What I've begun working on. A short, short. Which I will not obsessively work on all night since I am fighting a cold and not winning. A still - from the title, which has taken an hour an a half to compose - all 11 seconds of it. Hope you like!



It's Not working. Resolve is meaningless. I was going to stop at 11pm, and yet at 11:30pm I find myself 'just rendering'... the clips which I wasn't going to put together this evening, no, no.

An hour past my bedtime, and rendering the changes. It's impossible! Editing video can become an obsessive occupation. Stay away from it: recommended.

Sigh. I wait. How will the clip look now? Gosh, wish I were better at this! It doesn't look too bad, does it? I love the clips in this video. I love making little videos. Timewise, it's an endless process... forget about time! The body can handle lack of sleep.

Anyway, it's only a minute or two, and soon will be over.

::Smiles:: (some hours later)

I had forgotten that the myth of Atlantis came from Plato's Timaeus. The original a strange story of beauty and loss, of earthquakes and floods.



Raphael's Plato 
(Timaeus, circa 360BCE; 
Raphael's portrait, 1509, a detail from the The School of Athens)

Because of the disco beat, which never relents, the ocean seemed composed of fragmented glass. It falls on a beach painted wet on wet in watercolours and in the sky painted gulls and the metal pin of an airplane. The musical scene felt like animation, the winds coming as in an artful video. Just after half way I heard the Zephyr, soprano voices over the drone. The industrial sounds continued, with that ethereal voice calling from a long way off. The beach grasses waved like animated strokes. The water fell in shattered glass drops. The sonic beachscape built on itself, growing richer, even visionary. The drone continued, a quiet fan with beach detritus, aluminum foil caught in it. Planes flew by. Insects crawled in the dunes. Sandpipers bounced on sand wet with seafoam. Clouds became sparse. The sun shone and it was over.

Parchment Figures: Doubles, Doppelgängers, Clones, 2010,
24" x 30", 61cm x 76.2cm, underpainting. (opens to a resizable pop-up window)

Now that I have rinsed off the chalk drawing and covered the painting in a fine layer of Liquin, which is semi-gloss, it reflects light and this makes it harder to photograph. I have boosted the colour slightly so that it doesn't appear too 'washed out.' On the easel, however, it's looking possible.

A video at YouTube on the painting process, and on the chalk
sketch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsUQVGXSWro

Parchment Figures: Doubles, Doppelgängers, Clones, 2010,
24" x 30", 61cm x 76.2cm, underpainting. (opens to a resizable pop-up window)

A video at YouTube on painting process, and on the chalk
sketch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsUQVGXSWro

When I hit the undo button on this post, everything was deleted... trying to remember what I wrote.

Ummm, oh, yes, I did some research on the NET and decided to try a new technique. In the post-midnight darkness I mixed a little Golden® acrylic paint and scrubbed the figures in Raw Sienna with a touch of Titanium White. Today I'll block in the background with the lightest wash of Golden® Raw Sienna and Bone Black. When it's dry, I'll rinse off the original chalk drawing. Then I'll paint the whole canvas with a layer of Windsor & Newton's® Liquin Original and let it dry until tomorrow.

From what I read at Windsor & Newton's® site, I believe the Liquin will change my water-soluble oil paints into traditional oil paints and rather than diluting in water and washing the brushes after in water, I'll have to use turpentine.

I haven't explored this process before and so don't know the parameters or how the colours of the oils will work over the underpainting. In the last two 'on black' paintings I found it was necessary to paint very thick layers of oil paint and I wasn't able to work on detail as I might have liked.

direct link: Parchment Figures: Doubles, Doppelgängers, Clones

A painter on painting. Or, I'm painting again! Yay!

Wasn't a planned video, rather, thinking, many artists are showing themselves painting on-screen, let's put the camera on and get some footage, but I got talking, you know how it is, at night too though I managed to boost the light when I edited it, and now it's a bona fide video.

Enjoy. Hopefully you will find inspiration here for your own art, and might consider posting your own video.


Note: click on the base of the slideshow
to start the slideshow (or in the middle to
go to Picasa and see larger images).

An unplanned video -are they ever any other way?- thought I'd set the camera up while painting, yes at night, I know, silly, only I got talking, you know how it is. Thought it way too dark to consider for anything, but a filter on FinalCut Express, which is what I use to edit video, brought the light out. It's nearly 7½ minutes long, was over 8GB in a Quicktime .mov, but with a bit of fiddling, and I hope the quality is alright when it's finished uploading, I got it down to 1.6GB -under the 2GB limit at YouTube.

It's a 6 hour upload, I know, marathon. Should be up by tomorrow. A few stills... (click for larger)

Later now and it's up: Parchment Figures: Doubles, Doppelgängers, Clones

All I have to post is a little love poem inspired by some special music by a special musician who's beloved at Jamendo, Livio Amato, for my special, and secret, love:


Lyric of Love

-Sensitivity, Musa, Riela-

gently breaking on the waves
of our own oceans

seafoam of stars
falling over edges
pulling back in the underswell
of our desires

birds sweetly singing, ocean breezes, salt spray, morning light of gloss and glittering facets of cut gems

we cannot underestimate
the power of love

the ocean is driven by
inner forces as we are by love

wave patterns, oscillations of polished gems falling as notes of love from our Orphean songs

even as we approach the great mystery it recedes, ever pulling back and falling forwards, white foam melting into sand at our feet

-Dream opening-

then the grotto, magic, rock sanctuary, vision, a lover's cove

the dream of us opens

conch, periwinkle, nautilus, volva, cone, harp, trumpet shells, the music of the ocean at its shores

we are anchored in the swells, water
dance of love

or racing seaward, sails blooming
in the fast wind

-Suspended Animation-

sailing we are birds, osprey
sweeping over the waves
up to the clouds, joy, windsong
of strong wing

the wind who kisses the ocean,
or blows gales, passion

we dance on the beach framed by a disappearing red sun, burnished gong, palm tree fronds black with shadow as the dark washes over us carrying a full moon sailing through the night sky

-Yet, a moment-

we are the sky, the sun, moon and stars, the clouds drifting by, wind, the flying birds, dancing schools of bright fish, the diamond-covered expanse of
glittering

-Infinity-

one day we will wash away, drops in the ocean, no longer even a memory,

yet knowing
love loves
through us


-
Inspired by Livio Amato's album, Sensitivity: http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/62537 (section titles are his song titles -I note the sections as I wrote while listening)

Playing with code. Created a pop-up window using html. Click on image to open pop-up. Then click and drag on the lower right corner of the pop-up screen to increase the size of the drawing (I uploaded a large image- 1496×1872 pixels that's only 299KB in size and yet perfectly clear on screen).

Yes, I am stalled on this piece. Will and determination carry you a long way, but there have been setbacks that have left me exhausted. Three responses that I didn't feel were fair - not about this piece in particular, but there's an effect I guess. It takes awhile to psychically heal, I know this from years of experience, but then you continue on.

Saying this by way of meaning Courage, My Love. To all of you with your talents and projects. Follow your inner desires, and if you've a set-back of whatever sort, take a break, then pick yourself up and keep going...

Today I downloaded from Librivox Dostoyevsky's, Notes from the Underground, a book I have tried to read on and off for 30 years (I had read The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment).

When I was younger a storm of words was in me that only words could feed, and so I read like a dervish, and yet this book, I could only read a few paragraphs. Even a few sentences of this book triggered so many thoughts that I found hours had gone by and I had not read to the end of the first page. Last year I tried again and drifted into a philosophical speculative mood that also made me aware of my own tattered and ragged weltanschauung edges.

But now, thanks to an audiobook where it is read to me, I can listen during long walks with my dog in the night. Tonight I listened to half the book. How can I express how I love Dostoyevsky's vision, humour, seriousness, learning and depth of feeling- his exceptional literary talent (even in translation) whereby he presents a psychological book of anguish, an interior rumination of a gauntlet through life?

I am so glad for the gift of this book, the way I have found to finally 'read' it.

Dostoyevsky created a narrator in this book who is unlike any other. I can only think of a handful of books that are entirely composed of a soliliquey that reaches deeply into the philosophical and emotional depth of a life (one that comes immediately to mind is Clarice Lispector's, The Stream of Life, though it is an entirely different book, being a poetical treatise of a dying woman who writes what she thinks, feels, remembers, imagines without any barriers, from her pure pumping open veins).

Anyway, today I downloaded Notes from the Underground from a newly discovered gem of a site, Librivox: acoustical liberation of books in the public domain, where volunteers read books whose copyright has expired. Only I found the (male) voice(s) a little too strident, too peppy for this dark and difficult work, so I spent hours enhancing each .mp3, which is how each chapter arrives, adding a slight reverb, an imperceptible echo, some extra bass (double on that), a tad of voice enhancement, making an audiobook of over two hours that is an easier listen, that doesn't interrupt the text in its speaking.

It was an amazing walk tonight, my dog and I and Dostoyevsky. During the quiet dark of Earth Night.
_______
Who knows why I am taking these over-exposed flashlit computer photos at night... though this was after turning the lights back on!
I don't know how to turn off Photobooth's flash, I guess is it. But then without the flash the photo would have been shadowy in a pixelated way.