Monthly Archives: November 2019

this morning’s fun

messing about

This morning I was reading an essay by Beth E. Wilson ( The Material Image: Surface and Substance in Photography) that introduced a 2005 exhibition at SUNY New Paltz. It will take a few more readings to wrap my mind around its significance for my own photographic enterprises, but it did provoke me to try messing a bit with an image from more than a year ago, one which never quite reached its potential in the first version I uploaded to Flickr:


20x1828crop2

I’ve had the feeling there was something more to be discovered, and it occurred to me that I might bring out the figures by rotating and then warping the perspective with a GIMP tool. Here’s what resulted:


20x1828warped

One may wonder if such messing about is completely legit, and further wonder what I could do if I really knew about the possibilities and practicalities of tools like GIMP and Photoshop. I’m not sure what we’re looking at here, but there’s something mystically goose-like about the figure on the right. The figure on the left seems to be executing a 3-D dance move.

Ropa vieja

So it got to be noon and I was starting to make tuna salad for lunch and Broot says “I see that the Special at Home Kitchen is ropa vieja…” which happens to be one of my 30 or 40 most favoritest things at Home Kitchen. Flank steak in a Cuban sauce, with green olives, tomato, onion, green peppers, served with rice. So into town I went:

ropa vieja

Urp.

at play on a Monday morning

This post is a waypoint in the process of learning to use drawing tools to explicate mysteries.

I included this image in Elevenses but hadn’t parsed it for its content—for its component creatures:


20x1944

Gradually I’ve discovered a variety of possibilities, beginning with a burro-like creature:

and an elephant:

and just yesterday a woman appeared:

and just maybe she’s holding a baby, though that’s not as clear… yet:

The imp on the shoulder suggests that this is a Sagrada Familia, where the part of Joseph is played by an elephant:



I’m not sure what the next steps are, but perhaps a refinement of my initial tracings would be worth attempting. The iPad/iPencil combo clearly works, but just as clearly I’m only beginning to explore the potentials of the tools. Stay tuned.

Descry: to see (something unclear or distant) by looking carefully; discern; espy

When I first processed this one

10xi1911
I saw the whole as a dog-like figure, but I completely missed seeing until today this marvelous face:
10xi1911cropadj

This sort of thing happens a lot, and is basically A Good Thing: there’s always more to be found in images and/or in one’s mind. The problem is often how to articulate, describe, convey what one descries. Another example from this morning, from the very same source material, in an unfolding I made a couple of days ago:

god of Spaniels

At first I saw the canine figure in the top third of the image, seemingly with forepaws raised in benediction, and the first thought was “ah! the God of Spaniels!”. And next I saw another and larger canine in the center of the image, and read that one as a fox. But this morning that central canine appeared as a spaniel in transports of delight, floppy ears flapping, smiling muzzle, and eyes expressing a degree of pleasure that I imagine for a young spaniel playing in surf. The figure I first saw, the God of, is a spectral presence, blessing the joy of the dog beneath.

Wholly imaginary, since the seed material was a stump, cut off flush with the ground:

spaniel precursor
and it may well be that nobody else sees what I see. And indeed, I had no idea there were spaniels to be descried when I snipped out a bit of the original image and mirrored it.

orphic or Orphic?

I’m not sure whether to be offput, amused, informed… or just what by Andrea Scott’s Reframing Modernism at the New MoMA. On the one hand, I love the basic characterization in her report of “The Shape of Shape” exhibit:

The ethos of the new MOMA—to revise the myth of modern art as a triumphant procession of great white men and instead tell the glorious, untidy truth of a bunch of weird human beings…

but I am less than charmed by

…the emphasis is on oddballs like Clough, whose orphic 1985 painting “Stone” is included.

Well, it’s not Andrea Scott’s fault that I am left cold and baffled by the “orphic” tag on a piece that seems to me to have nothing discernable to do with Stone in the sense that I understand Rocks. I did have to explore the Lexicon a bit to figure out just which “orphic” she meant: there’s the mystic, the oracular; the fascinating, the entrancing; and the “having an import not apparent to the senses nor obvious to the intelligence” (vocabulary.com). I’m going with the lattermost, which leaves Orpheus entirely out of the picture.

a voice from the past

So there I was, walking to work in March 2005, on a hilly woods path behind W&L, and talking out loud with a microphone attached to a digital recorder. And 14 1/2 years later I find the file at Archive.org, where I had uploaded it shortly before I retired, in September 2005. The recording is rambling and only about 4 minutes long, but I’m quite interested in hearing what I had to say about courses, about teaching, about learning. I could only wish that I’d continued to make recordings like that.
Here it is:

From my walk to work

of Ot

This little story is complicated and digressive, but well worth trying to put together. It begins maybe a dozen years ago, in a taxi in Providence RI, a city that has a lot of public sculpture and other art stuff to look at. We passed by a particularly arresting sculptural creation and one of us said “What’s that?” and the taxi driver said “That? That’s ot” and thus the term ot was implanted into the Lexicon.

So yesterday morning one of the blogs I follow pointed to another tumblr with the stark message

2019 is almost over and all I gotta say is what the fuck was that

which expresses succinctly one of the mental states into which I occasionally stumble.

And the next though that coursed through my mind was

I take refuge in Ot

Where do these things come from? What imp instantiates them, sends them into Consciousness, which then offers them up to me to play with, these illusions and allusions that connect things to improbable other things?

The next thought was

hmmm. “take refuge in”…

which of course is a formula in Buddhist practice (one takes refuge in the Three Jewels: the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha), and that led to the realization that I was a bit less clear about this Dharma thing than I thought I should be, so a brief Wikipedia digression happened, and that led to an article on the Vedic concept of Ṛta (“the order that makes life and universe possible”, which seems to be nothing more or less than the Tao, innit?). That Sanskrit Ṛ phoneme is “a vocalist r, like that in pert or dirt, when pronounced with a rhotic r, e.g. as in American…”, but in Providence or Boston dialect would be non-rhotic [caa, paak, ot…]. And /Ṛta/ can be glossed as ‘Truth’.

And so on.

This Ot in which I claim to take refuge is well known to whatever readers of this blog there may be out there. Yesterday produced several more examples:


10xi1908
admonishing the young

10xi1903
punk sensibilities

alien
(name it and you can keep it)

a new toy

Not sure if this is a Good Thing or a calumny, but it’s progress of a sort.

The new iPad arrived yesterday, and I’ve been playing with Adobe Illustrator Draw, attempting to actualize an idea I’ve had for a few months. Take an image in which I see something that I want to call other viewers’ attention to. Sketch the outlines of what I see on a new layer, then export the sketch. Here’s an example, raggedy but clear enough to show the potential:

Start with an unfolded image (what I call a tessellation, though it’s just a single mirroring), like the one I labelled “voracious blue-eyed goddess”:

voracious blue-eyed goddess

sketch in the lines my imagination sees:

voracious

and turn off the background:

Hillary

Who is it?

Hillary Clinton.

I had no idea…

Cucurbitae of November

I sent the eleventh photo book (called Elevenses) off to Blurb a couple of days ago, and I’ll put up a link to its pdf once I know that everything is as I intended. I’m quite pleased with what went into it, and almost feel that I’m in control of Adobe InDesign, such that other books will follow soon. Meanwhile, and while I await delivery of some shiny new Apple hardware in the coming week, I awoke this morning with an idea for a quick 20-page booklet with rock images. By 4:00 this afternoon it was complete and uploaded to Blurb. Here’s the cover, front and back:


A Pumpkin in Late November Cover

…and it’s downloadable as a pdf.

An explanatory web page oook.info/LI/ is up in an early version, but I’m still working on what to include therein.