might have slipped past your otherwise vigilant attention. Russia switched its clocks to daylight savings time for the last time. There will be no more changing the clocks in Russia from now on. Next winter the clocks will keep on ticking the hours by and there will be no falling back an hour. President Medvedev explained that changing the clocks twice a year was too stressful. It upset people’s natural biorhythms and was harmful to good health.

I don’t know if that is true or not. I don’t set my life by a clock if at all possible. I get up when the sun rises regardless of what time the clock says it is. Still, I know a lot of Hoosiers will sympathize with the Russian initiative and may even wish our state legislature would take the same course. It has been a few years since we had a good argument over the clocks in the state legislature. In the past I have been neutral on the daylight savings issue. My big gripe is that we are in the wrong time zone. Indiana ought to be in the Central Time Zone. This is the Midwest not the east coast. This new factor about biorhythms though needs to be considered. I am all for reducing stress in others as well as myself.

Question: If setting the clocks ahead in the spring is going on daylight savings time, should one say setting the clocks back in the fall is going on daylight spending time?

Spring Blog Schedule

2011-03-27T09:25:00.000-04:00

As I anticipated the spring to do list has resulted in a slippage in priority for posting new blog entries. Finding the time to actually compose a blog entry is not that difficult, but the time spent researching material, listening to audio books and just dreaming up topics I might write about is suddenly in short supply. This situation is due in large measure and coincides with the diminished time I am presently spending in the studio painting. Blogging is in reality a byproduct resultant from the otherwise idle mental hours spent painting. Less painting means less blogging.

Last year when the same seasonal shift occurred I just dropped out of the photosphere without explanation reentering this past winter. This year my intention is to maintain a minimal blog presence going forward through the year. At this point it is difficult to predict how minimal that presence will ultimately be but I am hoping to at least post new material once a week.

One project I have decided to abandon is that series of YouTube videos on making a painting. I never really had much enthusiasm for the project and I wasn’t at all happy with the three videos I did produce. I have removed the links to the videos from this blog and will eventually delete the videos from YouTube.

On a second Internet presence front, Last weekend I finally updated my long neglected website with all the new paintings I have been working on these past few months. Including the tail end of the 2010 collection and the beginning of the 2011 collection, I have posted a total of 30 new paintings. (see my website link somewhere on this page)

I will keep my show schedule on the blog up to date. As of this posting I have no confirmed shows on the schedule other than the usual invitation declined from the Talbot Street fair.

Garden Update March 23

2011-03-25T00:02:00.001-04:00

As of the writing of this post on Thursday Mar 23, (it will publish in a day or two) the garden has burst into its first spring bloom. Daffodils, that last Sunday were only buds, are opened by the score. The forsythia in even less time has come into full glory and the upper most buds on the star magnolia are opening as I write. There is a faint tinge of green to the lilacs where its tiny leaves are starting to unfold and robins are everywhere to be seen. There is still more to come of course. The trees have yet to acquire their pale green halos of new leaves and the grass hasn’t really gotten started yet. The last bit about the grass I am thankful for since I need a new lawnmower and I haven’t had time to shop for one yet. I needed a new mower last year but I managed to do with the old one through to fall promising not to repeat with it another year.

What I have be up to is dividing and transplanting. The weather has been pleasant and for the most part dry for the better part of a week and I have taken advantage of it. As a consequence I have from divisions, 35 new stonecrop sedum plants and 10 new tall phlox plants. Additionally I have relocated 10 roses, 2 barberries, 3 echinacea, 1 tansy and 21 clumps of forget-me-nots, an uncountable number of evening primrose shoots, a big clump of Shasta daisies and a clump or two of yellow cone flowers. I still have 2 roses to move which I plan to get to today and I plan to dig up a patch of the lily of the valley. I am waiting for the lily of the valley to emerge a bit before I dig into them. Additionally I have been into every corner of the yard raking up all the winter blown caches of leaves, reset several cement statues that had shifted on their bases over the winter and turned a good portion of the compost

In short I have a good start on getting the garden in order for its spring show in about 5 weeks. I won’t be buying much in the way of annuals, just some pansies and a few more geraniums for the flower boxes. I brought my 12 geraniums from last year indoors last winter and all but one seem to have wintered over. Twelve geraniums represent about $50 so I think the trouble was worth it. I also plan to buy about 7 more wintergreen boxwoods. Making space for the boxwoods was one of the reasons for moving all the roses. It is early yet but I think I will stop by the nursery today to see what they might have along the boxwood line.

The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson, an audio book review

2011-03-24T00:02:00.001-04:00

Sadistic pigs, perverts and rapists beware. If Lisbeth Salander finds out about you, your goose is cooked. After listening to the audio version of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” by Stieg Larsson, reviewed here on Feb 18, 2011, I straight away reserved the second in Larsson’s Millennium series “The Girl Who Played With Fire”. Like so many reviewers and readers before me I was captivated by the main character, cyber punk Lisbeth Salander. For readers who are equally enchanted with Larsson’s 4 foot 11 inch “wasp” (wasp referring here to a tattoo on Ms Salander’s neck, not a demographic group), the second of the “Girl Who” books is bound to please.

In the broader context of mystery novels, it strikes me as just OK and maybe not as soundly constructed as the first book of the series. To begin with plot development in the first third of the book is practically non existent. There is one suspenseful episode in the first part of the book that is completely unrelated to the main plot line, otherwise the narrative is about who and who not of the main characters is sleeping with whom. Also we spend a lot of time with Salander setting up her “fortress of solitude” Yes, I still get overtones of comic book super heroes where Lisbeth Salander is concerned. She may not leap tall buildings in a single bound, at least not so far, but add to her impressive accomplishments in computer hacking and photographic memory from the first book, an aptitude for math able to visualize a general proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem plus talents in boxing learned from sparring with her world class boxer friend Paolo Roberto and I think we are venturing beyond the realms of the typical mystery novel.

Once the action does get going though, it is fast paced and it does hold the attention. We learn a lot more about Salander and she has a much rougher time of it in this episode and even at the end, … well we will just have to get the third book of the series to find out. Unlike The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, there are a lot of big open questions left at the end of The Girl Who Played With Fire.

War Posters, Indiana State Museum part 2

2011-03-23T00:02:00.002-04:00

I had gone to the ISM to see the showing of local regionalist art. (see yesterday’s post). Upon arriving though I noticed in an adjacent gallery in the museum an exhibit of posters from the two world wars. I decided to check that out too. The exhibit is called “Art for the Nation” and will be up through July 24, 2011. This exhibit is worth seeing if for no other reason than to truly appreciate how differently today we as a nation approach the idea of war. The comment has been made often enough that during both of the world wars there was a total national commitment to the war effort that touched everyone. This is certainly evident in the posters of the time. Everyone is urged to buy war bonds, conserve resources and be cautious of what they might say that could reveal information useful to the enemy. “Loose Lips Sink Ships” Even school children are encouraged to save their quarters and purchase war stamps. One is easily impressed with the troubled tone of the time.

What is more troubling though is how this display reflects on our own time and our present attitude about making war. Have we as a nation reached a stage where we are engaged in perpetual warfare? The countries change and the justifications change but the brutal reality is that American soldiers are perpetually somewhere killing people. It is all sanitized of course by terms such as “no fly zones” and “collateral damage”. A permanent warrior cast fights the wars. A financial industrial plutocracy directs runs the country. And the rest of us go on in willful ignorance of what is really at work in the world around us, content to play with our electronic toys and fill in our NCAA basketball tournament brackets. That today is what being a patriotic American is all about.

Regionalism, Indiana State Museum part 1

2011-03-22T00:02:00.001-04:00

This past weekend I ventured out to see an exhibit of local regionalist art at the Indiana State Museum. The exhibit is called Indiana Realities: Regionalist Painting 1930 to 1945 and will run through Sept 11, 2011. Regionalism as an art movement had its day in America from 1930 to 1945 spanning the years of the great depression and WWII. The most famous names associated with regionalism are of course Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry. The art generally portrays realistic depictions of rural life in America. Wood’s “American Gothic” would be an iconic example of the regionalist style. The exhibit that I visited was a collection of works of some of the local artists of the time that were following along this track. Some of the artists included in the show are Floyd Hopper, Edmund Brucker, Cecil Head and William Kaeser. The piece shown here is one of Kaeser’s paintings. Many of these artists were at the time residents of Indianapolis and taught at the Herron Art Institute.

Generally it is an interesting show worth seeing. There are maybe 50 paintings to be seen. The historical value of the paintings alone is an attraction but I also happen to like the art style of the period, Thomas Hart Benton being a favorite of mine. I was struck by a couple of impressions of the work overall. Much of the work is dark. Storms and night scenes are abundant. I also noted that the execution of the work varied greatly. Some of the work was very well crafted but some was sketchy, one would almost say crude by comparison.

Regionalism did not survive the war years as a major direction in American art. During the thirties there was a great rivalry between the regionalists and the modernists for center stage in the American art world. The modernists eventually won out and after WWII it was abstract expressionism that captured the spotlight.

Andrew Johnson by Annette Gordon-Reed, a book review

2011-03-21T00:02:00.000-04:00

Without naming any names, there have been in my voting life some remarkably ill-prepared and under qualified candidates for the office of Vice President of the United States. None of these contemporary candidates for high office however, can match the inappropriateness of Abraham Lincoln’s running mate in the election of 1864, Andrew Johnson, the man who upon Lincoln’s death became the 17th president of the United States. The biography “Andrew Johnson” by Annette Gordon-Reed is a short book. It is one of the “American Presidents Series” which are intended to be concise accounts, accessible to the student as well as the casual reader. In the case of Johnson though, it would be a challenge to write anything but a short and concise accounting because he didn’t leave much of a written record behind. Johnson a self educated man was never comfortable with writing so he wrote few letters and did not keep a diary. Much of his official writings were done for him. As a consequence after reading this book I came away with more questions about the man than I had going in.

Chief among these questions is why did Lincoln choose him for his running mate in the first place. In his favor, Johnson was a loyal unionist from a southern state, Tennessee. He was in fact the only senator form a seceding state to remain in the senate after war broke out. Nevertheless Johnson was an avowed racist and only begrudgingly agreed with emancipation of the slaves. As president he did everything he could to keep the freed blacks an oppressed underclass. This could hardly be a course Lincoln would have taken in his second term. Eventually Congress impeached him and he came within one vote in the senate of being removed from office. The one talent Andrew Johnson had was his speaking ability. Johnson, not beyond demagoguery, could whip the yokels up with fiery rhetoric without fail.

Though this book was easy to read and no doubt as complete as possible given the format and material available, I felt there must be more to the Andrew Johnson story than I have so far found and will be on the lookout for additional information.

Lists

2011-03-19T00:02:00.000-04:00

Most of the year life is simple enough that I can get from one day to the next knowing what I need to know and doing what needs to be done without the aid of a list. The process begins in the morning when the first to do item breaks into consciousness. It may still be dark outside and my eyes may still be closed, but once that first agenda item appears on the conscious screen there is no getting around the fact that I am awake. Soon the rest of the day’s to do list will line up and at that point I might as well get up and get at it. During the slow months of winter the daily to do list seldom exceeds half a dozen items with another half dozen or so items that might have gotten on the list but mercifully can be assigned to some future day. As spring approaches though the list of projects competing for the daily to do agenda grows beyond my limited memory buffers to hold all at one time and so lists become necessary. List time has rolled around again.

I can tell when it is time for a list not just by the calendar. I know it is list time when my mind seems to be forever lost in a haze of bewilderment not knowing what to do next. I need to be filling out art fair applications, I would rather be working in the garden, but what about that painting project I started and don’t forget you still need to do the taxes, and more. So today I started my spring list for 2011. Actually what I started today was a list of lists. I will need a list for preparations for the coming art fair season. I will also need a list of the house repair projects I want to attack this summer. I have last year’s garden list to continue with additions of course. Since I intend to host an open house in a few weeks there will be a list for that too. And so my list of needed lists begins. As each list on this list develops, estimates of the expenses involved with each project will be estimated and a budget arrived at with the necessary adjustments to aspirations imposed by monetary constraints. For the next 2 or 3 months I will be list driven until the lazy days of summer arrive.

Listless

2011-03-18T00:02:00.000-04:00

One of the things I very much like about painting is the daily routine of it. When I am painting, I paint every day. Typically I paint two hours in the morning before I have to go out and run errands, then two more hours in the afternoon and finally four or more hours in the evening. This routine will go on for 3 months at a stretch and occupies the winter months and summer months. I paint very little in the spring and fall as it is so much nicer to be outside doing something else. During the painting seasons I keep life as simple as possible and stay home more days than not. Spring and fall are the opposite. Multitasking becomes the norm. Everyday is another list of projects. Transitioning from the multitask project mode to the solitary focused painting mode is always a welcome event. I think I would stay solitary and focused continuously in painting if life did not demand otherwise. Transitioning from the solitary focused mode to the multitasked project mode is more problematic. I always experience a period of a few weeks of listless drifting before I get my feet on the ground and up to speed. Knowing that I will soon need to put the paints down, I am reluctant to start a major new painting but until my enthusiasm for house repairs, refurbishing the art fair kit and so on returns, I am sort of adrift. In years past before I understood the dynamics of my seasonal transitions, I could get stuck in drifting for quite a few weeks at a time. Now two or three weeks would be extreme. So since I presently find myself in drift mode, if the weather proves nice tomorrow, I believe I will go for a walk in the park.

Minimalism and Hard Edge Painting

2011-03-17T00:02:00.000-04:00

Minimalism and hard edge painting are both styles of painting that emerged in the later stages of the modernist period. The two styles are quite distinct. I have conjoined them here only because in my own work, the farther I got in experimenting with the one, the closer I came to the other. The image offered with this post, titled “Box Kite”, represents the last example of my exploration along this line. I don’t anticipate any additional efforts in this direction.

Of the two styles, hard edge has the most personal appeal. Typically it is a lot more colorful that my example. The key characteristics of hard edge are flat monotone areas of color delimited at sharp boundaries. The boundary lines are usually but not necessarily straight lines. This sort of art is very reminiscent of the earlier works of Piet Mondrian and can still be found occasionally in the contemporary arena. My own work, highly textured as it is, would, one would think, preclude me form attempting hard edge. Nevertheless, that is the challenge, to reconcile two opposing attributes, hard edges and deep texture.

As for minimalism, one is tempted in the spirit of the subject to say, the less said the better. It has been my opinion that with minimalism it would be better to minimize the art and not just the content of the art. I think a minimalist painting the size of a postage stamp should suffice. Instead we get these oversized, “Polar Bear in Snowstorm” sort of compositions. I don’t trust art that has to be really big to be art. As for “Box Kite” I condemn it as well for this crime. At 20 by 24 it is far larger than it needs to be. A little minimalism goes a long way.

The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant, an audio book review

2011-03-16T00:02:00.000-04:00

I found this audio book as usual by browsing new arrivals at my local library branch. It had been many years since I last even considered picking up a book on philosophy and I wouldn’t have in this case if it had been a print version. In this case, since it was an audio book and an overview of philosophy rather than a specific tome, I decided to give it a try. It wasn’t until I got it home that I noticed that, though the copyright on the audio book was 2010, the book itself was originally published in 1926. Had I realized that back at the library I would most certainly not have checked it out. That would have been unfortunate because reluctantly plugging in the first disk I discovered that I had brought home a thoroughly entertaining book. Even in its preface the author’s droll and sometimes biting sense of humor is evident.

The story is a telling of the lives and thoughts of twenty or so of the noted philosophers of history starting with the Greeks then jumping to Bacon, Spinoza, Voltaire, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and so on up to the early 20th century philosophers Santayana and Dewey. What would make it an enjoyable listen for even the novice reader of philosophy is the rich amount of biographical information on each subject and the well presented historical context. It is true that some familiarity of the philosophies examined is helpful going in. The author takes the liberty to draw comparisons to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche when discussing Plato and Aristotle. This I think would be annoying if one were not to some extent familiar with these out of context philosophers. Another small annoyance is the author’s habit of quoting bits, for emphasis, in Greek, Latin, Italian, French or German. When reading and I come upon a quote in a language I don’t read, it always seems to upset the flow of concentration. With the audio book version however this was not a problem. This is a good point in the review to mention the reader, Grover Gardner. Not only did Mr. Gardner convincingly read all of the above mentioned languages, but as noted, the random and generously offered jabs, quips and bits of humor in the text were read with an intonation and timing well tuned to their purpose. A well done for Mr. Gardner

Concentration yes, it does take a bit of concentration to follow along. One might easily miss a point or wisecrack if you are not paying attention. Then there are the philosophies in their own right. I still liked the Greeks the best of the philosophers offered. Voltaire was, as I remembered, a delight, and Kant still made my head hurt. I will say this though about the exposition on Kant, I actually think I understand what it was he was talking about now. My greatest regret with this book was that it ended when it did. I wish it had been continued to include the later twentieth century philosophers. I would very much have liked to get Mr. Durant’s take on the existentialists.

To conclude, if you have a weekend, make that a long weekend, with time to devote to the lofty pursuit of philosophy, you could do a lot worse than taking up The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant in audio book form.

The Buyout of America, Book Review

2011-03-15T00:02:00.000-04:00

The Buyout of America, How Private Equity Is Destroying Jobs and Killing the American Economy by Josh Kosman is another of those “books of the moment” variety. That is to say it focuses on a topic of the present, makes a prediction of what is going to be the near term outcome and that is that. In five years time Mr Kosman will either have been proven correct in his predictions and perhaps acclaimed as amazingly prescient, or not.

The gist of the book is that private equity firms, much like a plague of financial locusts, are feasting on corporate American engorging themselves with fat profits but in the meantime laying waste to the corporate countryside. It works like this. A handful of rich wheeler dealers form a company to buy up other companies in what at one time were called leveraged buyouts. The PE firms attract more investors, scan the horizon for a company to buy then arrange for financing from some big bank to leverage their available funds into the billions necessary to make the purchase. The debt of the bank loan goes on the purchased company’s books and the interest thereon is tax deductible. Even with this fat tax break though the debt often proves more than the purchased company can handle so to raise cash the new owners, the PE firm that is, start cutting costs on items such as payroll, R&D and customer service. As often as not the cash thus raised is not however used to pay down the debt but rather directed into dividends to enrich the owners. The purchased business inevitably suffers and as likely as not goes into bankruptcy.

There is a lot more to this story than the above thumbnail sketch but the bottom line is that shortly, the author mentions the year 2012 time and again, a new credit crisis will rock the financial markets and once again Joe Taxpayer will be forced to pick up the tab. Well at least we don’t have to wait for a longtime to judge the merits of Mr. Kosman’s analysis. The book is readable for a not especially informed in financial matters reader such as myself. It is well documented with tables of numbers which I wasn’t particularly interested in studying. And finally I believe I have an understanding now of how this world of wheeler dealer buyouts works. So that said, if the reader wants to be on top of the latest buzz about what big money is up to, this book is worth the effort. Or, you might just give it a couple of years when the whole thing starts to blow up.

Garden Update March 14

2011-03-14T00:02:00.001-04:00

March is the best month in the year to divide and transplant perennials. It is also the month to plant cool weather vegetables like peas and spinach. The key factor is that the temperature is reliably cool. All that is necessary is that the ground dry out sufficiently so that turning it over doesn’t result in a muddy mess and in this the condition of the soil in the garden is crucial. Less than a week ago we had a rain that left pools of water standing in low areas of the lawn. The garden area though after years of adding topsoil and compost is raised a good four to six inches higher than the lawn and as a consequence drains quickly. Drainage is very important but so is the nature of the soil. Clay soils take forever to dry out and if you attempt to work a clay soil before it is properly dry, you are inviting a disaster. Clay compacts into rock hard brick during the summer months. It is the repeated freeze and thaw of the winter that breaks clay soils up. In the spring dry clay will break up easily with a spade into a very manageable garden soil. Wet clay on the other hand even though it has all the cracks and fissures wrought by winter will just squeeze back into gooey globs that will dry hard as bricks again if you try to mess with it before it dries out properly. So raised beds with lots of topsoil and compost added is the ticket to an early start in the garden.

This past weekend was perfect for dividing perennials. I had already raked away the pine bark mulch around several of the plants I planned to dig up. This was to expose the ground to the air and sun so that it would dry out faster. Friday I started with the sedums in the flower boxes. Saturday, more sedums and I planted cuttings of the white rock cress. On Sunday I dug up a riot of tall phlox that had seeded last summer from two plants I had specifically let go to seed so I would have new plants this spring. I had way more phlox than I could use. I chose a dozen nice plants to plant in a row at the back of the garden and threw another 50 plants into the compost pile. It seemed such a shame. People always ask me for plants in June and I always tell them to check back with me in March. This just the start. For the next few weeks I will be digging and dividing and planting every chance I get.

Tech Update

2011-03-12T00:02:00.000-05:00

I would never claim to be the most informed individual on the subject of consumer technology. In my age bracket, over 60, I would surmise that I would fall in the more rather than less aware of new developments in this area. One of the factors that keeps me from being more hip to what is happening is that during the months of November and December I don’t go into retail stores except for groceries and dire necessities. Additionally certain areas under the heading consumer technology are of absolutely no interest to me, chief among these being the latest thing in TV viewing. TV is a brain sucking wasteland. I typically catch up on the latest gee-whiz gizmos after the first of the year when going to retail outlets is much less annoying and prices sometimes are much more reasonable. Of course I could just keep up to date from home on the Internet which I do but I am still an analog sort of shopper. I like to see and touch before I go on line to buy. With that as preface, the following are a series of reports on what I have been discovering out there in gee-whiz land.

The Carson zPix Digital Microscope - This is a toy one can plug into a home computer via USB that I first heard about from a friend late last year. Thinking that might be a fun thing to play with, capturing jpeg images of tiny bugs and stuff, I decided to check them out. The price seemed reasonable in the $50 range, so I ordered one from Amazon. My assessment is that it is a piece of junk. I got the software loaded and the gizmo working all but for one function, the single image capture feature. The one feature of course that I was most interested in. I could capture video but no stills. Now I know that I could have imported the video clips into moviemaker and captured stills from there but I didn’t want to go through all of that when the camera should be able to capture jpegs straight away. I called tech support. I was told to try a USB port on the back of the computer instead of the front I was told to reinstall the software from their website instead of using the software from the box. Neither worked so I was given an RA number and I mailed everything back to Carson. This cost me another $9 in postage. Three weeks later I got my zPIx Digital Microscope back with no accompanying instructions or explanations. I loaded up software again, plugged in the microscope and absolutely nothing had changed. Now it maybe the case that I have missed something in the setup. Tech manuals for so much of these new gizmos barely pass as readable. I don’t know if this is evidence of a decline in national literacy or if perhaps English is a second language for the authors of such material. At this point I haven’t the time or interest to get this thing to work and will likely just give to someone who does.

The ViewSonic Digital Photo Frame - Back about a month ago I was having dinner with friends and expounding on this great new idea I had. Judging how the price of flat screen TVs were getting more reasonable, the day was fast approaching when artwork would be sold digitally to be viewed on wall hung units encroaching on the market for original artwork. That is when I first heard about digital photo frames and shown one in action, a recent Christmas present. It was those, “Oh didn’t you know moments”. The idea of selling artwork for larger versions of mostly desktop size frames still has some kinks in it. I don’t think many artists would want to put digital copies out there where they could be copied as easily as music is copied today and end up in the same mess the recording industry is in. But the idea of using this new technology still intrigued me so I purchased an 8 inch model from ViewSonic again via Amazon. It came yesterday. I have the same complaint about the quality of the printed user guide but with one or two features a puzzle to me still, I got the thing working in short order with a dozen of my images loaded and viewable in slideshow format. My plan is to set it up at I my local coffeehouse where I have a reserved place for artwork. I have been hanging one of my 8 by 10s there for several years. At first the novelty of a new painting there every month or so generated a few print sales but that novelty has worn off, the analog equivalent of a declining Elmo rating (see previous post). I have talked to Jeff, the owner of Lazy Daze (the best coffeehouse in Indy by the way) and he is open to the idea. If nothing else it should boost my Elmo rating at Lazy Daze considerably and hopefully result in a few sales. The idea is still in development and glitches will no doubt emerge, but nothing ventured…

Cameras - While browsing digital frames at my local Best Buy, I cruised by the camera department. My 7Mega Pix Canon which cost $700 at the time could be replaced by a 14 Mega Pix for about $150 and fit in my shirt pocket. It was very tempting but I decided to wait. My old canon is still doing very nicely.

TV - sometime ago I noted that something called smart TV was in the offing but I wasn’t sure if it had reached the retail level yet. It has. There is something called Google TV now.

Finally there is this the Iphone painting app. Yet another sign that painting the old fashion way is under assault.

Surrealism

2011-03-11T00:02:00.002-05:00

For sometime I have wanted to write a piece on the contemporary surrealist art scene, but I keep running into an information void on the subject. I know that there are a lot of contemporary artists doing surrealism because I find their work with a simple image search. There is a lot of it out there and a lot of it is really good. Some to be sure is imitative of Dali, Magritte, Miro and so on but most of it is very fresh and original. Getting an overview of contemporary surrealism is however next to impossible. Wikipedia, typically exhaustive on subjects to the extreme has only this to say

There is no clear consensus about the end, or if there was an end, to the Surrealist movement. Some art historians suggest that World War II effectively disbanded the movement. However, art historian Sarane Alexandrian(1970) states, "the death of André Breton in 1966 marked the end of Surrealism as an organized movement." There have also been attempts to tie the obituary of the movement to the 1989 death of Salvador Dalí

So far I have found only fragmentary references to contemporary surrealism such as pop surrealism, massurrealism and associations with lowbrow. Some articles mention European artists especially those from former iron curtain countries. A number of the pieces I saw listed under the New Leipzig School had a surrealist look.

I even went to the extent of browsing through the on line articles from back issues of Art News for the entire past year and came up with nothing. So I took another approach I started searching for surrealism under pseudonyms as for example space art, fantasy art, magical realism, neo-surrealism. dystopian art and digital surrealism. (I have found that nine time out of ten if you put the word digital in front of another word and search for the resulting phrase something will turn up.) After a dozen or so searches, the pieces started coming together on the mystery of the missing surrealists. It appears that as a genre surrealism fragmented with the end of the modernist era. Then I took a closer look at the resultant fragments through a postmodernist lens and questions came up. Where was the rejection of modernist dogma? And most importantly where was the mistrust of global meta narratives. Surrealism just doesn’t speak the same language as postmodernism. Unlike abstract expressionism which in its autistic gestalt can at least pass for alienation, surrealism is on a different wavelength. Where surrealism sees dreamscapes, postmodernism sees landfills. On the one hand wonder and mystery on the other hand absurdity and alienation. Demoted from the high table of fine art in this postmodern world, surrealism makes do where it can on the fringes of lowbrow and in the corners of the lesser genre.

I find this state of affairs a shame because I really like surrealism and believe it deserves better.

All I can offer in rebuttal on the subject is a video (see Bizarre Bazaar) I found with a lot of good examples of contemporary surrealism. That at least should prove that surrealism is alive somewhere.

The Tickle Me Elmo Scale

2011-03-10T00:02:00.004-05:00

Note to future historians
If by chance elements of this blog survive in the cyberverse beyond the coming dark ages 2.0, future historians will find it helpful to read the following explanation of what is herein meant by the “Tickle Me Elmo Scale” and related terms such as the tickle me Elmo factor and a tickle me Elmo rating.

Tickle Me Elmo was a child’s toy first introduced to that market in 1996. It was an instant fad as described in the this Wikipedia entry

Some parents literally fought other parents in stores to purchase one for Christmas. The dolls' short supply due to the unexpected demand lead stores to increase their price drastically. Newspaper classifieds sold the plush toy for hundreds of US Dollars. People reported that the toy, originally sold at US $28.99, fetched as much as $1500

I have chosen Tickle Me Elmo as the archetypal metaphor for cultural fads generally and specifically fads in the contemporary arts, which are the subject of most of the posts on this blog. Tickle Me Elmo is an apt metaphor for fads for a number of reasons. First the word “tickle” as in tickle my fancy is an attribute of fads. They tickle our fancy as something new. Additionally the fact that the original Tickle Me Elmo was a toy for preschool age children carries two connotations appropriate for my metaphorical use of the term. There is the observed phenomenon that our cultural attention span and that of the typical two year old seem to be converging, not, it should be noted, because two year olds are changing in this regard. Finally if by comparing cultural trends in say the arts to a child’s toy, one by inference trivializes such trends…Well, let’s just call that collateral damage and move on.

The setting of an objective Tickle Me Elmo scale is problematic. The logical way to proceed would be to scan all contemporary media and note occurrences of say “Lady Gaga” then a comparative scan of the media for occurrences of “Hanna Montana” would give us a relative scale. I don’t have the resources to conduct such a scan. I can only judge based on my unscientific appraisal that Lady Gaga’s Tickle Me Elmo rating has overtaken that of Hanna Montana. Setting a standardized scale would also be possible but again tricky. One could for example take Elmo himself and set his media mentions in December of 1996 as a benchmark. This would be complicated by adjusting for the growth in cyber based media of course and that is where it could get tricky. Again this is beyond my resources. Consequently references in this blog to tickle me Elmo ratings will be understood to be purely subjective estimates informed only by my limited information resources.

After composing the above I realized that I do in fact have the resources to collect media occurrences scans. When a Google search returns it includes an estimate of how many instances were found of the search item. This information is in small print right under the Google search selection box. Google will also allow you to set a time frame for items returned. Setting the time frame as the past 24 hours with each return considered to be one “Elmo”, a search on all occurrences of “Lady Gaga” one gets a resulting return of 232 million results or .23 gigaelmos. Hanna Montana by comparison returns only .001 gigaelmos, confirming my earlier conjecture. Charlie Sheen by contrast registers .32 gigaelmos and President Obama rates .29 gigaelmos, just shy of Lady Gaga’s mark. Just out of curiosity I checked out the elmo rating for Skoalar. I got 6 elmos, but not all of the returns were really mine. Since I started using Skoalar as my cyber identity another skoalar has popped into cyberspace to tag along on my coattails.

An Additional Thought or Two on Timelines

2011-03-09T00:02:00.001-05:00

In yesterday’s blog I speculated that charting a progressive evolution of artistic styles as in an art history timeline was well perhaps misleading to some degree. I think the exact word I used to describe art history timelines was rubbish. That was perhaps a bit harsh. I am still of the opinion that such timelines tell us more about the fleeting attention span in the fine arts world than any intrinsic understanding of what is or isn’t art. One might gain an equally insightful understanding of society by plotting the timeline rise and fall of the hula hoop, pet rock and tickle me Elmo. This is especially so over the last 150 years or so since the advent of “modern art“. Timelines as such I believe are more effective at pinpointing the beginnings of a style that the conclusion. Beginnings are noted usually by some remarkable work of art. Conclusions never have that sort of punctuation to them and picking a date out of the air seems purely arbitrary.

Take for example abstract expressionism. Generally abstract expressionism is bracketed into a post WWII to the 1960s time frame with postmodernism being the “tickle me Elmo” that became the next big attraction. Paint thrower Jackson Pollock perhaps more than any other artist epitomizes this style and period. But was this really the beginning, the first ever expression of paint splattered on canvas? I would suggest that abstract expressionism’s roots go back, way back to when babies first started spitting creamed carrots, or something of that nature, on the canvas of their mother’s face. What made abstract expressionism into a recognized art genre was the concerted efforts off a few artists and perhaps more importantly the attention of art critic Clement Greenberg who hyped it.

When and how abstract expressionism got started is mute at this point it is here now and it looks like it is here to stay in spite of reports that its star faded in the late 60s. In fact an easy Internet search will turn up a multitude of clever artists splashing, splatting and finding ever new ways to slop paint on canvas. One of my favorite parodies of the style is in the movie The Big Lebowski where Julianne Moore sans wardrobe other than a harness suspending her on a wire track swoops down on a canvas large paint brushes in hand which she whips paint from as she flies over the canvas. While searching unsuccessfully for a clip of that scene, it occurred to me to search for anything on “baby spit art”. It is virtually impossible to come up with a new idea but that might just be one, or any rate as far as google is concerned, it is. I found one video link under the search baby spit art but it had nothing to do with babies or spit. There is spit art (see link under "Bizarre Bazaar"), but no baby spit art. As fast as ideas fly on the Internet I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find a dozen baby spit art videos posted on You Tube in a month. I don’t care if you want to take my idea and run with it. I will even post a link to your video here.

Having gotten that nonsense out of my system, for the time being anyway. I have this to say in conclusion. Deriving meaning and wonder from random visual content is as old as gazing at clouds and as fundamental as babies playing with their food. It is fortunate that for a period of time the high priests of fine art gazed down upon it as worthy. For even though in the meantime that gaze has passed on to other trinkets, in its wake generations of artists may play with throwing paint anyway they want to with at least some degree of validation.

Goth, Punk and Steampunk

2011-03-08T00:02:00.000-05:00

None of the above would be listed as categories of fine art, or at any rate I have not yet found them so listed. Nevertheless, they do represent distinctive cultural styles that impact art on the edges at least, influencing pop art and lowbrow certainly. All of the above influence and or have been influenced by film which is unquestionably a twentieth century art form. For punk, think Mad Max. For goth think Wednesday Addams or if you prefer something more contemporary, the recent spate of vampire movies. For steam punk think H.G. Wells Time Machine or Wild Wild West. All have also been countercultural fashion looks. That the followers of these three styles are typically the very young might explain why there hasn’t been more notice of goth, punk etc as distinctive art genres. For one thing, young adults are more likely to spend their cash on movies and clothes and aside from a poster perhaps, they are not dropping big bucks of fine art as a rule. If in the future we see more middle aged goths and punks? It does seem a bit far fetched I suppose. Still, I have a few observations to make before dismissing the whole subject.

Punk of the three seems to have had the least impact on the visual arts, unless you consider skin art. Tattoos are very much in and one finds skin artists setting up shop everywhere. A style that one can specifically point to as punk art still seems to be rather nebulous and underrepresented when compared to goth and steampunk. What there is in the way of 2D art is more in the subcategory cyberpunk and is rather monotonously Borg meets Blade Runner inspired.

Goth on the other hand is quite distinctly recognizable in the 2D arts. If you expand your definition of Goth beyond the stereotyped black lipped teenage necrophilia to the generally darkly morbid, Goth has been around for a long time. Were the works of Hieronymus Bosch a very early example of goth art? (see image above) I suspect an argument might ensue with that question, but there it is. To go out on an even more speculative limb, say that all this business of art timelines and linear evolution of art genres is all a bunch of rubbish. Rather, suppose that art springs from a more eternal, if not static at the least a much more slowly evolving substrate, the subconscious. Could one not assert that certain styles in art appear again and again as emergent because they are a natural expression of the individual as well as collective unconscious? Might not goth be such an expression, not to mention surrealism, expressionism and so on. Such a theory would go a long way toward explaining the disconnect between the art one sees produced in our culture and the attention limited narrow scenarios concocted by art historians.

Finally a mention of Steampunk. This is a new term for me, unrecognized by moi as a distinct style until just recently. It is however clearly recognizable as a Victorian expression of science fiction themes, a sort of what if steam and clock mechanisms were taken to the next level had electronics not intervened. Steampunk (where have I been?) it turns out is a thriving genre in film, fashion and the arts. In the arts one can easily find examples of 2D art from an image search but where steam punk is really big is in 3D, “sculptural” art. Steampunk artists are inventing up all sorts contraptions that may or may not actually work but definitely have a look right out of Jules Verne or H.G. Wells. I have placed a link to a video on steam punk under “Bizarre Bazaar” if you wish to see what it is all about.

Lowbrow

2011-03-07T00:02:00.000-05:00

From Wiktionary:
Americanism, circa 1902. Referring to the (by that time discredited) science of phrenology, which suggested that a person of low intelligence and sophistication would posses a lower brow-line than someone of greater intelligence and sophistication.

From the Free On Line Dictionary:
a person who has uncultivated or nonintellectual tastes

And from Wikipedia:
Many in the art world have deeper difficulties with lowbrow's figurative focus, its cultivation of narrative, and its strong valuing of technical skill. All these aspects of art were deeply disparaged in the art schools and by curators and critics throughout the 1980s and 90s

I first encountered the term as applied to a type of art about ten years ago. One of the local gallery owners in town used it to describe one of my works that I was auditioning for a place in his gallery. It was not intended as a put down. The gallery owner was interested in the piece and offered to take me into his gallery. It was that sort of gallery. Looking back now, the piece I was showing and indeed a fair amount of the work I have done since could accurately fall into the lowbrow characterization. Certainly not all though, and I can understand why artists bristle at being pigeonholed into this or that category if it precludes them from the freedom to go where the muse directs them to head next. I didn’t, as it turned out, settle into the local lowbrow friendly art gallery. I found a little more upscale accommodation elsewhere in town. Not that it would have made any difference. The art gallery of any stripe is not a thriving business model in Indianapolis.

That gallery owner of ten years ago did offer some advice of lasting value. He suggested that it would be to my advantage to move to LA. That, you see, is where the lowbrow movement’s roots ran the deepest. I have been to LA,. moving there was not an option and never will be an option. I have found rather that one can eke out a sustainable income plying the local art fair circuit. As for my affinity to lowbrow, it is still there. The image posted above “Drive-In Movie 1956” and the previously posted (March 4) “Gort Avec Les Damoiselles d’Avignon” both I think fit the description.

The above quote from Wikipedia that lowbrow’s figurative focus, its cultivation of narrative, and its strong valuing of technical skill were deeply disparaged in the art schools and by curators and critics throughout the 1980s and 90s speaks more to the poverty of culture from art schools, curators and critics of the period than anything else.

For more on Lowbrow see the video link “Low Down On Lowbrow’ under Bizarre Bazaar.

Polk by Walter R Borneman, an audio book review

2011-03-06T00:02:00.001-05:00

Polk, The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America by Walter R. Borneman and narrated by Alan Nebelthau is an excellent addition to the reading list of anyone who is interested in American history. I would go on to suggest that reading biographies of the presidents is generally a wonderful way to study American history. Since the stories by necessity overlap, you get more than one perspective on the issues, events and motives of the time. Plus you also get the personal side of the story along with all the big dates and events. This present biography added a new president to the list of presidential biographies I have read Biographies of the earlier presidents Washington through Monroe are easy to find and I have read multiple accounts of Washington, the first Adams, Jefferson and so on. I had also read an account of the somewhat more obscure 8th president Martin Van Buren and of course his predecessor Andrew Jackson, so this addition of Polk the 11th president was a timely addition to my list of biographies read.

Polk’s biographers are fortunate in one respect, in that much of the history of his presidency can be told in Polk’s own words for he left a comprehensive account of his one term as president in a personal diary which the author of this particular biography quotes from frequently. Polk was a native of Tennessee and a protégé of Andrew Jackson. One of the first insights one gleans from this book is how dominate a force Andrew Jackson, Old Hickory, was in the presidential politics of his time. Having served two terms himself (1829-1837), Old Hickory hand picked his successor Martin Van Buren who managed but one term and then after the interim of the Harrison/Tyler administration once again placed his chosen candidate Polk in the white house (1845-1849). For twenty years then Jackson’s dynasty was a formidable presence in the country.

Polk was a one term president but unlike any of the other one term presidents, he campaigned for the office on a promise to serve only one term and in the end kept that promise. One might speculate that this was prescient on Polk’s part because he died just days after his one term in office ended. Physically Polk was never a robust individual and what life force he had, he expended in full as president. Polk, by the biographer’s account, had long sought the highest office as a career politician from the state of Tennessee, serving in the House of Representatives for several terms rising there to speaker of the house then later serving as the governor of his home state. When he did finally attain his goal of the presidency he brought with him a very clear agenda to expand the territorial reach of the country to the Pacific coast and this he did. It was the era of manifest destiny. It took a war with Mexico to secure Texas and add the rest of the south west including California to the country and a negotiated settlement with Great Britain to add the Pacific Northwest but in the end Polk had done what he set out to accomplish. For this Polk can be credited as one of the most effective presidents to hold the office.

There is much more to say of Polk but this is a review not a biography and I am happy to report that a well written and well narrated biography exists in Polk by Walter R. Borneman.

The New Leipzig School

2011-03-05T00:02:00.000-05:00

If you have been following along with the blog posts of the past several days, you might conclude that contemporary art was either rubbish, squalor, an act of vandalism or at best a frivolous domestic spat. It was beginning to look much that way to me at least. Then my search wandered off to Leipzig, that old city in what was once a bastion of communist artistic dogma, East Germany. For half a century this once renowned home of Johann Sebastian Bach was held in the iron grip of soviet style worker’s realism where, at the Art Academy, such antiquated ideas as perspective and formal composition were still taught. Much as monastic cloisters had held the vestiges of Greek and Roman culture through the dark ages, Leipzig had held on to the vestiges of the craft of painting through the dark ages wrought by Clement Greenbergism and its usurpation by postmodernism.

Then the wall came down. The shackles of workers realism were cast off and what has emerged are the young German artists, yGa of the New Leipzig School. A google image search on “New Leipzig School” will return a collection of art that at once appears eclectic in its antecedents. Realism, surrealism, pop, fauve, cubist, even impressionist inspired work is evident. The common thread running through all though is they are all really well done. And, collectors are buying the stuff up faster than the artists can turn it out. The attention span of art critics and gallery curators, such as it is, will no doubt move on to discover the next new thing to tout and coin more isms for the rest of us to ponder. The New Leipzig School phenomenon reminds us though that quality in art may actually be a perennial attribute that from time to time will break through all the hype.

The Thornton Dial Exhibit at the IMA

2011-03-03T00:02:00.002-05:00

There is a dead goat hanging on a gallery wall at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. That is right, a dead goat is art.

Not long ago I read of the soon to open exhibit of work by artist Thornton Dial. This was to be a major show, a twenty year retrospective, over 70 pieces of work, by Dial and a show I new I had to see. Readers of this blog may already have noted that I take a fairly skeptical view of postmodern art generally and conceptual art more specifically. Even so this promised to be a major event in the local art scene and I really wanted to see it. I skipped going on the opening weekend to avoid a big crowd and waited until the following Tuesday opening of the museum when I was pretty sure I would have easy access and all the time I wanted to see the exhibit. I had budgeted an hour and a half to really take it in properly.

After paying the $8 special exhibit admission price I entered the first gallery room and found four or five massive wall hung assemblages. These were typical in scale to most of the rest of the pieces I would encounter. Panels maybe ten foot by 8 foot, some were in fact even larger and only a few were smaller, festooned (?) agglomerated (?) with all manner of stuff to a depth of six to eight inches deep, maybe deeper. In these first few panels certain materials common throughout many of the assemblages were evident, wire fencing, barbed wire, chicken wire, you name it kind of wire. Another material common throughout was rope, and a lot of it looked hand made, twisted ropes of cloth and carpet strips would be my guess. On one panel a large number of Barbie dolls spray painted different colors. Spray painting of the objects was common throughout and at first the colors were predominately dark, black, gray and rusty brown. My early assessment was that this was going to be a drab affair, but I was mistaken in this assessment. It was after all a big show and I was just at the start of it.

I believe it was the second gallery room I entered where I was drawn to a free standing assemblage that was evocative of a dinosaur display at the Chicago Field Museum, lots of big bones wired together. I was headed towards this to view it closer when off to the side another of the wall mounted assemblages caught my eye. On the right hand side of this agglomeration there appeared to be the corpse of a dead goat. It stopped me in my tracks and I recall thinking most specifically, that looks like a dead goat, I wonder how he did that? My thought was that it was other stuff assembled to look like a dead goat, but when I got closer it was most definitely a goat, albeit spray painted blue gray. Then I read the placard, Materials; wire, rope etc. etc desiccated goat and desiccated rat and one other animal I don’t at the moment recall. I was rather taken with the goat you see. I did find the rat though in the upper left hand corner. The title of the piece was “Lost Farm (Billy Goat Hill)” It was a transcendent moment.

It took me a while to remember that I had initially been drawn to the bone assemblage so I checked that out next. Title “Lost Cows” The placard additionally informed that these were old cows Dial had purchased that died shortly after he acquired them. In the midst of the cow bones hung an old golf bag. I went on to take in the rest of the exhibit. Eventually bright colored spray paint became evident, lots more rope and wire, no more desiccated animals that I noticed, a lot of junk to be sure. I could say, nothing I would want to hang in my house, but that would not be exactly true. The exhibit included a couple dozen drawings, some of which I liked quite a lot. And so it went. The material was not presented in chronological order which required me after a while to go back to the start and notice dates to confirm an impression I picked up along the way that 2000 to 2003 seemed to be Dial’s most dramatic period of work. I actually went through the whole exhibit three times before I felt I had had enough.

It would be easy to review this show with a lampoon of Billy Goat Hill but that would be an injustice to the artist. Just to fully appreciate on piece could take hours of contemplation, there is that much depth to this work, and I am talking only of a technical appreciation quite apart from the artist's intent or message. Like his work or not, one must appreciate the massive amount of effort it represents. One of my gripes with contemporary art is that so much is casual and gratuitous as in “My Bed” reviewed here a few days ago. Nor is it valid I think to deprecate this work as not pretty. It most certainly does not aspire to any formulation of aesthetic beauty I know of or if it does, only in the most strained relativistic sense of the concept. The title of the exhibit is after all “Hard Truths” and hard truths are what one gets in abundance. Thornton Dial is an African American who grew up in the poverty of rural Alabama. The narratives provided for each piece speak of the legacy of slavery, poverty, homelessness, oppression and environmental degradation, none of which are especially pretty to look at.

That said, I am left with this puzzle. Had I not known the artist’s story, how might that have affected my perception of his art? Would the art stand on its own without the artist’s story? Would Van Gogh’s art stand on its own without Van Gogh’s story, or Jackson Pollock‘s, or Picasso‘s? I am inclined to think that the answer would be different in each case. My thoughts on the Dial exhibit continue to evolve. How Dial's work stands over time is a question for future critics. All that can be said today is that it is a powerful and thought provoking testament

Here is an extensive image gallery in slide show format of the Thornton Dial exhibit provided on the IMA website. Included is am image of "Lost Farm (Billy Goat Hill)"

Here is a video about Dial's materials, also provided by the IMA website with a much better view of the goat.

Garden Report March 1st

2011-03-02T00:02:00.000-05:00

You might have noticed that I have been slipping a few garden photos into the blog in recent weeks. In spite of the late winter storms of the past month, there are signs aplenty of spring’s imminent arrival. As proof I offer the photo with this post of tulip shoots popping up Today, as I write this it is March 1st and the afternoon has turned into a most pleasant sunny in like a lamb March day. I have just come in from my first afternoon in the garden and I think a garden report is in order. I didn’t set a heavy work objective for this first foray outside, but I did want to at least get the roses uncovered from their winter covers of leaves and the Styrofoam caps. I really dislike looking at the styro caps all winter, but they do protect the roses. Still I really wanted to see them go away and so the did. The piles of leaves are not as good a protector as the styro caps but when a rose gets too big for the biggest styro cap, what are you going to do? The piles of leaves are also a mess to clean up in the spring. I really need to come up with an alternative to both my methods. In any event the roses are all open to the sky now and all seem to have survived. I would even note that a green sprig was in evidence on the Queen Elizabeth. Shortly, as soon as the ground is dry enough I expect to be transplanting several of these roses. When I first planted the roses two years ago, I didn’t really prepare the ground properly for them nor was I familiar enough with each rose to judge the best location them. I intend to correct those shortcomings presently.

With the roses project taken care of a still a desire to enjoy the afternoon, I decided to clean up a few of the old stonecrop sedum stalks. I have a lot of stonecrop sedum and I leave last year’s growth on over the winter. It is an attractive plant even as a corpse. Pulling the dead stalks out of the plant is an easy chore and clearing the old stalks away and the cover of leaves reveals the new green growth already in evidence. I have already posted photos of the sedum some days ago. I by no means cleaned up all of the sedum plants. That will take another afternoons work. As I noted I have a lot of it. And soon will have more. Sedums are one of those wonderful plants that you can chop into two, or more pieces if you like, and both halves will flourish as separate plants. Last year I let plants I had chopped in half the year before mature a bit with the intent of chopping them in half again this year. Why so much sedum? Well it is one of the first things to get green in the spring and spring ios when I can enjoy the garden the most. Throw in drought tolerant and will grow just about anywhere, I haven’t tried growing them in concrete yet, and for my money that is a winner.

Stuckism and Remodernism

2011-03-01T00:02:00.001-05:00

Back on the Feb.21 posting in a comment from Mr. K the terms Stuckism and Remodernism were thrown out as follows,

Post Postmodernism = <2/3 Stuckism + 1/6 Remodernism +1/12 Video Game Art +(9/12)* {Infinite Suim [Any_Other_Art_Genre/10^n] for n=0 to infinity}

I thought he was making it all up. He is always doing that sort of thing you see. Little did I know at the time that stuckism and remodernism are indeed recognized artistic movements with real artists professing to be stuckists and remodernists. My apologies Mr K for not taking you more seriously. I still don’t understand all of your formula though.

Stuckists it turns out are artists who profess to be stuck in the mold of , for lack of a better term, the more traditional arts forms. They have a manifesto which spells out their system in full. The link is provided if you want to read it in its entirety. I would just like to touch on a few items therein.

Item #4. Artists who don’t paint aren’t artists.
This seems a bit harsh if you ask me. I can appreciate the frustration they no doubt feel with all the garbage out there called art but really to propose such a standard is not just retro it smacks of totalitarianism. At the very least it is wishful thinking in the extreme.

Item #5 Art that has to be in a gallery to be art, isn’t art
This again is naïve, but I think a concept worth developing. I confess that I have long been suspicious of art that is created specifically to be sold to a museum to be displayed only in a museum gallery. I know it is a line item in every museum’s mission statement to foster and promote the arts. But I take the arts to be that phenomenon with a life out beyond the museum walls. When a museum curator chooses to display a piece which has absolutely no exposure in a broader or any other context then he or she ceases to be a curator and becomes the sanctifier of what is or isn’t art. This is a complex topic, touching on free speech, social norms and public funding just for starters, which I will leave to some future time to explore in more depth. For now I will just indicate that I agree with Item #5.

Item #9 The stuckist is not a career artist but rather an amateur
Anyone can do art. More people should. If you want to call yourself an artist though that sets the bar a bit higher. I say you have to get out there and put your work on the line if you are going to call yourself an artist.

Item #20
Stuckism embraces all that it denounces. We only denounce that which stops at the starting point — Stuckism starts at the stopping point!
Say What?

If you are wondering what stuckism looks like after all this verbage, you could google stuckism for images, which I did. It is a hodgepodge as you might guess. A lot of nudes I did notice. Well if you are going to get stuck somewhere I guess you might as well get stuck … Oh yes the term stuckism comes from a put down

former girlfriend, to ex-boyfriend, Billy Childish (founder of stuckism): "Your paintings are stuck, you are stuck! Stuck! Stuck! Stuck!"

To get a flavor of what stuckism is all about, check out this video link Stuckists, but please be advised, turn down the volume if you would rather not hear the loud and annoying musical accompaniment.

One last note, Remodernism. When Mr K posted his enigmatic formula I replied that I could be counted a remodernist. Not so! I just liked the word. That was before I knew what it referred to. I have also read the Remodernist’s manifesto. I leave to you to track down if you are so inclined. It uses the word spiritual and spiritualism way too many times for me to even remotely associate myself with it. No mumbo-jumbo for me thank you.

Conceptual Art One More Example

2011-02-28T00:02:00.000-05:00

One more stop before I live conceptual art behind. It is easy to knock conceptual art in large part because so much of it is utterly absurd. It would be wrong though to leave the impression that all conceptual art is pure junk. It would also be an error to presume that really good conceptual artists are recognized as such and given credit for their achievements A case in point, Ruben Lucius Goldberg. Know more popularly as Rube Goldberg his name has become synonymous with overly complex machines. Goldberg, a Pulitzer prize winning political cartoonist was never recognized as a fine artist in the field of conceptual art probably for a couple of reasons. He died in 1970 just as conceptual art was emerging as a movement and technically speaking his concepts never got off the drawing board. They were cartoons. This second objection I regard as of no merit. The concept was there. Further, Goldberg’s inspiration lives on in his many admirers who have in fact actualized Rube Goldberg devises. The popular Wallace and Grommet films are an example of the Goldberg legacy Goldberg’s creations combined wit, humor and from the common man’s perspective lampooned the contraptions of the modern era. He should be recognized posthumously as one of best of the conceptual art genre.

Bad Art Award

2011-02-27T00:02:00.002-05:00

Back in the late 70s Dan Aykroyd on SNL created the character Leonard Pinth Garnell, an art critic. There were a series of skits titled along the lines of “Bad Cinema”, “Bad Ballet”, “Bad Theater” and so on. When I first conceived of doing a post on “Bad Art” I mentally heard the voice of Leonard Pinth Garnell ripping apart some of the really wretched stuff one can find in the category, bad art. For inspiration I thought I would see if I could track down a video of one of these old SNL skits. To my temporary delight I found listed a skit done in May of 78 on SNL called “Bad Conceptual Art” This is just the sort of thing I could use. But as I said my delight was short lived. I did not find a video of Bad Conceptual Art. I did however find a video of Bad Ballet and will post it at the Side Bar Café so that you might get a sense of what I am referring to and the proper tone of what follows.

In researching the previous post on conceptual art, and posts coming soon, one on stuckism in particular, I came across the name Emin, Tracey Emin several times. This morning picking yet another of the myriad contemporary art classifications, this time the one called “Young British Artists” or yBa for short, There she was again Tracey Emin. So I decided to dig into this a little deeper.

What I found is that in the early 1990s, London, it would seem, ascended to the ranking of world center of bad art, formerly a title I presume was held by New York. I further discovered that this bad art coup was accomplished largely by the yBa whose poster child was none other than Tracey Emin. Ms Emin has since become an historical personage with her own Wikipedia entry. Her most famous work of “art” titled “My Bed” was just that a bed, her bed, unmade, dirty clothes, blood stained underwear, used condemns etc scattered about. This was her entry for the Turner Prize in 1999. She is also credited with inspiring the term Stuckism which again you will read about in a future post. Ms Emin is the girl friend quoted therein.

Wanting to see more of Ms Emin’s work, I did an image search and came up with surprisingly very little. Her bed is there and a couple more pieces one of which seems to feature her crotch and a lot of money, nothing explicit mind you. What I did find on the image search were a lot of photos of Ms Emin, in most of which she has this really odd twist to her mouth. It must be a sort of signature expression.

In any event the yBa and Ms Emin in particular for her bed, may add to there list of honors, this, in the tradition of Leonard Pinth Garnell, inaugural Skoalarian award for “Bad Art”.

Conceptualism, Neo Conceptualism, Conceptual Art

2011-02-26T00:02:00.002-05:00

OK, go to the hardware store and buy a new toilet seat and a box of 16 penny common nails. You probably need a new toilet seat anyway. Take the old one off, and set it aside for now. Put the new seat on the toilet. Next step, take the old seat out to the garage or down to the basement. Don’t clean it up. The more stained and grungy the better. Now, drive the nails, a couple dozen or so through the seat from the underneath side so that they stick up 2 inches or more out of the side you would be sitting on. You may need to pre drill holes for the nails to keep the seat from splitting into a bunch of splinters. A few splinters sticking up would be a nice extra touch though. Leave the assemblage out for several weeks where it will get rained on. In short order the nails will begin to rust. Voila, conceptual art. You are an undiscovered artistic genius. It has probably already been done though.

Now I ask you is this something you are likely to give your mother in-law for Christmas? It may be an interesting concept, but I don‘t think we want to go there. Not all conceptual art is quite so absurd but generally speaking way to much is in the same ballpark. The “Fountain” head of conceptual art Marcel Duchamp started it all in 1917 with his readymade he called fountain, a urinal turned upside down. It was a gag, a prank that started an art movement.

My first exposure to art from found objects was in 1984 on a trip to San Francisco and the bay area.. Outside of Oakland on the bay are vast mudflats which you can walk out on when the tide is out. There, locals collect the driftwood and junk that washes up from the bay and assemble it into sometimes fairly magnificent structures called mudflat art. It was exciting to see. An appropriate artistic use of the flotsam and junk washed ashore. Further, it is in harmony with nature’s process of decay and renewal. Mudflat art you see is subject to the ebb and flow of the tide and is therefore quite transitory by nature. If only the rest of conceptual art were equally transitory.

When I walk into a museum gallery devoted to a typical piece of conceptual art, my usual reaction is, what an incredible waste of space. Just think of the carbon footprint required to maintain this pile of junk in a museum controlled environment. I am all for reduce, reuse, recycle but let’s consider the complete environmental impact.

Here are my guidelines for appropriate, environmentally proper conceptual art. Biodegradable is a big plus especially if it is left where it will biodegrade as soon as possible, a compost heap for example. Secondary use, If it functions as something with intrinsic value like say a garbage can or flower pot then OK. Finally if the artist specifies a recycle by date when all the useable materials will be disassembled and returned to the goodwill and the remainder properly disposed of in the most environmentally sensitive way available.

Oh, I just had an idea. Instead of giving it to mother in-law, tie a piece of red ribbon and a bow around it and call it “Christmas Present for Mother In-Law”. Now if I could just work a box of Ex-Lax in somewhere….. Gee, you know this is kind of fun. Maybe I should rethink my opinions of conceptual art.

Psychedelic Art, What About Peter Max?

2011-02-25T00:02:00.000-05:00

The link posted here a few days ago with the presumptive list of the world’s most famous artists is diminishing in credibility as I keep thinking of names absent from that list as for example Peter Max. For that matter the whole business of classifying art seems to have dropped the ball on psychedelic art generally. Where does it fit in all of this grand scheme of categorization? Virtually every timeline I have found ends the modernist story with pop art which you might stretch to include psychedelic but I don’t think so. Then you jump to postmodernism and it gets all so dialectically charged and not much fun, way to serious for tripping.

Well as for the question what about Peter Max? He is doing quite nicely thank you. Here is a link to his website and a link to a video of some interviews and news footage on him. And he is definitely on my list of most famous contemporary artists.

As for the question of why the oversight of psychedelic art from the category game, I can only speculate. Though Max came out of New York, the genre really started in the heart of flower child country, San Francisco. With New York being the center of the art that was really art world, perhaps psychedelic, in the waning years of modernism and pop just got overlooked as not really that significant. But why then not place it the soon to emerge postmodernist movement? Postmodernism, excuse me, did not invent the idea of questioning the dominate paradigm. We knew what counter culture meant in the 60s and before the 60s there was a beat generation that gave voice to the cause. My guess is that the association of drug usage with psychedelic art had just lost so much social cachet by the time it came to assigning it to one or another cubby holes, that no one really wanted to deal with it and so it drifts out on its own now.

My own thought on the matter is that it tags on at the end of the modernist epoch, its sixties counter cultural roots notwithstanding. Clearly there are surreal and pop, even fauvist elements in psychedelic and it is anything but in your face confrontational. It is just fun, groovy stuff. Psychedelic also by the way has, as well as any genre made the quantum leap to fully digital format, spawning fractal art. For a sample of 21st century psychedelic, here is a dynamic art work called GO4IT from Viking Trance. Psychedelic is alive and well and coping very nicely with the digital revolution.

Grafitti artist Banksy

2011-02-24T00:02:00.002-05:00

First genre up for my scrutiny of contemporary art, graffiti. I will be picking categories in no particular order, just personal whim mostly. In this case however, I have picked graffiti because in just days now the graffiti artist Banksy may ascend to that most rarified status for contemporary artists, popular notoriety. Yes, Banksy is on the cusp of becoming a celebrity. He is presently a nominee for an academy award for best documentary feature for his film “Exit Through The Gift Shop”.

In point of fact Banksy is already known to those who follow graffiti art. In Bristol England, where he is from, and in London he has already made a name for himself. Here are two news videos about him and his work, the first is a report from Israel the second is from LA.

One might argue that graffiti is the penultimate postmodernist art genre. Not only does it typically question the cultural meta narrative, but it is by definition an act of vandalism and punishable as a crime virtually world wide. The irony is of course that graffiti has been around since the time of ancient Greece. Challenging the dominate paradigm is not, it would seem, the invention of any recent generation.

If you would think to dismiss Banksy as nothing more than a punk gang banger, well you might be right. No one really knows who this Banksy person really is. No identified photo of him, mug shot or otherwise exists. Speculation is he will not show himself on Oscar night, but rather lurk out in the audience somewhere while an associate accepts the award should he be the winner.

Personally I don’t condone vandalism, still I give Banksy high marks for chutzpa in painting on Israel’s West Bank wall. And I give him high marks for being over the top, Two cops kissing? Yikes! If he tried that in Indy, forget due process. He would get his tires slashed.

The Sisters Who Would Be Queen, a book review

2011-02-23T00:02:00.000-05:00

The Sisters Who Would Be Queen - Mary, Katherine and Lady Jane Grey, a Tudor Tragedy by Leanda de Lisle presented itself to me in the new arrival section of my local library branch. I hadn’t sought this book out but for sometime now I had been on the lookout for a text dealing with this period of English history, so you could say I was predisposed to check this book out. I had a reasonably good understanding of Henry VIII and an equally filled in familiarity of Elizabeth I. It was the time between the two that I was sketchy on and this book fit that blank area perfectly it seemed. And so it did. Maybe a little too perfectly because as it turned out I almost bit off more than I could chew. The book focuses in great detail on the three sisters Grey who were cousins to Elizabeth I and by Henry VIII’s last will, in the line of succession to the throne and there in begins a tale of great woe to these three young girls.

Apparently their story has become a legend over the centuries and it was one of the author's objectives to set certain inaccuracies of the legend straight. Having never heard of the Grey sisters before, I couldn’t have cared less. The book is filled to the brim with names of people related to other people who were constantly plotting to marry this child to that and thereby secure the crown for their branch of the family. Typically the plots failed and someone ended up with their head chopped off. Such was the fate of the eldest Grey sister, Lady Jane. Lady Jane actually was the Queen of England as a teenager for a total of nine days, but her reign was swept away by the supporters of Mary and eventually Jane, still a teenager got her head chopped off for her trouble.

The text was for me, a bit dry in the academic sense as you might have gathered, but it told the story well enough that I didn’t put it down though I am sure I appreciated only a fraction o its intent. Two lessons I did take from the book with renewed appreciation. First, hereditary monarchy is a really dysfunction form of government. Second, when persons contending for political power have religious motives, bad times are bound to ensue. The first of these lessons, the one about hereditary monarchy, is I think a point well understood in this country. The second I fear we may need some refreshing on. That alone might be a good enough reason to read this book.

The book also tells the story of Elizabeth I by virtue of her being the reigning monarch for the later half of the story. I found this aspect of the book interesting in its own right. This is a different view of Elizabeth than the one I was familiar with. The great defeat of the Spanish armada in 1588 had always been a focal point of the Elizabethan story. In this book the armada of 1588 doesn’t even rate a mention.

So would I read another book of a similar bent to this by the same author? I think not. Would I recommend it? Yes if you are already familiar with the history of the time and especially the story of the Grey sisters and want to know more, by all means, enjoy. If you are just looking for a more general history of the happenings of the time, I would say keep looking.

The Relevancy of Painting, a Final Word

2011-02-22T00:02:00.001-05:00

Back on Jan 31 when I first started this inquiry on the relevancy of painting as a medium of artistic expression, it was all because of a question that I had for sometime been puzzling over. The question: Why are there no longer famous contemporary painters. At the time I didn’t even know if it was a valid question to pose, it just seemed to me that it was. Perhaps I was just not aware of who was making a name for themselves in the contemporary art scene and the question reflected more on my naiveté rather than any broader truth in the contemporary culture. Since then I have come upon additional information as a consequence of these postings on the relevancy of painting and the arts that lead me to conclude that it is not a vacuous question to ask, why are there no longer famous contemporary painters?

Exhibit A. Last week I came upon a web page at Artcyclopedia listing the 30 most famous artists of all time. Not too surprisingly Picasso was at the top of the list. Sixteen of the thirty just over half of the list I could identify as painters from the modern period, impressionism to pop art. Thirteen more I believe came from the periods prior to the modern era. I could have actually been mistaken about the classification of a couple in the pre modern group making the modernist grouping even larger. There was one and only one name of a contemporary artist or for that matter any artist from the past 40 years on the list at number 29 out of 30 was Janet Fish. As it happens I have seen a Janet Fish painting. It was a good ten years ago but it was a very memorable piece so I am heartened to see that her work has gained her this sort of recognition.

Exhibit B. As you know if you have been following along, in my last couple of postings I did finally get a handle on all of this ism business. Whether you like them or loath them, you can’t wish them away and I find it a very curious coincidence that the popular mindset of who makes it onto the who is famous list for artists coincides precisely with the major break in the world of art isms that occurred in the mid 1970’s, namely the break between the modernists and the postmodernists. Basically if you are a postmodernist, you are an unknown quantity as far as the man on the street is concerned or at any rate not on their radar screen.

Pondering the above I decided to discuss the matter over dinner with a friend whose familiarity with the arts and painting in particular is extensive. The conversation was fruitful and suggested some additional insights. This friend’s educational background is human psychology and he pointed out that it is human nature to seek out categories as a way of organizing content, mental, emotional, likes and dislikes, what have you. Absent a category there is a strangeness about experience that is perceived as a negative. With intent this strangeness can be overcome, but without intent, experience outside of a culturally established context is alien and avoided if possible.

An additional observation my friend made was that to compare the notoriety of contemporary artists of today to those of the modern area some 50 years ago we should really ask how famous were those artists back in their day? My sense was that Dali, Pollack and Picasso etc were in their times well known, but since I was a child at time I couldn’t say for sure from my own experience Then somewhat later in the evening I was able to pin down an example from my memory of a famous contemporary artist. “Andy Warhol won’t you please come home” goes the lyric of Simon and Garfunkel’s A Simple Desultory Philippic, (Or How I Was Robert McNamarre’d Into Submission) from the Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme album. That was 1967. I had that album and I knew who Andy Warhol was. He was famous enough to be part of the cultural narrative of the time. I think too that Salvador Dali was well known in his time. Certainly by the 1945 release of Hitchcock’s movie Spellbound which included dream sequences designed by Dali, he was well established in the popular lexicon.

So where does all of this leave us? There seems to be no question that contemporary art today stands in a changed if not diminished position in the overall cultural consciousness relative to the position it occupied in the first half of the 20th century. This could be due to many factors. Perhaps the explosion of modern art in the later half of the 19th century was a unique event and we are seeing things get back to normal now. Perhaps the digital age is taking its toll on static art forms of the earlier age and there is a slippage in relevance. And yet a third possibility, perhaps the postmodernists distaste for labels and categorization has just left them poorly branded in the marketplace and the previous epoch of modernists are still beating the newcomers pants off in brand awareness.

I leave all of the speculations to hang as it were with this one final thought on all of this relevancy business before I move on. It was noted again at dinner last night. As long as there are three year olds, crayons and walls there will be art. I may from time to time return to the relevancy topic, or not. I realize that in prior posts I had indicated some additional comment on the subject and perhaps that will come to pass eventually, however at this point I feel complete on the subject. My next interest is to explore the world of contemporary art in more detail. As much as the postmodernists may despise categorizations, the categorizers have been hard at work making up cubby holes for them and I want to look in all these cubby holes to see what is what.

Post Modernism

2011-02-21T00:02:00.002-05:00

Pop quiz. Name three post impressionist painters. What does the term fauves actually mean? Cubism spanned what years? Perfect score? Good, if not you need to go back to yesterday’s blog posting and study some more. We will wait for a bit.

So much for modern art. It left the building in 1975. Well, not every one got the memo, but it was over nevertheless and in its place came postmodernism and we have been living in a postmodern world ever since. So what is this postmodernism you ask? Well here is a fine sentence from Wikipedia on the topic,

Postmodernism is a movement away from the viewpoint of modernism. More specifically it is a tendency in contemporary culture characterized by the problematization of objective truth and inherent suspicion towards global cultural narrative or meta-narrative.
Or if you prefer

Compact Oxford English Dictionary: "a style and concept in the arts characterized by distrust of theories and ideologies and by the drawing of attention to conventions

Volumes have been written on the subject.. My own take on the demise of modernism and its replacement by postmodernism goes like this. The modernist period had an incredible run of over a hundred years. After a hundred years though the revolution got stale. Enter abstract expressionism. and with that modern art hit a wall, splat. Where do you go after you have dumped a bucket of paint on a floor mat, rolled around in it and then nailed it to a wall and called it art? Art it may be but what do you do for an encore. With abstract expressionism modern art did a Thelma and Louise exit. It was a train wreck intellectually speaking from which there was no encore and from the wreckage, the survivors wandered out into the world in search of something relevant, a new narrative freed form the intellectual posturing of the modern period, and they called it postmodernism.

That is my theory. Of course it overlooks the fact that pop art came in after abstract expressionism, but as I mentioned not everyone got the memo right away. Also you will excuse me for pointing this out, but I notice that there are still a lot of artists throwing paint out there and I see a lot of new stuff I would call surrealism. What does that mean? Old isms never die, they just get ignored by art historians? I think I am developing an inherent suspicion of the global cultural narrative.

There is one more item to mention before we jump into exploring the many nooks and crannies of contemporary art. There has been some grumbling in recent years of declaring postmodernism dead. It isn’t serious yet, but I just thought you ought to know. For the moment no one knows what to call the next epoch, post postmodernism?

The Isms of Modern Art

2011-02-20T00:02:00.002-05:00

One of the questions I am asked frequently at art shows is, what style of painting do you call this? The questioner generally is hoping I will come up with a word ending in ism. Anything less seems not to satisfy. Artists, art critics and those in the business are still coining up with new isms all the time, but to little effect beyond the insular world of contemporary artists and art galleries, as far as I can tell. An example of a new ism I came across recently would be “gemism”. This ism was put forward in 2004 by artist Anton Kandinsky and is descriptive of the fact that he paints a lot of gemstones in his paintings. I will be exploring the brave new world of contemporary art isms in the days to come in my quest to answer the question is painting still relevant, but for now I think it advisable to look back a bit at the isms that once were considered modern.

The isms most people would recognize as real words, and not something fabricated out of thin air, are those art movements which collectively come from the modern art period. Modern art entered in the 1860s with impressionism and exited in the 1970s with pop art. I would call this the era of the ism. Sorting through the isms of the modern art period is a reasonable task even if it does often daunt the once in a lifetime art museum patron. Recently in a stumble through art history in StumbleUpon I found this interactive website called The Modern Art Timeline. When the site first loads you will find yourself in the first epoch of the modern period. To get the big picture click the “Index” tab. I think from there it is pretty easy to figure out navigation. Along the way you will find definitions and multiple samples of representative artists all set on a timeline for context. I found this a very informative site filling in a number of the blank areas of my understanding of the modern art era It is well organized easy to use and if nothing else colorful.

StumbleUpon

2011-02-19T00:02:00.000-05:00

A few days ago I got an email with a link to a site I had not heard of before called StumbleUpon. How to describe it? Well it is a web surfing interface, free, but registration is required. You define categories of interest and the type of content you are looking for, perhaps just videos or photos or anything and everything. Then you start stumbling along. Based on your set preferences Stumble will navigate you from site to site all appropriate to your criteria.. Now when I am researching a project, it is pretty easy to get exactly what I am looking for with a Google search. Browsing for fun is another matter. Let’s face it, the amount of complete garbage on the Internet is nearly beyond computation.. Just browsing YouTube can be a drag. Typically on YouTube I hop from one video to the next. The content drifts from one subject area to the next and before you know it your way off in left field from where you started. StumbleUpon is not like that. It stays focused on your interests and it isn’t confined to just one site like YouTube. But here is the big plus as far as I am concerned, quality. I have only been surfing with StumbleUpon for a few days now but from what I have seen, the sites are all quality sites, no fuzzy inaudible videos, no moronic goofballs just good quality stuff. Now half at least of the sites I just skip by. Just click the Stumble button and the next site pops up, and I am sure that eventually I will stumble onto a bozo or two. I mean it is the Internet My recommendation is, if you like to just see something new but still something you would likely have an interest in, check out StumbleUpon.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, An Audio Book Review

2011-02-18T00:02:00.003-05:00

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson was recommended to me last December. Upon receiving this recommendation I checked the city library and discovered that an audio version was available but that I would be number 101 in the queue. It is apparently very popular. Two months later I received an email from the library informing me that the audio version of the book was waiting for me.

I should say at the outset that I don’t have a long history of reading crime novels. I only first started sampling them about two years ago. I read a bit of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Agatha Christie, some Sue Grafton, Sara Paretsky and Michael Connelly. Of the contemporary writers, Connelly is the one I prefer and return to read as new material becomes available. By virtue of this limited exposure to the genre my assessments therein may be equally limited, never the less I shall have a go at it.

This was an easy and entertaining story to listen to. The reader, Simon Vance was excellent, portraying characters from the 25 year old tattooed heroin, Lisbeth Salander to the 80 year old industrialist Henrik Vangar most convincingly. The plot holds together well with no obvious holes or loose ends left dangling. It is mostly a cerebral investigation of a possible crime committed 40 years earlier, but by the end there are plenty of spine tingling moments in the story.

There are a couple of subplots in the novel, the first of which serves to bring the characters together and to some extent set the timing for the rest of the novel. I said there were no loose ends which is true enough, however subplot A which starts the story off goes into a state of suspended animation for the bulk of the novel and isn’t seriously dealt with until after the main plot line is all but concluded a bit like a coda at the end of the book.

On reflection, the story, which was very engaging, was not the most interesting aspect of the book. What I am still puzzling over 48 hours later is the main character, or rather the female half of the main character duo Lisbeth Salander. She is a taciturn young woman, not particularly attractive, a mistrustful loner, a renegade and a punk with some exceptional, to say the least, abilities. She didn’t strike me as the usual sort of heroin for a crime novel. She struck me more like a Sci-Fi heroin, a genre that I have much more familiarity with. In many regards she could almost be a female Spiderman, troubled youth with super powers trying to sort out the moral and ethical issues her powers present her with.

It wasn’t until after I had wrestled with this puzzle for some time that I googled Steig Larsson for more background and found this. Steig Larsson died in 2004. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo was the first of three novels published after his death. The three novels collectively are known as the millennium series. The English titles of the other two novels in the series are ”The Girl Who Played With Fire” and “The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest” the girl being Lisbeth Salander, who is said to have been patterned after Pippi Longstocking, so much for my Spiderman theory. The biographical notes however did mention Larsson’s life long interest in Science Fiction.

The library waiting list for the remaining two novels is not quite as long as it was for the first so maybe by May I will have reported on the entire series. I will read all of these books.

Watson Rules!

2011-02-17T00:02:00.001-05:00

It was close on the third and final night with Watson behind for a good portion of the evening. However going into final jeopardy Watson had a small lead. If Ken had bet the ranch and Watson flubbed again as he did the night before, Ken would have won the round. But Ken didn’t bet the ranch and Watson not only got the final answer right he also went big with his wager. Point, Set, Match, Watson.

OK so Deep Blue proved that a computer could be designed to beat the best chess player mankind can come up with, and now Watson has thoroughly trounced us at Jeopardy. What is next? What should be the next challenge in the development of artificial intelligence? A computer that writes poetry? It’s been done. A computer that paints paintings? Don’t even get me started. Or perhaps a computer able to provide commentary for an NFL television broadcast? Now I am laughing out loud. No I think it is time to set a computing goal that is really relevant to society. I have been scratching my head tying to think where homo sapiens really needs help, where we seem to helplessly fall on our faces over and over again and it came to me. Replace the US House of Representatives with a computer.

I can already hear the outcry. You would be turning our government over to whatever corporation wrote the program! My reply, so how is that different from what we have now? Just substitute the word legislation for program and you have described our legislative process in a nutshell. I am not suggesting turning the whole government over to a computer anyway, just the most dysfunctional part. Ok that last bit is debatable. The gist of my proposal would be to let the humans keep the Senate and the President, checks and balances and all that. That at least was my first impulse.

Then I remembered that Watson got a bit confused about Toronto being a US city on the second evening and I will concede that this could have international repercussions. It would be rather embarrassing for the US government if the House of Representatives were to declare marshal law in say Ontario. So here is my compromise solution. For a first test case let’s pick a state legislature to replace. I will gladly volunteer my state, Indiana. Nothing much of any sense ever seems to come out of our legislature and Indiana has no international boundaries or much in the way of a military capability. Mostly what they do in the Indiana legislature is argue about what time to set the clocks at and how confusing it is to always be changing them. I still would keep the Indiana senate and governorship in human hands of course. For now anyway. I wonder if Watson has thought of forming a political action committee?

Watson Night 2

2011-02-16T00:02:00.001-05:00

Tonight on Jeopardy they completed the first round started Monday evening. Both nights a considerable amount of the program time was devoted to telling the Watson story. So Tuesday evening they played the double jeopardy round and final jeopardy. By the end of the game Watson had racked up $35,734 with Ken and Brad coming in with $2400 and $5400 respectively. Basically Watson smoked the competition. But the really quirky moment came in the final jeopardy round. The final jeopardy category was US cities and the answer was “Its largest airport is named after a WWII hero and its second largest airport is named after a WWII battle” Both Brad and Ken got the correct question, “What is Chicago?” Both having bet or nearly bet the ranch to end up with the totals noted above. Watson on the other hand muffed final jeopardy. His response was “What is Toronto???????” Including the question marks! What is up with that? Category US city, Toronto? But the cagey computer had the last laugh. Watson had wagered only $947 Tomorrow, Wednesday, they will play, I assume a full game, jeopardy, double jeopardy and final jeopardy and the grand totals of the three nights will determine the champion.

Man vs Machine

2011-02-15T00:02:00.002-05:00

After the first round of Jeopardy Watson the computer is tied with Brad with 5000 each. Ken is in third place back at 2000

No, that is not Watson in the photo. That would be the fictional HAL 9000 from “2001 A Space Odyssey”. Watson is a very real IBM creation named for IBM founder Thomas J Watson. Watson, the computer, was specifically designed to compete on the TV game show Jeopardy and Monday evening was the first of two nights on Jeopardy devoted to this historic man vs. machine face off. Watson’s competition for the two day match up are not slouches either. They are the two of the biggest winners in the history of the game, Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings. At first it looked like Watson was going to smoke the competition by racking up an impressive lead in the early going. As the round progressed though Watson stumbled on a couple of answers and both Ken and Brad gained ground on Watson with Brad pulling ahead at one point. Only with the last answer of the evening was Watson able to pull up to tie Brad.

In so far as I am a very infrequent viewer of program television, a medium I officially pronounced dead here just a few days ago. It was only by the merest chance that I heard about Watson’s Jeopardy contest appearance just the day before when, for a bit of relaxation, I searched out the NOVA website to see what viewing of interest I might find there. Of the selection of new program videos I found there I picked the one titled “Smartest Machine On Earth” and that is how I learned about Watson and his soon to be appearance on Jeopardy. So I decided to plug in my dead TV, and tuned in to see the show. With the match up so close after the first night, I plan to tune in again tomorrow to see what happens.

Artist's Statement

2011-02-14T00:02:00.000-05:00

As I might have mentioned before it is the time of the year when invitations to submit to the art fair jury process arrive in the mail. This past week three more arrived. In a few weeks deadlines will arrive and before the end of May the shows accepted to and rejected from will all be known for the year ahead. For now though the application process involves certain routine steps be followed. One is the preparation of images, usually digital, of past work to be included with the application for review by a jury to ascertain the quality of one’s work to be sure it meets the standards of the show in question. Another is the enclosing of check or checks for the booth fee in the event you are deemed acceptable and in many instances a jury application fee to cover the costs of determining if you are acceptable. This second fee is not refundable. There are other requirements of course, a signed waiver, description of work and so on and finally, though not always an “artist’s statement” (in 25 words or less).

It is this last bit that in years past has irked me to some extent. I understand that selecting who will get in and who will not can be a challenging task, especially if the show is a popular one and there are far more applicants than available spaces. For this reason I can accept that a rejection can be based on some minor infraction of the application process and so diligently I play the game and provide the asked for statement. If allowed enough space and or words my statement will typically contain the following paragraph

It is a staple of fine art venues to request an artist statement as part of the application process. This I find a breath taking irony in a culture that accepts fine art produced not just by the humans but also by monkeys, elephants, dolphins and who knows what other life forms. Given that these other species “artists” are never, to my knowledge at least, asked to provide an artist statement, and further considering that the works of these other species artists frequently command higher prices for their work than I get for mine, then, if there is any statement that I feel compelled to make, it is that, as an artist one must have a sense of humor about one’s work and thereby find a human distinction from the animal competition.

Careless Talk

2011-02-13T00:02:00.002-05:00

Back on Jan 28 in a posting I titled "Stats, Who Is Watching Who", I noted that I could not account for all of the traffic this blog gets. For some time now that traffic has been holding fairly constant at about 500 page views a month. This past Friday I by chance happened to stumble onto one source of those unknown page views. I had, as is my custom from time to time entered a google search for “skoalar” to see what turns up. When you have been dinking around in cyber space as long as I have, It can be surprising what turns up with your name attached to it. This past Friday’s search turned up a doosy. There on the first page of results I saw echoing back to me the title of my most recent blog posting, “TV is Dead Long Live Video.” That posting was barely 12 hours old and it had been snagged and regurgitated with links back to my blog from a website originating in Indonesia. It seems I had stumbled into a breaking news story with my remarks about Amazon entering the on demand video business and this website was trolling for related content wherever it might be found. No doubt a search engine was involved but since my remarks had been very neatly edited down to just the most pertinent bit about Amazon, a human editor must have been involved in the final cut. This particular web ferret has since moved on and my moment of Indonesian fame has flickered out otherwise I would have provided a link. As it is you will just have to take my word that this all happened.

The whole business of seeing one’s own words turn up in such an odd place did remind my very much of a cautionary tale from that repository of wisdom, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams. Here in text followed by video is that excerpt from the Guide recounting the origin and shocking outcome of the Vl’hurg war. The Arthur mentioned in the first paragraph is Arthur Dent one of the main characters in the book.

It is of course well known that careless talk costs lives, but the full scale of the problem is not always appreciated.
For instance, at the very moment that Arthur said, 'I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle,' a freak wormhole opened up in the fabric of the space-time continuum and carried his words far far back in time across almost infinite reaches of space to a distant galaxy where strange and warlike beings were poised on the brink of a frightful interstellar battle.

The two opposing leaders were meeting for the last time.

A dreadful silence fell across the conference table as the commander of the Vl'hurgs, resplendent in his black jewelled battle shorts, gazed levelly at the G'Gugvuntt leader squatting opposite him in a cloud of green sweet-smelling steam, and, with a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers poised to unleash electric death at his single word of command, challenged the vile creature to take back what it had said about his mother.

The creature stirred in his sickly broiling vapour, and at that very moment the words, 'I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle' drifted across the conference table.

Unfortunately, in the Vl'hurg tongue this was the most dreadful insult imaginable, and there was nothing for it but to wage terrible war for centuries.

The ensuing war and shocking conclusion are documented in this You Tube video. The Vl’hurg War

Revolution Then Evolution

2011-02-12T00:10:00.000-05:00

If there were no more walls to hang paintings on, would painters still paint pictures? Well yes of course, there would still be ceilings and sidewalks to mention a couple of alternative surfaces for painting on. That may sound like a stupid question to pose. How could there not be walls. You have to have walls. Nine hundred years ago though, it might not have sounded so stupid. You see back in the 12th century a technological revolution was underway in the building arts and it very much involved walls. Three inventions, the pointed arch, the vaulted ceiling and the flying buttress came together in a revolutionary new style of architecture embodied in the gothic cathedral. Gone were the heavy thick walls and the dark narrow spaces they enclosed and in their place entered vast open interiors with walls open to the light and ceilings soaring overhead all seemingly in defiance of gravity. It was a boom time for masons. It also became a boom time for stained glass window artisans. Where once there were walls, now there were vast openings for windows, and stained glass, which had been around for centuries, stepped in to fill the spaces.

So how faired painting in this gothic revolution? Not bad. A lot of wall space was lost but it had been dark torch lit wall space. What wall space remained now was much better lit and now there were nice open vaulted ceilings to paint on. Ceilings that a couple hundred years later Michelangelo would make good use of. This particular technological revolution seems to have been a win win for the arts in question. Moving forward a few more hundred years to the mid 19th century and another technological revolution, photography, one can not assume such an equable outcome.

Much has been written about the impact of photography on the graphic arts. Here I wish I had a better background in art history and will take input from those out there who are better acquainted with the subject. Nevertheless I would make this observation. Prior to the advent of photography painting was generally an exercise in depicting what the eye saw or could see. This was stretched to some extent in idealization of subject matter but Venus if she were painted, would have two eyes not three. The one exception to this sweeping generalization that comes to mind are the fantastic works of Hieronymus Bosch, who in the 16th century seems to have anticipated surrealism. In the main though the subjects for painting prior to the invention of the camera were faces and landscapes, interiors and perhaps a bowl of fruit. The camera if it didn’t wipe that market out completely, it certainly changed the game. The painters though met this challenge with a burst of creativity and an explosion of new styles of painting in the late 19th century and into the early 20th century, impressionism, cubism, surrealism, expressionism to name but a few. This was clearly a case where revolution led to evolution.

Today another revolution is underway, the digital revolution. No big surprise there. It is how the painting arts are responding to this revolution that is at the heart of my original question, are the painterly arts still relevant and that is where I will begin blogging when the subject comes around again.

Television Is Dead, Long Live Video

2011-02-11T00:01:00.004-05:00

Not much bloggage stirring around in my head for the blog tonight, just some thoughts on all the video content on the Internet. The one item I did want to get posted was a photo of the finished Beck Chapel painting which I had shown in progress a couple of weeks ago. A fair percentage of the regular readers of this blog are IU alumni and I figured they might like to see the finished product.

As for the video business, it has been evident for some time now that streaming video is a growing presence on the Internet. Perhaps because I am spending more time of recent searching out video content, I have noticed just how rapidly video content is growing on the Internet, and I have noticed some changes too. One big change, not unanticipated, yet not rejoiced about, is the increase in commercial advertising associated with video content. I find now that You Tube is inserting little pop up overlays to many of it’s video offerings and even more recently little video insertions for Metlife and Mormons that run before your video starts up.

The big success story for video is of course Netflix. Already a booming business model in video delivery by mail, I read not long ago that Netflix was going to rapidly expand its streaming video selection, seeing that as the fastest growing sector of the video market. Not far behind Netflix comes Hulu which is free, for now, but includes advertising breaks in its offerings and doesn’t have near the same quality of offerings as Netflix. I read again recently that Hulu was soon to launch, if not already a fact, a premium service. Yet another new comer to the streaming game is Amazon. The Amazon model is pay per view and must be very new since the selection there is still miniscule and the user interface needs a lot of work yet.

The one road block still keeping streaming video from sweeping into America like a tsunami is that most TV viewers prefer a more comfortable, larger screen viewing experience than is typically afforded by sitting at a home computer. Enter the Smart TV an Internet connected television. I haven’t been in an electronics store for some time so I don’t know if they are available and what the prices are. I don’t think Smart TV is quite here yet since I didn’t find much in the way of Internet sales offerings from a Google search.

In any event. I have more fun and I feel get better quality entrainment from an hour or so surfing You Tube and the like in an evening for clips for the Side Bar Café and Art Bizarre features on this blog, than watching anything on commercial television. As far as I am concerned programmed commercial television is dead.

Getting Rid Of “O”

2011-02-10T00:04:00.002-05:00

A couple of weeks ago a friend called up to let me know that he was getting rid of some “O” and wanted to see if I would take any of it. I knew exactly what my friend’s cryptic query was all about. For many years the letter “O” has stood for the word obstruction in our communications. Now obstruction can mean many things depending on the usage but most commonly between my friend and I it refers to some item, a material possession that has ceased to be of any use, an item if not headed for the land fill or municipal incinerator, at the very least headed for the Goodwill. We call it obstruction because that is what it is, an obstruction to life going on unimpeded. A reading of Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” will elucidate the concept. “O” is everywhere. It clogs our closets our garages and basements and can be found in every cabinet drawer and on every shelf in the house. The trick is to recognize “O” for what it is and get rid of it. Hence the necessity of going through one’s potential “O” on a regular basis and culling that which is of no longer any use.

To effectively cull “O” I recommend having a rule. My rule is, if it is something I haven’t used in the past two years, then what is the justification for keeping it. For example, yesterday I decided to go through my kitchen stuff and a twelve inch skillet turned up. It was past the two year mark so what was the justification for keeping it. I had gotten it to make omelets but had since discovered it is much better to make an omelet in a smaller skillet. I don’t use a skillet for anything else, so into the “O’ box. Another example a stack of a dozen or so dinner plates. I got them when I used to host dinner parties. Can I imagine ever hosting another dinner party? Not even remotely, so into the “O” box.. Once you get the hang of it, getting rid of “O” can be fun, even addictive. Every now and then I will find I need something that I once had but had since tossed out so I have to get another one of the same. This I figure is a small price to pay for a house that is easy to keep tidy and well organized.

Loss Of Relevance, A Few Examples

2011-02-09T00:02:00.002-05:00

I seem to have reached a crossroads in my series of postings on the question, Is painting as an art form still relevant. In hindsight I can see now that a more appropriate title to the series would have been, Is painting as an art form loosing relevance, but no matter. I shall press on. As for being at a crossroad, my intent at this point was to launch into an examination of all the technological changes historical and current that have and are impacting the marketplace determining the fate of all manner of human activity, painting included. In perusing this course three main themes will emerge. The first “the marketplace” has already been spoken of. The two additional themes to emerge shortly will be “revolution” and “evolution” It is still my intent to follow this general outline, but I believe I will digress momentarily and examine some examples of human activity other than painting that arguably have lost relevance, to see, by example, what we might understand the loss of relevance to mean.

Examples; pyramid building in the Egyptian style , Mo’ai sculpting, as in the big stone heads of Easter Island, and epic poetry presented in the oral tradition. Each of these activities could in some sense be considered an art form. Each of these activities is for all intents and purposes, apart form its interest as an historical study, completely irrelevant to 21st century society. No one is planning on building more pyramids. Though mo’ai sculpting is completely extinct, the odd massive stone sculpture does pop up from time to time. Mount Rushmore comes to mind. And epic poetry in the oral tradition, though not completely extinct, exists only in remote areas such as the Gallic hinterlands and in isolated mountain villages of western Turkey.

Let’s focus in on epic poetry in the oral tradition first. Narrative is an essential need of any society. It is what binds peoples together in a common identity and gives the clan, or nation identity. This narrative may be an historical account but frequently it takes on a mythic proportion. Stories of frontiersmen and cowboys remain bedrock components of the American narrative. Centuries ago before writing existed and wide spread literacy was common the only way of maintaining a cultural narrative was by the spoken word handed down from one generation to the next. And so epic poetry in the oral tradition was essential to the fabric of those very ancient societies. Then a revolution happened, writing appeared, and then more importantly literacy spread to the populace and slowly over time the relevancy of the oral tradition slipped away. It lingered on as an art form as an “art for art’s sake” indeed it lingers to this day, but only on the cusp of extinction with those who still care, disparately trying to record the last of the old people who can still recite the old stories. As a performing art it barely registers a pulse. So what does this example tell us? It demonstrates that even though a human activity becomes completely irrelevant to society that activity can linger on in a twilight world for long time.

What of pyramid building and mo’ai sculpting? I picked these two example because in recent years there have been Nova episodes formatted around the theme of demonstrations on how the pyramids were built, how the mo’ai were made. Invariably these Nova excursions follow the same pattern; collect a bunch of engineers, archeologists and devotees with a bunch of theories, set a project task such as tipping an eight ton block of stone on end and put them to work. At some point the project devolves into a squabble between a couple of alphas, a lot of head scratching ensues but eventually the block of stone is dragged, lifted and tipped into place, high fives all around. This is not pyramid building or mo’ai sculpting. It is an excursion into speculative fantasy. The truth is if we decided to build a pyramid or sculpt a mo’ai head today, which is not about to happen, but just saying, if. We wouldn’t know how to do it. We would have to reinvent the art.

Is this pertinent to a discussion of the trajectory painting as an art form? Well, it does set a time frame. We are talking about a protracted process of decline and it does point to a pattern of decline. Loss of relevance leads to diminished practice which results in loss of knowledge and skills resulting in a long slow decline. And with that I will return to my original course and take up those revolutions which have and are shaping the world of art and perhaps determining the fate of painting with my next posting.

Lessons to be learned from the ice storm of 2011.

2011-02-08T00:01:00.002-05:00

Lesson number 1, Always have 20 lb of ice melt on hand. I never bought ice melt, rock salt, before but I definitely will be stocking up asap.

Lesson number 2, Food. I thought I was in pretty good shape there since I recently started stocking for 2 to 3 weeks at a time and I had just been to the market the Thursday before the storm hit. And in fact I didn’t run low on any food items to speak of. Still, I came too close for comfort this time and looking forward, I think it would be prudent to stock some emergency items should a future disruption last longer than 2 weeks. Frozen veggies would be number one on that list. I don’t as a rule do frozen veggies, preferring fresh but at least for the winter time I think I should make use of the empty freezer space and store away a dozen or so packets of veggies. Dried beans is another item I haven’t stocked lately either. There wasn’t a lentil or pinto in the house. And finally dried fruit.

Lesson number 3, Water. I buy my drinking water in 5 gallon jugs and keep two at a time which is about a three week supply again. That has to go up to 3 jugs. I don’t like tap water.

Chances are another storm like this last one won’t be along for another 20 years but you never know. We might get blasted again next week. The truth be told I had it easy. My electrical power did not get interrupted. Many were not so fortunate. Some in central Indiana went as long as 24 hours with out power. For me no power means no heat. It could have been one long cold day. Had this storm been more of the freezing rain variety rather than ice pellets, power outages would have been worse and longer. I have never had a winter power outage but if this was a wake up call then I better think about the possibility. The essentials, as far as I have thought about it, are heat, light and boiling water for cooking and coffee. For heat I am considering one of the new propane emergency heaters. For light, I would like one of the new LED lanterns, and I have often considered the merits of a propane camp stove.

For a final lesson learned, if I ever buy another house, which I hope will never be necessary, get one with a shorter driveway!

Salt

2011-02-07T00:08:00.002-05:00

Saturday I decided I better see what the outside world was doing. So still iced in I put my heavy duty winter boots on and set out on a trek to the closest major intersection. The boots are the best boots ever made. I call them my moon boots, in part because I purchased them just a few years after Neil Armstrong’s boots first stepped down on the moon and they kind of look like the original moon boots. The boots are well into their 4th decade of use.

My destination was to be the intersection of 21st and Arlington, not what you would call a thriving hub of commerce. This area of the city has been in decline for many years, ever since I bought those boots come to think of it. Presently there are three establishments open for business there, an Army Navy Surplus, a Family Dollar on one corner and diagonally across the intersection a service station slash convenience store. If I could them I was interested in buying a loaf of bread and some salt, the drive way kind that is. What little salt I had on hand I had used up. When I actually got down to picking a hole down to the pavement there is more like 2 inches of ice out there. Of course I was obliged to shovel the additional four inches of snow to get down to the ice to discover the depth of the situation.

I got the loaf of bread but of course there was no rock salt to be had. I have since read that city wide rock salt is a scarce commodity and prices have skyrocketed, of course. I could have tried the next bigger intersection down at 10th and Arlington. That would be another mile farther on, but I wasn’t in the mood for that. The footing was precarious and there was a good chance I would find no salt there either, So I headed home with my bread. Then on the way home I had a thought. I hadn’t used all of the salt I had, just all of the rock salt in the garage. I still had almost a whole box of Morton’s table salt in the kitchen pantry. It is a hold over of my days before I went low sodium. So when I got home I sprinkled that on the drive as well. I only covered about a third of the drive figuring that I didn’t want to spread it too thin.

That evening I went out to see the results and I found some progress, I was able to scrape up about an inch of the ice on a third of the drive still leaving one inch hard as a rock. I figured that if I could get 5 more boxes of Morton’s, I might just break out of this ice jam.

So the next day, Sunday I set out again for my neighborhood Family D. No Morton’s. They had flour and sugar and between the two an empty space on the shelf. Could it be that I was not the only one to figure out that salt was salt. It would seem so. OK well leave no stone unturned, I headed across the street to the service station slash convenience store and there I found three boxes of Morton’s still on the shelf. I bought them all. The owner at the check out, I think he is Pakistani, just looked at me and said, with that rising inflection of question Pakistanis and Indians use, Ice? I just said ,Oh Ya.

As I write this blog entry it is Sunday evening. The Super Bowl score is Green Bay 14 Pittsburgh 3, and the salt is down. hopefully to good effect. I will know more in the morning. I salted only the bottom half of the drive as that is where the incline is its greatest.

Ice Storm Aftermath

2011-02-05T00:06:00.001-05:00

I suppose it is worth mentioning that I am still iced in as a consequence of the worst ice storm in a decade hitting Indy last Tuesday. The sun is out today, Friday, but so far it doesn’t seem to have made a dent in the glacier covering the drive. I have been out to check on it several times yesterday and today to see if I might chop down to pavement. Not much luck with that. I could slide out to the street I suppose, but what would be the point. I have provisions enough for a week, two if need be and if I did get my car down to the street, I would not be able to get it back up in the drive without a winch so for now I am staying put This current state of affairs incidentally would explain the recent flurry of blog postings. It is either that or succumb entirely to cabin fever.

Helen Of Troy - A Book Review

2011-02-04T00:03:00.003-05:00

I picked up Helen of Troy, the audio book version, by Margaret George, read by Justine Eyre, on impulse in a browse some weeks ago at my local library branch. It proved to be a daunting task to complete, 25 CDs in all. My thought was to listen to one or two disks a day but things came up, as they always do. Before I knew it my three week lending period was do to expire and I was forced to renew and redouble my efforts to complete this novel. Which I did.

There were a couple of other factors which put me off a bit early on. The voice of the reader for one. This is something one always confronts with audio books when hearing a new reader, and something one generally becomes accustom to. In this case the reader’s inflection was obviously British. Generally I find the many British inflections pleasing to listen to from Eliza Doolittle to Monty Python to William Shakespeare. Ms Eyre’s inflection has that slightly nasal timbre of the British upper class that can at times irritate my otherwise rustic Hoosier ears … yes, quite. This I became used to and it was not an issue past the first few disks.

Another small annoyance was the limited perhaps one would say tepid voice early on the author gives Paris, Helen’s lover. In their early passionate encounters all Paris seems to be able to say is “Oh, Helen…Oh Helen!” Surely there could have been a happy medium struck between torrid romance novel dialogue and this rather inarticulate offering. But again this was only an annoyance early on.

The story, well to say that Homer’s Iliad is a classic of western literature is an incredible understatement. It is “the” classic of western literature. I have read the Iliad once, English translation of course, in high school 45 years ago or there about. Since then I have seen a couple of times productions of Euripides play The Trojan Women and tangentially of note Michael Wood’s excellent TV series In Search of the Trojan War. The story is one I am familiar with and it is a gripper. In respect to staying true to Homer and in bringing a fresh perspective to the tale I think Margaret George succeeds brilliantly.

The novel is told in Helen’s voice from beginning to end, which cast a different light on the saga for me. Different even from that of Euripides play which is told in the voices of Hecuba and her daughters. I give you two example of this different perspective. First, I don’t recall Agamemnon as being a particularly sympathetic figure in the Iliad, but as leader of the Greeks, he was so to speak one of the good guys. In this recounting he is a butchering war monger who gets exactly what he deserves in the end when his wife, Clytemnestra stabs him to death in his bath in revenge for the earlier sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia. A second example, Paris, Helen’s abductor / lover, is in my memory something of a wimp. He is still a bit of a wimp at times in this telling, but one with a lot more substance to him.

I finished up the novel, listening to the last eight disks in one day and was held spellbound throughout to the very end.

The Relevancy of Painting and Samuel Morse

2011-02-03T00:14:00.002-05:00

Did you know that Samuel Morse, before securing a patent for the invention of the telegraph in 1847 and inventing his famous Morse code, was an accomplished painter? I didn’t until a couple of years ago when I read a biography of his life. An image of one of his paintings, The House of Representatives, is posted here. In the biography I read that, though an accomplished painter, he wasn’t a particularly successful painter, in the economic sense, and happening upon the invention of the telegraph was just a bit of good luck. He wasn’t really an inventor, just someone with a speculative mind able to see possibilities others hadn’t connected yet. The story is that he was returning to America, and at a dinner during the passage home a discussion developed on some of the new discoveries in electromagnetism. Speculations ensued and Morse speculated that communication over long distance might be possible. Upon landing in America he set his paints aside and went to work realizing what was perhaps the very beginning of the technological revolution. In time a revolution that would manifest the telephone, wireless radio, television, even this the latest manifestation the Internet, the medium of this blog. I find this an irony of staggering proportion. For if indeed the painterly arts struggle for significance in the modern world it is primarily due to the competition from technological innovations such as these, and it was a painter, Morse who set it all in motion.

Well, it was an idea whose time had come. Morse was just the first to grasp it and he spent the rest of his life fighting off the many others who were right on his heels. Before I leave Morse though, there is one more facet of his story that I find germane to the discussion. I also learned form my read of two years ago, that the art market of the early 19th century had a curiously unique aspect quite beyond anything known today. Morse, unable to convince the federal government to purchase his painting of The House of Representatives, did what was the custom of the day. He took his painting on tour. Renting halls in one city after another, he displayed his painting to the general public charging a modest admission price. A concert tour so to speak. Alas, his tour was a flop, but isn’t it amazing that such a market even existed. To contemplate such a market today would be laughable. I muse at times sitting in my booth at an art fair, how much I could charge for entry into my space, a nickel? Could I make enough that way to pay the booth fee? Doubtful.

The market though, and the competition therein, is today the ultimate arbitrator of relevance in our modern world and there in a nutshell is the central premise of my original question. Are the painterly arts still relevant? Perhaps still yes, but what is the trajectory of this relevance. What is the market share and what is the competition doing? In my next posting I shall look at the competition more closely specifically how technology has impacted the painter’s market.

Happy Groundhogs Day

2011-02-02T00:02:00.001-05:00

If Punxsutawney Phil’s Hoosier cousin managed to break through the ice crusting over his snug burrow, if he was even crazy enough to want to go out after yesterday’s ice storms left a half inch coating of ice on his world, he would find a shadow less ice shrouded landscape outside. No shadow, early Spring. (And no disparaging our beloved Punxsutawney rodent Mr. K).

Whether there is any truth to this legend or not, Groundhogs day is my favorite holiday of the year. Why so? Well, lots of reasons. Near the top of the list is the fact that Groundhogs day is not an occasion to shoot off firearms or recreational explosives. Another is that offers no excuse to go out and get blinding drunk and menace other travelers with impaired driving. I know, for many, these are a couple of the reasons that make other holidays such festive occasions. Let’s just say I am not one of those many. Another reason for my preference for Groundhogs day is that one does not feel obliged to buy a bunch of Groundhogs day junk at the malls.

But those are all negatives you say, is there nothing positive to say to recommend this otherwise bleak day in early February. Yes, I say, there is, and the top reason of the lot. The central message of Groundhogs day is that Spring, whether six weeks away or with luck sooner, is on its way, and in this I rejoice.

As a way of celebrating this special day, the Side Bar Café link today will take you a grooveshark’s recording of the groundhogs day alarm clock from the movie named for the holiday. Happy Groundhogs Day!

When Painting Was Really Relevant

2011-02-01T08:59:00.002-05:00

Ars Gratia Artis, So says the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion. Art For Art’s Sake, and with this any discussion of the relevance of art is ended. History though tells a different tale. Tomb paintings of the ancient Egyptians recorded the noble deeds of their occupants, that they might glory all the more in the afterlife. Medieval Christendom hung paintings its churches to awe and bring the peasantry into an appropriate reverence for the power and glory of god and, oh yes by the way, the church and priesthood too. Then the Medici the great renaissance patrons of the arts used art to again awe the citizens of Florence as well as any competitors for power. And so on up to the near present most notably by the communists and their “workers art” Throughout history the painterly art has been used to the purposes of the powerful and wealthy. It was in opposition to this fact of life, so Wikipedia tells me, that the phrase l’art pour l’art was first used.

But does, I ask, l’art pour l’art, ars gratia artis, art for art’s sake, pay the rent? Put food on the table? Perhaps for a few still but not I think as in those days past when church, state and empire ruled. I will leave that as a debatable point for it is not my mission to deny that painters do not make a way in the modern world. My assertion is that it is a way loosing ground, loosing relevance, to many factors, and I will take up that theme in subsequent postings.

In this posting I just wish to point to the long view of the situation, that there was a time when painters didn’t just work for the powerful, they were the powerful. If what archeologists tell us is true, back at the dawn of man’s time, when he lived in caves or at any rate painted pictures there, the painters of those cave depictions of game animals and hunters in the chase were considered vital to the very existence of the clan, and the painters of those pictures were though of as shaman with magical power and held in high esteem, sitting in the clan councils at nearly the same level as the chief himself. If this is so then it is a far cry from where we are now. I think even today artists of all stripes are credited with being messengers of a sort, by virtue of their standing somewhat outside the mainstream. How often though do you suppose, when the councils of war meet in the great Washington DC, that an artist is included in the discussion? Relevance it seems to me is relative and it has diminished in the last 17,000 years.

Is Painting Relevant as an Art Form

2011-01-31T07:02:00.002-05:00

I have been pondering a series of blog articles around the question, is art, painting, relevant? Painting, as an art form that is. Well of course, as a painter my knee-jerk answer is obviously, yes … I think. And as a society I believe we at least want the answer to be yes. But that only begs the further questions how and why is art relevant. I would like to consider in some depth these questions both from a contemporary perspective as well as an historical perspective.

It is perhaps a fool’s mission to attempt a consideration of the relevance of art with out first defining what art is. Nevertheless that is where I am headed. My implicit definition of what art is may very well become evident in the process. Again, my thoughts and remarks are meant to pertain to the painting arts only, and that will no doubt prove to be a source of confusion at times. I will attempt to make this point clear as I go along, but the temptation to just use the words art and artist in my restrictive sense is significant. I wish there were another term I could use. Painters and paintings of course, but is it clear that I am not talking about house painters then? It is a necessary clarification I have to make often enough with the general public. Another option would be to use the terms 2D art and 2D artist. That is how art fair applications draw the distinction. I have never cared for the term 2D artist though. It sounds like I am a being living in a two dimensional world whose mind would be boggled by the concept of a third dimension. All I can promise is that I will work on this problem.

So, when might one expect to see the beginning of these articles? Soon is the thought here. Mixed in with the day to day gibberish lately typical of this blog. Definitely before the crocus bloom. At that point all promises are off. I have an idea for the first article. The title will be. ”When Art Was Really Relevant”

You Tube and the Tiger

2011-01-30T08:33:00.003-05:00

Getting reacquainted with You Tube has been a trip. I first opened a You Tube channel in late 2006 and for several months I played around with making video clips. It was fun for a while but as is typical for me, when Spring rolled around …

In any event with the exception of one or two videos uploaded since, my channel has languished in obscurity. That has been fine with me. I still every now and then will get an email from You Tube that some odd soul out there has subscribed to my channel. As if I might post something new. Ha, well I guess the joke is on me because once again I plan to upload videos.

I said my YT channel has been languishing, and that is true with one exception. One of the videos from 2006 went viral in a small way. I did a recitation of William Blake’s immortal poem The Tiger. The whole thing was an excursion in over done special effects, a ghostly image of tigers fading into my face, me reciting the poem all superimposed on flames, the crackling of fire so loud that it most of the time drowns out the words of the poem. It really is a wretched video. At last check, it had been viewed 27, 236 times. This even though of the two dozen or so videos I have posted, the Tiger has gleaned more thumbs down votes than otherwise, a verdict I heartily agree with.

The way this video happened to get so many views, I have deduced, is because a flurry of William Blake themed websites picked up on it and linked into it. I know this because when I google “skoalar” I find them, by the score.

The true irony of it all is that I did a painting I called Tiger, Tiger not long after that video posting. It is one of my favorite “unsold paintings” Personally I think it is one of my better works. For two years I packed that painting around to every show I did but it got barely a nibble and so it is part of my closet collection now. If I could have just somehow linked those 27,236 views of the poem video to my painting.

Stats, Who Is Watching Who

2011-01-28T21:53:00.003-05:00

Something I don’t remember from when I started this blog, maybe it is a new feature, are the viewer stats. It is the typical how many page views sort of information you might expect and I have been watching them for a few weeks and they raise some puzzling questions. For instance, I get on average between 15 and 25 page views per day. Ok I can account for two or three of those per day from my own activity, checking to see what a new posting looks like. Despite an intended feature allowing me to suppress the count of my page views, the feature has a bug and my views get counted no matter what. I also can account for maybe 5 or 6 regular viewers from the comment postings and email I get off line. That adds up to at best 10 hit’s a day. So the question is where are the additional 5 to 15 hits coming from? One possibility is that one of my regulars is checking in 5 to 10 times a day. Two or even possibly three if we are in a comment exchange I can believe but not 5 to 10 and not every day.

There is more. The stats section is really cool in that it breaks the viewers locations down by country. I seem to be getting a lot of page views from Europe, in particular the Netherlands, Russia, Germany and France. On one day in particular the were 44 page views from the Netherlands alone. Fascinating, if it can be believed. I have my doubts.

Another feature of the blog stats are the totals by page. The most popular page at this point is the one titled Music Sharing with 21 hits so far. That I can understand I think because of a link to a music clip there. (be advised that I plan to remove that link soon so you will want to save it to your favorites if you intend to keep listening to the clip) The second most popular page though is a puzzle tough. With 18 hits so far it is a tie between The book review “Atlantic” and a posting from Dec 21 called “Painting Process & Hulu” Go figure? And one more in fourth place with 17 hits is the recent piece called Ophiuchus. If anyone out there would care to speculate on an explanation for any or all of this, feel free. That invitation I would especially extend to any oversees viewers, if indeed you do exist.

The Plan

2011-01-28T08:56:00.001-05:00

A day or so ago one of my regular blog readers requested more blog time devoted to painting, the how to step by step stuff. Well that is one of if not the primary reason I started this thing in the first place, but it’s tricky. Still photography and written text are a cumbersome way to convey the idea. What I need is to start incorporating video content and that is the catch. Oh. I have the cam and I have done that sort of thing before. I still have some of my videos up on You Tube, but I have slept many times since then and there is a steep relearning curve to deal with, the cam, the editing software and the ins and outs of You Tube. Ok. I did it before so I can do it again. It is just a matter of committing the time to do it. This is winter. There is the time. What else is there.

Then there is this. Come mid March as soon as the snow is gone and the first even slightly warm day rolls around, it is good by paints and hello garden. If the blogging is going to continue come Spring, it is going to shift focus to the garden and here again video would be a major plus.

So that pretty much settles it, the vid cam battery is recharging as I write and I have dug out the operating booklet to incorporate into my bedtime reading material. Hopefully in a week or two I will be uploading some fresh amt’l to You Tube and linking to from here. I think I will prefer going that route as opposed to embedding the video file here directly, which I could do. That however would quickly exhaust my blog memory allocation which I would rather not do.

While on the subject of content, You will have perhaps noticed the recent addition of occasional You Tube and Groove Shark linkage in the new Side Bar Café feature over on the right. The plan is continue that with hopefully entertaining clips of a topical nature. If you have any recommendations or requests for inclusion into the Side Bar Café program feel free to send them along either by comment or email.

One more item then for to day and that is no blog days. Yesterday Thursday was a no blog day. Thursday will typically be a no blog day since my Thursday schedule is way to full to include an hour or so in the morning for this sort of thing. When show season gets going next Summer there will be more frequent no blog days. I will try to keep you posted on the plan.

Frogs and Toads of Southern Indiana

2011-01-26T08:14:00.004-05:00

Today I am going to do a bit of bragging and promotion for brother Geoff and his latest sound recording. Geoff Keller as many will already know is a nationally recognized leader in the field of birdsong recordings and has produced through the Cornell Lab of Ornithology many CDs of birdsong. Most recently though he has turned his talent and high tech recording equipment on capturing the sounds of the “Frogs and Toads of Southern Indiana” and with the collaboration of Rosemary Saurer has produced a CD by that name. I have listened to it and I can tell you it is one of the most intriguing collections of sounds I have ever heard. For all you frog and toad lovers out there this is unquestionably a must have CD.

Regrettably I can’t direct you to a website where you might inquire about a purchase, nor will you likely find it anytime soon in stores near you. You might try contacting Geoff directly but I don’t know if he is even ready to start marketing by mail. I can promise you that a supply will be available here at tulipalooza this Spring. In the mean time, you may find this interesting. Some time ago a local TV station did a feature interview of Geoff which I by chance found posted on You Tube. Here is a link to the video. Geoffrey Keller Interview

Progress on Beck Chapel

2011-01-25T08:47:00.003-05:00

I have just been plodding along on the current painting. Here it is as of this morning. The past few days I have been laying down the background base which is now almost done. So a little bit more of that to do then I will set this baby aside for a couple of days for everything to set up so that I can start the final assault on all the tiny little bits of leaves and twigs. In the mean time I have another hors d'oeuvres on the drawing board to occupy my attention.

Ophiuchus

2011-01-24T07:25:00.006-05:00

I think it is a well known fact that if you read too much news, your brain is liable to clog up with hooey and hogwash. At least that is my observation so I am careful to take my news in moderation. As a consequence I sometimes miss out on some of the more absurd news items of the day. A case in point, a friend just asked me what I thought of the recent controversy over adding Ophiuchus to the zodiac. Say what? (my thoughtful response). Yes indeed, it turns out some loony astronomer named Parke Kunkle in Minnesota stated in a TV interview that the earth’s axis had shifted relative to the sun over the last few thousand years, and therfore it was now necessary to add a thirteenth sign to the zodiac, specifically Ophiuchus, the serpent bearer. This is hooey on so many levels it boggles the mind. To say it is hooey astrology, which it most certainly is, may be a tautology, but it is also hooey astronomy and I cannot let that pass.

Yes, there is a constellation called Ophiuchus, pronounced OFF-ee-YOO-kuss. And yes the axis of the earth does rotate, shift is a poor way to describe it, in a regular pattern relative to the plane of its orbit about the sun. This is called precession. That much of the report is solid astronomy. The salient fact, that the earth’s precession, a motion similar to the axis of a toy top moving in a slow circle as its rotation slows down, is hardly newsworthy, isn’t mentioned until well past the bogus headline.

Precession is a difficult thing to explain. Its effect is similar to riding a tilt-a-whirl. Nevertheless I shall take a go at it and in the process expose this rubbish about adding a sign to the zodiac for what it is. What is needed is a demonstration, in this case a thought demo. We need to go back in time, say 2500 years, and we need to go where the sky is good and clear. Oh yes, and we need to be on the equator or as close to it as possible, so Sherman set the wayback for the Nazca plain in South America and the year 500BC. Be sure to bring a deck chair.

Now, set your deck chair up facing due east and get comfy. We are going to be here a while. First, we need to turn off the sun so we can see the stars all the time. Check. Now look east. Check. What you see are stars coming up over the horizon. The ones directly to the east rise straight up and head west and go straight down. The ones a bit to the north do much the same thing except the path they take is more akin to arcs which get smaller the farther to the north they are. You might be able to see a star due north right on the horizon that isn’t moving at all. It just stays there all the time. Same story looking south. And this goes on and on, over and over, same stars, same paths, time after time, year after year until you are old and grey. But not forever!

OK next let's turn the sun up just a bit, not all the way but enough so you can at least see where it is and for the sake of argument let’s say it is the first day of Spring so when it comes up over the eastern horizon it is dead bang due east. The next time it comes up it is again dead bang, um …almost due east. Actually it is just a wee bit north of due east. After a week or so it is getting noticeable mixed in with those stars to the north and so on. Until the latter part of June and then it, the sun, starts slipping back to the south ends up due east again in September and keeps on heading south until it turns north again in late December, all this in the course of a year while daily zipping up and over, up and over day after day. The times when the sun rises due east at the equator are called equinoxes and the times when it hits its high and low points north and south are called solstices. I know this is taking a lot of set up but stay with me.

And so it goes for all appearances, year after year, century after century. The stars following their same old paths and the sun snaking slowly along the same path from one year to the next. This path the sun is snaking along is called the ecliptic, and because we have the dimmer on the sun turned, we can see the stars it is passing by along its path. On that first day of Spring we can see that the sun is right in a bunch of stars we call the constellation Aries, but the sun doesn’t stay in Aries. The sun slowly moves on to the next group called Taurus. Aries and Taurus don’t move. They just keep spinning over our heads day in and day out, but the sun does appear to move from one constellation to the next. In all, these constellations are called the signs of the zodiac. One of the constellations that the sun does come close to is called Ophiuchus, and maybe we could count it as one of the signs of the zodiac too but we already have twelve and twelve is such a much more even and wonderfully divisible number than thirteen, that we just stick with twelve. And that is that, as far as we can tell at this point.

Now jump forward 2500 years to present time and let’s stay down on the equator and see what is different. Well the stars haven’t moved perceptibly relative to each other. Aries is still next to Taurus, and the sun is still snaking its way along the same path of stars as before. It still comes just as close to Ophiuchus as before too. What has changed is that where before Aries used to come up dead bang due east over and over again, it is now Pisces that is coming up dead bang due east over and over again, and Aries appears to have slipped into the crowd just to the north. So now on the first day of spring when the sun rises due east at the equator, it is in the constellation Pisces, not Aries anymore. Oh yes and one more thing is different. That star you might have seen to the north that wasn’t moving at all? Well it has moved too, and it is making circles now and a different star is standing still on the northern horizon.

So what does this all mean? Well just this. The ecliptic, the sun’s apparent path relative to the fixed stars, Ophiuchus included, hasn’t changed one iota in the last 2500 years. For that to have happened the earth’s orbit would have had to jump out of the plane of the ecliptic which it most definitely has not done. So it makes no more sense to suggest including the constellation Ophiuchus in the zodiac today than it did 2500 years ago. To suggest otherwise is just bad astronomy.

What has changed due to the wobble of the earth’s axis is the direction in the sky that the earth’s axis is pointing and consequently the direction in the sky the sun appears in front of when it rises on the first day of spring and for that matter every other day, but no matter what day it is the sun is always going to be snaking along on the same old path. called the ecliptic, zodiac and passing by the same old stars called the signs of the zodiac and yes still passing close to Ophiuchus but not close enough to count as a sign of the zodiac then or now.

Beck Chapel

2011-01-23T09:53:00.003-05:00

Just thought I would give you a peak at what I am working on presently. The subject of the painting is Beck Chapel which is located on the IU campus in Bloomington. It was a year ago last Fall when I was there with a friend on a photo expedition that I took the picture I am using to paint this piece.

I think I am over the hump with this job now. The building part is mostly done, I just have to paint in the trees and leaves yet and a few building details. There was one setback along the way. When I mixed up the base color for the stone work on the chapel, I used burnt umber. That was a mistake. The over all result turned out way to dark, but I didn't fully appreciate this until I started to paint in the foreground base, also of burnt umber. It was all looking way too dark. The only thing to do was to paint over the completed stone work which initially took two and a half day to lay down. UGH!

Actually it is not as bad as you might think. In painting over, I don't have to build up the characteristic texture. I just have to brush a new light layer over the old which goes much faster. On the plus side this additional top coat does add more subtle color variation to the finished work. On the minus side, it is very hard to get the same sheen on the second coat when it dries and that will be evident relative to areas not painted over. I have mitigated this effect somewhat by adding a liberal amount of linseed oil to the new layer. By the way the right choice of base for the stone work was raw sienna which is much lighter and warmer than the burnt umber. A second mitigating factor to applying a second coat on the stonework is that much of the rest of the painting will have a second layer applied anyway. That is the only way to deal with the chaos of leaves. And in any event six months from now if the painting hasn't sold, I can spray varnish it and the mentioned sheen variation will all be paved over as it were by the uniformity of high gloss varnish.

The End Of Discovery, a book review

2011-01-22T09:08:00.003-05:00

The End Of Discovery by Emeritus Professor of Physics Russell Stannard stands as my second book of the new year, this time one read the old fashion way, one page at a time. The question on the dust jacket, are we approaching the boundaries of the knowable, is the central question of the book. The answer, maybe ... Hard sayin', not knowin'.

Now that might strike one as a bit equivocal, but keep in mind we are dealing with a scientist here taking on what might be a rather embarrassing question. The book does take on many of the imponderables of physics and cosmology such as the creation of the cosmos, the size of the cosmos, what is up with quantum physics and what is spacetime really. None of these topics were new to me nor did I find in the book any new startling understanding for any of them. It has been my suspicion for some time now that not only are we approaching the limits of the knowable but we may have even wandered a bit off into la la land already. String theory comes to mind in this regard, a topic also covered briefly in the book in one of the final chapters.

So why is it that Prof Stannard thinks we may be approaching the end of the science party? Well there are a variety of reasons. One it costs a blinding amount of money anymore to do big science. The USA bailed out on big time particle research quite a few years ago when in opted out of the next generation of mega buck particle accelerators, leaving the field to the Europeans and their recently fired up Large Hadron Collider. More to the point though, man, an animal evolved to survive the African savanna may not have the right sort of brain structure to comprehend say an 11 dimensional universe. Perhaps a hyper intelligent, pan dimensional race from another galaxy might do better, we can only hope. Ultimately though, Stannard offers that the universe may just be one of those things you can never really know.

Ah well, as I said it is an OK book.

365 Radio

2011-01-21T09:24:00.002-05:00

The topic of the best web radio option expands. Some weeks ago "365 radio" was suggested in comment here as yet another web radio option. With a reminder of that in an off line email yesterday, I checked out 365 radio last night.

At the outset I should say that any one to one comparison of the three web radio options so far under discussion; Pandora, Grooveshark and 365 would be beyond my ability and if nothing else, unreadably long. To start off with, I am not evaluating each on an equal footing. I am paying $3 a month for Pandora premium and only test driving the free on line options of the other two. And in any event, I dare say not all listeners are alike and what may, in this case, be sauce for the goose need not necessarily be sauce for the gander.

So what was 365 like? Well, it is a myriad of individual web radio stations with each station formulated to a very specific musical genre. Unlike the other two options discussed, there is no programing input from the listener other than picking a station, just a bijillion stations to choose from. And I would suspect that the number of repeat selections (one of the generally agreed big objections to Pandora) on any given station would be lower than on Pandora. For one thing I would guess that a programed station such as one finds on 365 would know that The Eagles "Hotel California" on the greatest hits album is still really the same song as the live in concert version, a distinction that eludes Pandora completely.

For taking a blind leap into the unknown world of web radio, a tip of the hat to 365. After trying for a minute or two several classic rock stations I decided to settle in on the station Bosso Nova Breakfast and it was really cool for about three hours. A wag of the finger though to the commercials. This was far from commercial free radio. After three hours, I had heard enough about H&R Block's special deal and the virtues of Home Depot even though the later was in Spanish or Portuguese or whatever. Radio commercials, commercials of any kind is a sauce that is poisonous to this gander. Its why I don't watch TV, AT ALL! Perhaps there are less commercial intense stations to be found on 365. The likelihood of my finding them on my on is minimal. I would return to 365 for one reason to find artists of a specific genre that I would take back to Pandora to seed a new station.

As for Grooveshark, it gets a tip of the hat for user control of content. One feels a little like they have broken into the music bank when listening to GS. And indeed GS is presently fighting off copyright litigation. One suit with EMI has been settled but a more recent filing by UMG is still pending. One suspects that if GS is to survive it will require major surgery of its format. But as noted here in comment earlier, for now, the good times are rolling. My biggest wag of the finger at GS is content quality, specifically volume levels. The quality and volume level from one selection to the next varies too much to just build a four hour play list and let her rip. There is a lot of getting up and resetting the volume with GS

No, I shall stick with Pandora. Even with its acknowledged short comings, it is what works for me. As with any application, if you stick with it long enough you find work arounds. It is all about tactics and strategy and I have become pretty good at getting the most out of my Pandora Premium.

Music Sharing

2011-01-20T09:32:00.008-05:00

Yesterday in an exchange of comments on this blog I first learned of the web radio service called grooveshark.I spent the bulk of my listening time yesterday checking out gs and discover this. Sharing. I think this will work even if you have never been to grooveshark before and no account set up is required.

Here is a favorite little ditty I first heard on Pandora a couple of months ago. The selection, from Grooveshark, is called New Soul and the artist is Yael Niam the bio material is from Pandora. Here are the lyrics To facilitate listening to the selection it will open in a new window which can then be minimized allowing you to open the lyrics page to read and follow along. I recommend reading the lyrics!

The Journey

2011-01-19T08:54:00.005-05:00

No, the photo here is not one I took this morning. Just wishing it were. This morning the topic is Pandora.

Last night after I put the paints away around 10 pm, I thought I would tune in to a few minutes of Pandora listening before going to bed. The next time I noticed the time it was 1 am!

Something I have noticed about Pandora, especially when listening to classic rock, is that the selection tends to get in a rut. Recently, it seems like every classic rock station I have created eventually wound around to playing Van Morrison and the Eagles, and the Beatles of course. I like listening to all three but really The Eagles on a station based on Paul Simon! Well OK, Simon / folk rock / country rock / Eagles, I suppose. To remedy this situation I decided to create a station based on the Doors figuring there is no way the Doors are going to match up with the Eagles.

Success. I didn't listen to the Doors station for long but I heard nothing remotely like the Eagles. What I did hear, the second selection in fact was "Got A black Magic Woman" by Santana. Great, that is what I am talking about, something different. So rather than stay with the Doors which I knew if it didn't lead back to the Eagles would eventually lead to the Beatles, they all do, I created yet another new station based on Santana.

The second selection on my new Santana station was startlingly different. I got a flamenco guitar number by a group called Armik. Now that is really different. The third and fourth selections on the Santana station wandered back into more known territory of classic rock so with a sense of adventure leading me into the unknown, I created my third new station in a row now based on Amrik.

Wow! now I was in a wonderland of Latin guitars. All stuff I had never heard before and all, most anyway, really cool, Latin rhythms, no vocals, mostly just solo acoustic guitar. I listened to this station for a long time and noticed that I liked the slower more melodic solo guitars a bit more than the selections with a lot of percussion. The artist that stood out for me in this group was William Wilson. So, my last station for the night, I created based on William Wilson, perfect.

This morning, I am listening to a mix of my usual favorite stations ambient/new age/electronic artists with the new William Wilson station of mellow Latin guitars thown in, very nice. I will no doubt add Wilson to my blend of favorites.

Just one final note, as I am writing this blog entry and listening to the morning mix I hear the strains of Latin guitar playing the familiar rock classic "Stairway To Heaven"! How cool is that? It just goes to show you that music is one big universe. All streams flow together. My journey began with the Doors and eventually by the long way around I found my way back almost to where I started with Led Zeppelin. I shall not be too surprised to someday hear in my morning mix, Hotel California!

Winter Solstice

2011-01-18T08:31:00.004-05:00

After my fisher price phase in painting, I had one more phase to go through at the end of last year. For lack of a better term I guess I would call it my elliptical phase. Elliptical because ellipses figure prominently in the composition of each painting.

True ellipses are not easy to draw. For small ones, two inches or less, there are templates of course, but it is hard to find good big ellipse templates and at that they are only good for maybe four inch ellipses. For anything bigger it gets difficult. There are several ways to approach the problem. The easiest and of course least accurate is to fake it with a french curve. That works, sort of, for anything up to maybe 12 inches, and is my preferred method for the most part. For anything still larger there are two options.

There is the loop of string and two tacks method. Two tacks stuck in the drawing surface at the two foci of the ellipse with the loop of string loosely encircling the tacks and drawn taught to a point on the ellipse by the point of a pencil will enable one to in theory draw a perfect ellipse of just about any size needed for a drawing. I say in theory because if there is any stretch in the string it will mess up the resultant ellipse and there is always stretch in the string.

The second method, by far the most difficult, is to write out the formula for an ellipse and calculate the x,y coordinates of a sufficient number of points on the ellipse so that one might smooth a curve through the points. The one saving grace of this method is that you only have to plot the points on one quadrant of the ellipse and then mirror them about the semi-major and semi-minor axis. And that is it as far as options go, or it was until I started using Microsoft Publisher last fall as a composition tool.

Publisher draws ellipses with a click and a drag. Getting them sized and lined up properly is the tricky part but I have learned a few tricks in that regard. The one drawback to using Publisher for ellipse drawing is that Publisher gives you no clue as to where the ellipse focus is. This I still have to guess at, but having orbital paths of comets etched into my brain patterns since my earliest memories, I can handle it. And so, the elliptical phase came to be.

Of all the phases I have recounted from my explorations this past Fall, the elliptical phase is my favorite. I have done five of these so far and plan to do at least four or five more. If I could sell one or two of these babies who knows. The one shown here is called Winter Solstice.

Magnifier

2011-01-15T23:24:00.004-05:00

I got my first PC back in 1985 and still I am just learning new tricks that just amaze me sometimes. For example, I listen to Pandora web radio a lot when I paint. But something that has just annoyed the dickens out of me when I am listening to Pandora and painting is when a selection comes up that I wonder what the name of the song or artist is. Problem, the computer sits on a desk on the other side of the room from my painting set up. So, if I want to find out the info on the selection playing I have to set my paints down get up and go over to the computer to read the Pandora screen. I can't just boost the zoom level on IE because Pandora is a Java something or other which ignores IE's zoom level. That was yesterday. Today, problem solved.

I knew somewhere back in my memory banks that windows had an aid called magnifier for people with particularly bad vision. I never needed it so I never tracked it down until last night. As you will see from the photo here I can set IE on the left side of the screen and the magnifier window on the right side and with the cursor placed appropriately on the current Pandora selection, I get, in this case a four times magnified view that I can easily read from across the room. As an added bonus, I get to see the jacket artwork a lot bigger too.

Space Monkey

2011-01-14T22:12:00.003-05:00

Late last October when I was just beginning my brief sojourn into the world of art deco, I was also considering doing something in a scifi motif. I had been mulling this over in anticipation of a possible scifi art show, now postpned I am told, that was in the works at the time. Scifi themed paintings, as much as I enjoy doing them, are not particularly in demand by the public so I was looking for a different approach to scifi that might alleviate this short coming. I had been researching some of the early scifi film artwork as an outgrowth to the art deco interest. The Fritz Lang move Metropolis is a good example of where scifi and art deco intersect. I had also taken a look at some of the early Flash Gordon episodes.

Then an interesting thing happened. It was the day of the Irvington Halloween Festival and I decided to take a break and check it out. There at the festival I came across and artist booth displaying a number of oil paintings of toys and one painting in particular of a toy spaceship circa 1950 just like Flash Gordon might have flown. I was fascinated as this had been one of the images I had been toying around with, so to speak. I talked with the artist a while, a woman, and asked her what her inspiration was for the toy paintings. Her reply was that they were just things she had that she could paint from.

Some weeks later after my affair with art deco was drawing to an end I picked up again on the idea of doing paintings of toys, morphing from an art deco phase into a Fisher Price phase. I did a toy train, toy tugboat, toy helicopter flying over a couple of moose and yes a toy spaceship with a monkey, a space monkey shown here.

Garden Fence

2011-01-12T20:29:00.004-05:00

So, back to the painting thread, "Garden Fence". After a few floral compositions as described earlier, I decided to expand to a garden setting. As was the case with the flower arrangements, I drew out each element of the composition shown, photographed it and assembled the bits in Publisher. At this point working with Publisher was still awkward but on the plus side, garden compositions have always been headache. Drawing all the plants and the leaves drives me crazy. For this particular composition I drew one sunflower and re sized and mirrored a couple of copies to get the effect of what looks like three different plants. Should I ever desire to paint another sunflower in another painting, I have a drawing of a sunflower in my image archive.

Atlantic, A Book Review

2011-01-11T22:24:00.003-05:00

I just finished my first book of the new year, Simon Winchester's latest, Atlantic, this on CD. I have long been a fan of historian, geologist and world traveler Simon Winchester and recommend many of his titles, paramount among them "The Professor and The Madman" about the making of the Oxford English Dictionary, and additionally "The Map That Changed The World" and "Krakatoa" to mention a few.

In terms of scope of subject Atlantic has to be his most ambitious project to date. The mission of the book is to encompass the story of one of the great oceans of the world and more specifically the ocean around which western civilization arose. The story begins with the geologic beginnings of the great ocean and includes as the the subtitle of the book states, Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms and a Vast Ocean Of A Million Stories. It is a thoroughly engaging read, or as was my experience, listen. As with all of Winchester's books, he narrates his on audio version.

In some of Winchester's earlier works I found he tended to muddle his narrative with an almost breathless excitement for his subject. He forever tended to get ahead of his tale and was frequently having to stop and go back to what he had started out to say, promising his reader that he would get to some particularly interesting bit, which he had wandered off on to, a little bit later on. There is none of that, or at any rate very little in Atlantic.

If I have one criticism of the work it is small, and it comes in one of the very last chapters of the epic story in which the author addresses the environmental impact man has had on the oceans. Winchester comes right up to the conclusion that climate change is caused by human activity, but then retreats behind the "some few scientists disagree" dodge. I wonder if he realizes how thread bare that line has become. Perhaps as an historian, his comfort level with contemporary issues requires him to give voice to such caveats. My guess is that he may only recently have credited climate change at all and is not yet completely comfortable with the idea. On the whole he presents a comprehensive picture of the present environmental situation with one curious omission. The topic of ocean acidification is not mentioned. Admittedly this subject is a fairly new concern in the public domain but his book is quite up to date in all other respects, even to including mention of the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico last Summer. This one eyebrow raiser for me however does not preclude me from giving Atlantic, rich in information, insight and entertainment a very enthusiastic endorsement.

Hawk

2011-01-10T17:48:00.004-05:00

What sort of hawk do you suppose this might be, perched outside my back door? I have seen him once or twice before in the past month. This is the first time I have been able to get even this good a snap of him.

Deco Flowers

2011-01-09T09:07:00.003-05:00

After the Deco Gecko I decided to take on a flower arrangement in a stylized geometric depiction of flowers inspired by what I had seen researching the gecko. I have avoided flower compositions in the past because the subtle color variations in flowers are just too time consuming with my style of painting. The color simplicity of art deco suggested a way past this problem so I was intrigued to see if the style and subject would make a good match.

After the first attempt shown here I executed three more along very similar lines and although I am not thrilled with the results, the paintings weren't horrible and it did more or less slake my apitite for art deco. This was not however the end of the creative thread that started with the deco gecko.

As one will observe the flower depictions are nothing more than geometric designs that I laid out with the aid of various templates and drafting tools on tracing paper and assembled into the final composition as I have been doing with all my paintings for sometime. After the first of these flower compositions it occurred to me that I might do the same thing on the computer with MS Publisher. So I took a shot at it. My first efforts were awkward. Even though I have used Publisher for a variety of tasks for well over a decade now, I have never been impressed with its drawing features.

The approach I took this time was a bit different. I still drew out the original object on paper but then I snapped it with my digital camera and imported the image into Publisher where I could crop, size, rotate, mirror and copy with ease. And move the elements of the composition around to my heart's content before deciding on a final composition which once achieved I merely printed out and transferred to canvas via carbon paper in the same sort of process I was using with tracing paper compositions. As I said my first efforts were awkward but after a bit of trial and error I have become much more proficient with Publisher and have learned to use the drawing tools afforded by the software to bypass the manual drawing altogether in some cases. Though my foray into art deco recedes now into memory the use of Publisher as a tool for composition continues to develop and expand beyond what I could have imaged just a couple of months ago.

Art Deco Gecko

2011-01-02T09:18:00.004-05:00

When I start painting again after a break of several weeks, I typically experience a period of creative wandering. This past fall was no exception to that rule. In late October when I took up my brushes again, my only impulse was to do something a bit more abstract than I had been doing. I wanted to work in a bold design motif with a minimum of ornamentation and so I started researching the art deco style on the Internet. Almost immediately a subject suggested itself, an "Art Deco Gecko" The result pictured here turned out OK. At least I had made a start in the direction I wanted to go. The art deco motif would continue for the next several paintings and though I don't think I ever got to the essence of art deco, it did open up new creative avenues which I continue to explore now some 20 paintings later.

New Year

2011-01-01T11:04:00.007-05:00

With almost perfect timing, thunderstorms ushered in the new year at the stroke of midnight. This morning the rain has washed away the December snow and one can almost imagine a better year ahead. So wake up and stretch those sleepy muscles.

New Year's Haiku;

Last night’s party snores
Awakes opportunity
You need aspirin

What Is Normal Anyway

2010-12-30T09:33:00.003-05:00

An email from a reader of this blog inquired this morning about the current status, retrograde or direct, of the planet Mercury and if in fact it was once again direct, would life now get back to normal. I won't go into the arcane subject of Mercury retrograde at this point. Suffice it to say that Mercury has been retrograde since the 10th of the month and it did in fact return to direct motion in the wee hours of the morning Dec 30th. One might therefore conclude that all was on track once again and I so assured my correspondent.

I had some qualms about this advice as I had just previously noted in the weather forecast that we are to expect thunderstorms tomorrow with a high temp of 56 degrees. That is a rather abnormal forecast for Indiana in December but it was a weather forecast, how reliable could that be? My qualms about the weather were soon overwhelmed by total incredulity when I noted another news item. Magnitude 4.2 Earthquake Hit Northern Indiana. The timing of the earthquake was just before 8 this morning and well after Mercury was supposed to be safely going direct and all should be normal again.

Obviously what is lacking is a definition of normal.

Sixty Symbols

2010-12-28T14:01:00.003-05:00

The source material for today's post comes courtesy of friend who is as much a science nerd as myself. Yesterday he sent me a link to site called "Sixty Symbols" Videos about the symbols of physics and astronomy. When you select the link above, it will open a page of symbols. Each symbol is a link to a 6 to 8 minute video on the topic that particular symbol refers to. I couldn't tell you what all the symbols stand for. I might make a stab at half of them. A few just about everyone has some idea about, the symbol for pi for instance. A couple of my readers will likely recognize about as many of the symbols as moi, maybe even a few more. A reader or two with familiarity with astrology will pick up on some of the astronomy symbols.

What is really fascinating though are the videos the symbols link to. From the two I have seen so far (Saturn and Quarks) they appear to be a British production, very academic, very nerdy and totally captivating. It looks like hours of entertainment and education.

Art Shows 2010, Part 3

2010-12-23T13:19:00.003-05:00

As I indicated in an earlier posting there were a few bright spots on the show schedule this past year. The first of these came early on in late April. As a consequence of a suggestion, I decided to hold an early preview of the paintings I had stocked up last winter for the 2010 fair season. On a spur of the moment impulse I thought to combine the art preview with an early spring garden tour. The previous Fall I had planted a lot of tulip bulbs so as late April approached the garden was in full spring bloom.

The turnout for the garden show/art preview was modest but enthusiastic and I did sell several original pieces. The plan for 2011 is to repeat the garden/art open house again when the tulips are in full bloom and expand the invitation list. The event has recently acquired the official name of Tulippalooza. There will be more tulips, I planted an additional 600 new bulbs this past Fall, and lots of new paintings.

Painting Process & Hulu

2010-12-21T08:39:00.003-05:00

Another snow event last night, this one topped with a layer of freezing drizzle.

Today though a news item and an update on process. For several years the computer has been an integral part of my art business. In conjunction with a digital camera the computer is the source of prints and used as a resource and research tool for new paintings. Just recently though I have been using the computer as a composition tool in laying out new canvases. Specifically using Microsoft Publisher in place of tracing paper to size and arrange the elements of a composition.

In a nutshell, I still draw the individual elements out on tracing paper, then photograph them, prep the image elements with photo software, Digital Pro, and then Microsoft Paint to establish the transparent areas, and finally assemble the elements into Microsoft Publisher. In Publisher I can size, rotate, mirror and arrange the elements into the final composition, print it out and transfer to canvas with carbon paper. So far I have been working with relatively simple designs on 8 by 10 canvases to explore the limits of the process. Just yesterday I figured out how to scale the process up to 16 by 20 canvases.

Now the news item, Yesterday evening I spotted two new arrivals on Hulu worth noting. The first is the original "Little Shop Of Horrors" released in 1960 (not the musical version released several decades later). The second new offering is the six episode, British production of Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" Again this is not the somewhat inferior film version released more recently. Both are classics of off beat sci-fi humor most worthy of checking out.

Winter Solstice

2010-12-20T11:37:00.004-05:00

Tomorrow the calendar will catch up with the reality on the ground. The winter solstice will arrive and winter will be official. Winter solstice is also the shortest day and longest night of the year for inhabitants of the northern hemisphere. I spotted a news item a couple of days ago reporting that this year's solstice coincides with a total eclipse of the moon. Totality for the eastern time zone is at 3:17 am tomorrow morning. Here is a link to a site called Space.com which explains, among other things, what a lunar eclipse is all about. According to Space.com the last time a lunar eclipse happened on the winter solstice was 372 years ago.

Art Shows 2010, Part 2

2010-12-19T09:01:00.003-05:00

This will likely come as no surprise but 2010 was not a stellar year in any economic sense, at least as far as art sales were concerned. In addition to the sluggish economy, I did fewer shows and perversely it was either beastly hot or it rained at some point during most of the shows I did make it to. Sometimes it was both hot and rainy. Hot is to be expected but from July through September the area was decidedly short on rainfall, so it was odd that the very few rainy days invariably coincided with art show days.

The most memorable of these rains was during the Penrod art fair in September. It wasn't an all day rain, none of them were. It was an early afternoon rain that dampened the ground just enough to turn the traffic area in front of my tent into slog of mud four inches deep. By the end of the day the few customers who were coming by were only the most intrepid sort willing to remove their shoes and socks and squish on through.

The year wasn't a total loss though. I shall elaborate on that in part 3 of this series

PBS Video

2010-12-17T12:58:00.003-05:00

Monday the local PBS affiliate emerged from its dreadful doo-wop fortnight of fundraising with a program I had not seen before called "Paris The Luminous Years" It is a two hour program of the art scene in Paris from 1900 to 1930. I highly recommend this video for a comprehensive look at the beginnings of twentieth century art, music and literature. The video is still available for streaming on the PBS home page.

A Murder Of Crows

2010-12-16T09:07:00.004-05:00

This morning I awoke to a "murder of crows". No, the neighbor wasn't out blasting away with a shotgun at the birds. Murder in this case is the collective noun appropriate to a group of crows. Other collective nouns would for example be a gaggle of geese, or a knot of toads, or a scurry of squirrels. If you would like to see a list of collective nouns check out this site Fun With Words

Art Shows 2010, Part 1

2010-12-15T08:44:00.004-05:00

I did 10 shows this past year. The year before the number was around 15. There were a variety of reasons for the fewer number of shows. The first show of the year for the past few years has always been the State Museum show in mid February, The Indiana Art Fair. It is a show I have enjoyed doing, indoors of course, easy set up and decent sales. I had to withdraw from last year's show almost at the last minute because the museum threw in a new last minute requirement for vendors. We all had to secure liability insurance. I could of gotten the insurance, but on principle I chose not to and had to withdraw from the show.

I heard from another artist recently that the State Museum had dropped that requirement for next year. Who knows why. Perhaps I wasn't the only artist to withdraw last year. In any event I got that information too late to apply for the 2011 show. I don't regret that. Getting ready to do a show is a lot of work and in February I prefer to be painting, not showing.

Another show I dropped from the schedule this past year was the last of the previous year, a December show at the Eitlejorg museum called Winter Market. There were several reasons I did not go back to the Eitlejorg show in 2010, poor sales and awkward setup conditions at the top of the list of reasons. Looking ahead though I don't want to do any shows in December. The year just sorts out better with a four month break, from December through March, from doing shows.

Garden Project Of The Year 2010

2010-12-13T10:41:00.003-05:00

Actually I got a lot done in the garden this past year. On the list were starting a new compost pile, beds for 600 new tulip bulbs, topping the arborvitae and a new bed of creeping phlox. Looking back though the project that takes the prize and one that wasn't in the original plan was pouring a concrete walk around the Kuan Yin bed in place of the gravel walk that had been there since I laid the bed out 15 years ago. In all it took 54-40lb bags of ready mix concrete which I hauled in 6 bags at a time in the back of my Matrix. I used to buy the 80lb bags but my back doesn't like 80 lb weights much anymore. I poured the walk in 12 sections over the space of several weeks during July and August. Next year I plan to continue replacing gravel walks with concrete but I think I will order a large delivery of ready mix at the beginning of the summer rather than make all of those trips to the home center.

Biggest Expense of 2010

2010-12-12T09:18:00.003-05:00

By far the biggest expense of 2010 was the new roof on the house. Including the garage the total came to just over $5K. It was long overdue. The final straw forcing me to take money out of savings to get the job done was having to constantly fight off raccoons from breaking and entering.

After getting a few bids, I took the best offer and in short order a dozen Mexican workers were on the roof ripping off old shingles. One of the contractors I had gotten bids from tried to deter me from low bid Mexican labor with a lame appeal to some sort of we real Americans have to stick together jive.

As it happens, the demographics here in the hood have for the past few years shifted to include a significant number of Latino families, I assume mostly if not all Mexican, and I am more than happy to share space and work with them. They are hardworking, decent people. The sort of people who started this country in the first place. A bumper sticker I spotted recently said, "I Shouldn't Have To Press 1 for English" Well if you are too lazy to push a button, you are too lazy to nail on my new roof is what I say.... End of rant.

Best Deal Of 2010

2010-12-11T14:51:00.003-05:00

Early in the year I signed up with Netflix. I was looking for a source of videos of old TV shows for mom who at 100 was just not up to speed with the programming offered on television today. I found the videos I was looking for, unfortunately mom was basically not up to speed with television period so the plan didn't work out. I did find that Netflix is a really good deal otherwise and it would be my pick for best deal of the year but I found an even better deal more recently.

The best deal of the year is Pandora Radio premium. I have been a Pandora listener for going on two years but until about a month ago I was listening to the free offering which only allows 40 hours a month listening and includes commercial interruptions. The premium package costs $36 a year and has no commercials and unlimited listening. Off and on I thought about upgrading then would decide against it, not wanting to pay for something that was free to the extent that I was using it. Then in October I got a message from the Social Security administration informing me of a correction to my monthly benefit, an increase of $3 a month. I took that as a sign for the universe to sign on for the Pandora upgrade.

Pandora is great. I listen to five, six, or more hours a day now. My favorite station is a mix of new age ambient, classical ambient and electronic. My second favorite is a mellow rock station I put together based on the artists Paul Simon, Carol King, Billy Joel, Harry Nilsson and KT Tunstall.