El Dorado Scene and Painted Background

Frustration with technology

Yes, I get frustrated with technology sometimes, but that's not what I'm crabby about today.

Today I'm crabby about other people's technology skills -- or rather, their lack of same.

My local fiber and textile art group is getting ready for a show and we want to prepare a gallery notebook with information on each piece in the show.  We have asked members to submit the info and a photo of their artwork; I'm in charge of compiling the info for the notebook.  I want the notebook to look professional, so I want to copy everybody's information into a single document and make sure it's all formatted the same.

We thought it would be easy -- provide a form in a Word document that people would fill out (so all the information would be there in the right order to be copied and pasted into my document), give directions for submitting the photo (don't have to crop or resize, just send us the image straight from the camera).  But it's not.

We are surrounded with technology, everybody with her various devices and connections, and yet to judge from the responses to our call for entries, a lot of people cannot use them for what I consider to be ordinary activities.  They can't figure out how to get a cellphone photo attached to their entry form.  They don't know how to tell whether their photo has been saved as a .jpg or a .dat file. They don't notice that their computer automatically resizes photos to a handful of pixels when sending email.  They send their info in a Pages document or a PDF instead of a Word document.  They don't have Word on their computers and can't open or can't fill in a document.  They don't know how to work around by typing their info into an email.

I know I'm a curmudgeon, and I know I'm way more dedicated to the written and printed word than most people are.  But I worry that ordinary, everyday capabilities that every educated person used to have are now endangered, washed away in the flood of cellphones and tablets and Facebook and Instagram.  The tech industry has enabled this by equipping many smaller devices with alternative programs, perhaps easier to use for minimal tasks but incompatible with the grownup programs like Word on which the business world operates.  And people who own these smaller devices often retire their actual computers, on which grownup business tasks would be much easier.  Meanwhile, the proprietors of grownup programs discourage people from using them, by charging continuing user fees instead of allowing people to buy the programs outright.

As a result, people can easily do minimal things on their phones or tablets, but they can't produce any kind of work that is compatible with the grownup world.  Is this progress?  What do people use when they have to write a letter?  (Do people write letters any more?)  What do they do if they need to print out a biography or an artist statement or a page for a gallery notebook?  What if they are asked to give a presentation to a group?  How do they keep track of their artwork and their show entries?

And I try not to even think about how the "informality" of text and email, plus the "convenience" of voice-recognition dictation, has turned us into a nation of inarticulate, ungrammatical misspellers who never think to proofread before they hit the send button.

I try to be tolerant of people who feel overwhelmed by learning new tasks, particularly older people like myself.  There are tech tasks that I have resisted, preferring to play dumb and hope my kids will step in and do it for me.  But if you want to participate in a serious art activity and can't do things on a computer to enable you to enter a show or take good photos or whatever, then I think you should find a friend or hire a geek to help you.

Now back to retyping my gallery notebook, since I can't copy and paste from what people have sent me.

Refugee quilt people

Longtime readers of my blog may recall how last year I made a lot of little sculptures of people and had a lot of fun doing it.  But after I put them all together into a single installation for a show, and then took them apart and put them back in their boxes, and then sold a few of them, I thought that project was over.

Until a few weeks ago when I noticed the weekly email from SAQA with a call for entries for a new show with the theme of refugees.  It's called "Forced to Flee" and the entry deadline is October 31.  And it specifically allows 3-D entries.

I decided I needed to make some more people specifically for this show.  But I knew they would have to fit the SAQA definition of a quilt, which is “a creative visual work that is layered and stitched or that references this form of stitched layered structure.”

After a bit of thinking about how I could make sure that my people, who were generally layered but not stitched, would fit that definition, I had a brainstorm.  What if I were to start with pieces of actual quilts?  And I knew exactly where to get pieces of actual quilts -- I would ask my friend Denise Furnish, whose art M.O. is to paint onto beat-up old quilts, if she had some leftover bits and pieces she could donate to my cause.

She did, and I have been making quilt refugee people for a couple of weeks now.

While my previous batch of daily people were all shapes and sizes and made out of all kinds of materials, these guys are all pretty similar.  Their clothing all looks beat-up, faded and torn, as befitting people who have trekked across the desert or sailed in a leaky boat across the sea.

I have made no attempt to conceal the holes and stains and frayed edges and the cotton batting leaking out from between the layers; I think it gives my little people substance and character.  The only thing I've added to the quilt pieces, besides thread and cord, is some walnut ink to give many of the people dark skin.  And they all have heavy wire armatures inside to allow them to stand up on a board with drilled holes.

I have a lot to do these days and I know I can't spend the entire fall sewing up little refugee quilt people, but I hope to get a fairly large number of them finished before the entry deadline.

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"Docking Peacefully" --- Sold

This painting was done at Oxford MD during the Plein Air Easton Festival. I felt very peaceful when I painted them. Nowadays, the world is getting more and more chaotic. We really have no peace of mind when we are bombarded with the information of what are happening. Art is my sanctuary, where I can forget the reality temporarily.  Just like those boats, I want to dock peacefully.

Thought for the day

Every so often I fall through a time hole and spend some time with old posts on a favorite blog.  That happened to me while reading Tanya Watanabe's great blog, which I discovered a few years ago and have been addicted to ever since.  She is an American who went to Japan 35 years ago, got married to a Japanese, and still lives there.  She's a quilter but what I love most about the blog is her description of daily life in Japan.  Check it out here.

But you don't have to read the blog to enjoy the thought for the day:

I remember hearing a story about a missionary who lived in Central America for many years and when she was getting ready to return to America, the missions board sent out an announcement to all the churches she had ministered to that she was leaving.  One day an old man arrived at her door carrying two coconuts as a thank-you gift for her time with them.  She was very touched by the gift but she was more concerned about the man, who she knew had had a four-day walk from his village just to give her the coconuts.  "Thank you so much for your gift, but what a long walk you had to have!"  The old man replied, "Long walk part of gift."

Mathematics in Art

Do artists need math? Generally speaking, I don't know. However to myself, the answer is: Absolutely. Mathematics is a powerful tool when I run into ambiguous issues during painting practice. I'd like to run a few analysis mathematically. For instance, I try to investigate the color temperature relationship between light and shadow. I use image processing software (Photoshop) to sample out the colors in light and shadow area. I get their color coordinates so I can compare, and then plot the sampled colors on the color wheel. The result can be shown clearly. I document the analysis result in my note book for future references. My today's post is one of my color analysis. I consider I may teach some useful math to you in my future workshops.

Daily art update 4 -- I've been there

One of my favorite recurring formats is "I've been there" -- I find a photo in the newspaper of something happening in a place that I've been, then paste it up with a map of that place.  I wrote about this format earlier in the year and since then I've done dozens.

Sometimes the "there" in I've been there is interpreted relatively loosely -- I've driven over that particular bridge or been through that particular town.

But I'm getting much more satisfaction out of a tight reading of "there."  For instance, this photo of Stuttgart, with the cutlines referencing the main train station in the background.  I give myself extra points because I've not only been to Stuttgart but came and went through the main train station.

Here's a photo of Wrangell, Alaska, where I've been -- but extra points because the story was about getting to Wrangell on the Alaska State Ferry, and that's exactly how we got there.

This photo shows a nurse in the St. Cloud (Minnesota) Hospital, and I'm sorry to report that we once spent a very long night in its emergency room.

Here's a photo of 666 Fifth Avenue, a troubled property owned by Jared Kushner's family.  Not only did my parents occasionally take us to dinner in the very fancy restaurant on the top floor ("Top of the Sixes") but at least twice a month I would take the E train to the Fifth Avenue station, walk upstairs into the 666 building and turn left on 53rd Street to get to the Donnell Library.

And here's a story about a mass shooting in Tasmania in 1996 that led the Australian government to effectively ban most private guns.  We visited the actual site of the shooting, at a national park, where they have set up a little remembrance area.

This project has added a new dimension to my morning ritual of a cup of tea and two newspapers; now in addition to reading what fabulously good news has developed throughout the world, I scan every photo to see if I've been there.

"Time Impression"

I spent two morning hours painting this old barn at Easton. I love to paint old stuff. This barn I painted last year. I saw it gets run down even more this year. Things fall apart. That is a very profound truth. On one hand we try to improve, wish we get better and better. On the other hand, we fall apart. The world is balanced in a weird way.

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Unhappy customer

I am going to have a solo show in November focusing on my many daily art projects over the last two decades, and I'm getting serious about what pieces to exhibit and how to display them.  I decided that the best way to show four years worth of collage work on index cards would be to choose maybe 20 of the cards and pin them to a foam core board, and put the file boxes with the rest of the cards on a table where visitors could leaf through them at leisure.

So I needed some big foam core boards.

After not finding them at my local office supply store, I went online and discovered that Office Depot had a pack of ten for sale.  Great!  But they were not available for instore purchase.  Instead, they would deliver them to my house tomorrow for free.  Seemed like a great deal, so I bought them.

But when the boards came the next day, it was bad news.  They were loosely packed in a cardboard carton with no internal packaging.  No flaps to protect the corners.  And guess what -- every single corner of every single board was busted in. 

I filed a complaint and got a speedy reply telling me that they would of course refund my money, and would be happy to put in a replacement shipment, and the beat-up boards would be picked up Tuesday between 89:30 and 5 pm. 

Tuesday came and went, but nobody showed up to pick up the boards.  I called.  She looked up the order -- and there was no pickup scheduled.  I should dispose of the boards myself, and did I want her to put the replacement shipment in.

I asked if they were just going to send a new pack of boards in the same packaging.  She consulted something and finally came back to say there was no way to request special packaging, the next shipment would be just like the first one.  I declined.  Could I have the boards delivered to a store so I could see what I was buying?  She consulted something and finally came back to say no.

So now I own ten FREE foam core boards with busted-in corners, but none that are pristine enough to be put in a gallery.  One friend suggested that our local art store might be able to cut the corners off neatly.  (Because if you've ever tried to cut foam core, you know that home tools just give you a big mess.)  I will pursue that.  But if they can't, I guess I will have a search for some place in town other than Office Depot that can sell me big foam core boards.

I'm glad I have started on this show planning with plenty of lead time.

Last Week of my Gallery Nucleus Show

It's been a great run! Only a few pieces left, you can click here to purchase online or stop by in person! Ends August 19.

"Time to Say Goodbye"

Got on "Youtube", I searched "Time to Say Goodbye". When the beautiful voices of Sarah Brightman and Andrea Bocelli permeated my studio, I felt tears in my eyes. This month of August is still young, but I have been shocked twice by the sad news that friends pretty close to me passing. Capt. John Atoms, (who was in Richard Schmid's dvd "The Captain's Portrait"), had stroke in July and passed away on August 3. I love him dearly. Another friend Patrick Hugg went to China with me last year and we met again in my Raleigh workshop last month, but he was gone on August 4. Patrick was only 52. The God of Death is so close to us. We all know we can not live indefinitely, but very few accept this truth. I did this small house painting several times. One of them was collected by Capt. John, and this very one was painted in front of Patrick. Farewell, my dear friends.

Daily art update 3 -- museum maps and a plea for help!

I wrote last week about train tickets that have been brought to me by vacationing friends.

And speaking of friends....

I'm always wildly grateful for help from my friends.  I've been asking people who are on their way to vacation if they would bring me train tickets, maps or any tourist things that include a map.  I'm thinking of things like museum brochures that have a street map on the back or business cards from restaurants with a street map.

Here are four pages that will eventually become part of a book called "My Friends Go to the Museum."  Each page has the name of the museum, a little picture of something on display in the museum, a map, and of course, thanks to the friends who brought it to me.

I find it interesting that different museums have such different approaches to maps.  The Bologna map is totally detailed, showing every street within a one-mile radius.  The Paris map is stylized, with only a few main drags.  The Sao Miguel map shows a whole chunk of Portugal.

I would love to have a lot more pages in this book, so here's an invitation -- if you have brought home piles of brochures from past travels that are simply gathering dust in your files or piles, and you'd just as soon have them disappear and become somebody else's junk, and a few of them include a map on the back page, send them to me!  I will love and cherish them and turn them into certified ART, and thank you on the page.

Same with tickets, or museum brochures that include a map/floor plan of the museum rather than a street map.  Every one will find a home in my daily art this year.  And these ephemera don't have to come from exotic places -- the next time you visit your local museum, look on the back of the brochure and see if you find a map.  If you do, I would be a very happy recipient.

In case you are moved to send me something, shoot me an email and I'll tell you my address (I'm hesitant to publish it on the internet, although of course a thousand hackers across the second and third worlds already know it).  And my sincerest thanks in advance!

Inadequacy and style

Last week on Hyperallergic, the daily e-newsletter about edgy art, I found an interesting cartoon, a recurring feature by CM Campbell about "How to Draw a Black Guy."  In two minutes you can get much to chew on about cartooning, race relations and artist doubt.  But what I liked the most was his almost-at-the-end conclusion.

"That's why you should never force style.  It's just inadequacy combined with practice."

What a profound and true statement!  As I look at my own art practice, I see so many examples of inadequacy combined with practice.  Probably the most blatant is that I can't do beautiful calligraphy, so I have cultivated varieties of handwriting and handlettering that are deliberately awkward, wobbly and misproportioned.  I think they look pretty nice.

I guess there are two ways to deal with inadequacy -- avoid the area entirely, or figure out a way to embrace the situation and make the best of it.  Think about that for a bit.

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