Labor Day 2012

In this Labor Day pictorial essay, I believe I felt most like image #5 in my daily work before retirement.

http://todayspictures.slate.com/20120831/

Today's Google logo has paid 90th birthday tribute to artist Art Clokey and his creation, Gumby In this tribute page, you can see Clokey's first clay film, done on his parent's table tennis table. It does not star Gumby, but it is a fun, early animation in modeled clay.

AHN't they wonderful?

This post is to introduce a wonderful trio (piano, violin & cello), who are playing a delightful (!) piece. It is a part of the TED: series of presentations on the Web. The subtitle of their works are always "Ideas Worth Sharing". This one definitely IS worth that and more. TEDWomen is the particular occasion. Read about the Ahn sisters when you follow THIS LINK to the two pieces: They start with the bright and poppy "Skylife," by David Balakrishnan, then play a gorgeous, slinky version of "Oblivion," by Astor Piazzolla.

As always, comments welcomed.

May your eyes take in and your mind comprehend

National Geographic <== That organization's magazine's name rings through the centuries (now) as a bastion for the perfect photograph of distant places, scenes, animals, people, insects. Belches of fire from earthly openings below the crust; rushing, raging rivers; along with quiet moments of peaceful tranquility are all shown in its pages. This annual contest seems to distill the best of the best for passive viewers to take in and gasp at pangs of feelings evoked about what we see.

Enjoy!

Comments welcomed.

Real is as real does

Photorealism is perhaps even more fun for me than realism in enjoying art. I recall my first and second shows of photorealism I saw in the U.T. art gallery in Austin during the last century. The first exhibit had every canvas containing some reference to aviation (as I recall, it was sponsored by an airline company). I was fascinated by one painting where there was an old, riveted and shiny-surfaced airplane, captured with all its reflections as in life. But the puddle below the wing of the plane (it was raining in the painting) captured the essence of a real rain puddle. It did not look like a painting of a puddle, but it looked exactly like I would see a real puddle. The difference is subtle but striking in the extreme.

The second show was even more wonderful...I recall three of the exhibited works from it like the show was yesterday: one was a canvas with a bright light shining from above the canvas from a wall-mounted lamp. The canvas was covered with painted droplets, each one captured in full, seeming three dimensions and the bright light from above was refracted in each droplet, just like the bright light above the canvas could have been expected to appear if the drops had been real.

The second work in this show was a 4x8' canvas that represented a piece of plywood, complete with grain, "boats" (the little replacement pieces shaped like boat bottoms to replace bad places in the thin sheets of wood that make up the surface of a piece of plywood), incidental drips of paint and wear places in the wood of the plywood. It was about as perfect as one could expect a painting to be. I loved it.

The third work in the show was a sculpture of a woman. This wasn't just any woman off the street: This woman had no clothing on. She was life-size, standing upright and relaxed with every pore and hair intact...right down to her eyelashes and arm hair. I would say that she attracted quite a crowd of folks who were intently trying to find some mistake on the artist's part and failing.

But this NPR photo blog piece on a modern photorealist artist, Ralph Goings, is about as good as it gets. It contains an interview with the artist on his reasons and thinking for doing what he does, and each of the eight paintings of his in the piece is preceded by the photo from his collection (he does his own photos to work from to produce the lifelike paintings) that inspired the canvas. After you see the blog piece, there is a link to small samples of the 40 years of his work on his own Web site.

Comments are welcomed.

ART: Typewriter ribbon tins

Another mind-boggling art form that I'd forgotten existed. I recall now seeing some of these back during my very first days of noticing things about typewriters. This series of photographs is stunning for the most part. To think of companies putting such design art effort into something as mundane as containers for single typewriter ribbons! Worth a view: here.

Comments welcome.

Crabs don't throw stones

The really fine dance of art and science with the natural world has just made another leap. I saw this wonderful image shown above and an accompanying article & video which show how it was done and for what reason. It is worth a visit, I think.

Electronics parts yield articulated animal robots

I ran across this post today on the MAKE: blog that discusses robot art pieces that are fashioned from large numbers of electronics and mechanical parts into the most interesting animals you can imagine. Very imaginative and inventive, to say the least!

I was following some of the links about this and I found this post of the artist's own making, that takes a few of the robot pieces even further to make extremely short videos of them going through their articulated paces! They amazed me no end!

Comments welcome.

Influential people painting with links

Three Chinese artists compiled their list of dozens of influential folks and created the linked painting. What is remarkable about the technology is that you can double click on each portrait for a Wikipedia article about the person.

This could keep you occupied for some period of time......up to you!

Enjoy .... click on the link below . . . (sent by a California ham buddy)

http://cliptank.com/PeopleofInfluencePainting.htm

Animals and such...on hand

Here's a link for a collection of 22 images concerning painted animals and such on hands (and feet). This one is a commercial site for "fine art bodypainting". I'm sure there must be some odd level of satisfaction in doing so, but I cannot for the life of me understand why someone would pay lots of money to paint their cat. Perhaps they are starved for conversation topics or have some fetish. I just don't think I want to go there in any case.

This fellow seems obsessed, since he spent about 30 hours with the various levels of paint on the front of his body during this video of the seemingly frantic period of painting those who have influenced his life on that canvas. He says it represents:

30 different people that influenced my life were painted one on top of another on my torso. I either painted a picture of the person or an object that represents the person.

This plant will not shock you

Let's see now...hmmm. Coulda been (original to this application):

Power to the people

Keep on pluggin'

Socket to me

I'm very cableble, oshifer

Cut the CORD! Cut the CORD!

In an octopus's garden (sic)

Sculpture: you can't get there from here

I'm a fan of mind boggling, whatever its roots. So, when I discovered this sculpture of a triple Klein bottle, I directed my attention its way. See, a Klein bottle is one of those impossible things that gets your mind rattled until it doesn't know what happened to it. It can't be created reasonably in three-dimensional space. Evidently, this British sculptor didn't know that, because he not only created ONE, he created one inside one inside one for a triple threat of 'em!