Veja Du - 5

I chose to be my dog for a day. He lives SUCH a pampered life!!!

He eats:

He drinks:

He stares longingly at his momma:

He lays in the living room (these two terrorize him):

This is what a big, spoiled baby looks like:

Ah! To be a dog!!!!

The Big Picture - 6 November 2010

I love to take digital photographs. One of my favorite subjects is sports art; baseball to be exact. If I ever get a chance to visit another city, I usually make sure that I can get tickets to the local baseball team and we watch a game. I have played the game for 39 years as a catcher and my wife has learned to ignore me, because I sit in the stands and call out the pitches before the catcher sends signals to his pitcher. I take my camera to the game and I wander around the stadium taking the general sightseeing pictures (broadcast booth, playing field, statues, monuments, etc.) then I go back to my seat and start to zoom in on the players.

Chapter 9 in “Sparks of Genius” talks about “Body Thinking,” or the training of our bodies to perform a physical function over and over, until our body does the movement without even thinking. Chapter 10 talks about “Empathizing,” or mentally placing yourself in another’s position. You may act like that entity, or you may emulate their physical traits. My dad tried to teach me how to pitch by making me watch Detroit Tiger baseball games on the television and try to throw a ball like the pitchers did. It never worked. I was taught how to throw a baseball like a catcher and still do after all these years.

As I said, I have been a catcher for 39 years and that is a lot of squatting when you add it all up. I was taught “how” by a snakeskin, steel tip cowboy boot wearing coach. He used to stand behind me during practice and kick my left buttock every time I did something that he did not like. I hated that stupid metal tip, but it sure made me “body think” my way into being a better catcher. Now I am old in baseball years and I can watch a player’s muscular performance, seeing if they deserved a boot to the butt, or freedom from pain. I take pictures of the players too and I can critique them later.

My boys like to play baseball and I coached their teams for years. There were times I wanted to buy a pair of steel tipped, snakeskin boots, but I prefer to stay out of jail. I taught my players “Body Thinking” through repetition, not pain. I took photographs during games and used them to demonstrate/illustrate where they were not playing correctly. It worked well, but not perfectly. I would tease them as well, by picking one or two idiosyncrasies of their behavior and imitate them during practice. One player had a mental/superstitious issue with making a cross on the plate before each at-bat. I am not sure if he knew this, but we all had a good laugh when I asked the team who I was and walked into the batter’s box, making a crucifix symbol with my bat. It was fair turn-around when my kids finally noticed that I never walked in front of an umpire. Even if he were standing up against the fence, I would politely excuse myself and walk behind him as I went up to bat. I really wished somebody took some pictures of me doing that, because I am not that superstitious and it would have been funny to see.

How Do I Love Thee 3 - Abstracting As Poetry

DIGITAL HAIKU

Once I took pictures

Then they made me “boil it down”

Now they call it art

Digital photography is a fun subject. There are so many different avenues to express yourself it becomes endless. I started to play with paint.net and it gave me the ability to boil down some of my artwork. Now people look at my photographs and consider them a whole different art form.

The Big Picture - 22 October 2010

Being an artist, you might think I would be able to perform abstract art. It is just not so with me. Abstract art is very loose and representational, about as polar opposite in artistic styles from my personal, heavily controlled, pencil renderings. Pablo Picasso is not my favorite artist, but I do know about his work; I even have a Picasso Lithograph in my house, but the cubism/surrealism/abstract movements are just not what I like to look at.

In art, in order to abstract an object, you need to over-simplify it down to the bare essentials. Shape, color and size mean nothing. Proportions are not held and realism is completely lost. In a digital photography world, how do you abstract an item without computer programs? You can take all the pictures you want and, unless your camera has special settings, you are reliant upon those programs…and then you need the knowledge of those programs in order to make them work properly.

Analogizing, or representational replacement, in photography can be interpretive. I like to take pictures of lighthouses. If any of those photographs hold any artistic “specialties” (composition, color, shading, etc.), I might even paint the picture. Then, I had a professor at The University of Michigan ask me what my obsession with the phallic symbol was all about. I wondered what he was talking about and asked him why he said such and he responded with some Freudian quote about all things being psychologically connected to sex. I had never thought about lighthouses in that manner, I just liked taking pictures of them. Now that professor has semi-ruined the subject matter for me and every time I snap a photo of a lighthouse I get a mental image of a penis…and that is just wrong.

On pages 154 and 155 of “Sparks of Genius” they talk about M.C. Escher’s tessellations. I have always been fascinated with Escher’s work. He was of a different mindset. A digital photography lesson about M.C. Escher could contain an observance of positive and negative shapes that blend together to form a composition. The question is, where would you find anything pre-prepared for you to just take a picture of, without it already being somebody else’s artwork? You would have to look for individual parts that, put together, would make up the whole. In the end, it would be a rewarding assignment, but one that is very hard to achieve.

I do not alter my digital photographs very much. I take my pictures, upload them into my computer and sift through them when I get time. In other words, I have thousands of pictures just sitting in electronic limbo, waiting for me to retire, so I can actually work on them. It would take me some time to open up my mind and turn my pictures into anything abstract, or representational. I like to keep things as close to realistic as possible. This does not mean that other people cannot enjoy those styles of art; in fact many do. It is just not my style.

Veja Du - 4

I KNOW IT'S NOT A "PICTURE," BUT IT IS A DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPH OF ONE OF MY DRAWINGS

SO, I STARTED TO DISTORT THE COLOR: 

THEN I PIXELATED THE ARTWORK:

AND CRYSTALIZED IT:

HOW ABOUT NEAR BLACKNESS?

MY FAVORITE...LOOPING:

AND...UNDER GLASS.

Sparks of Genius Idea 2

Hi Groupies,

I checked the calender and the full moon is 22 October 2010. I think this falls right in the middle of our turn to take our turn at the "activity" lesson. Please correct me if I am wrong. If it does, are we going with the idea of "playing" with the sun and moon? If so, when do we run it by Punya and Kristen?

Give me some input here and let's get ahead of the assignment before it gets here.

Thanks,
Lial

The Big Picture - 9 October 2010

As an artist, I have a tad bit of creativity. As a person with ADHD, that creativity seems to spatter all over creation. You would think that I would have a hard time falling into patterns, or ruts, but I always do. My wife always jokes that I am borderline Obsessive Compulsive as well. When I draw, I draw a lot of the same subject matter before I tire of it and move on to something else. The same is true for my digital photography. I seem to like to take photographs of the same ideals, just in different locations. An example would be all of my baseball stadium pictures. If we go to another city, I HAVE to go see a game and I end up taking tons of photographs that, if I did not know where they were taken, blend together to the general viewer. Can you consider my picture taking a “pattern?” Yes. Do I take pictures of patterns themselves? No.

I try my best not to be closed minded when it comes to art projects and I really liked some of the pattern ideas that were presented in “Sparks of Genius,” but where would you find some of those images in the real world? Can you find a series of M.C. Escher style images/patterns to take pictures of? Would they be natural, or man-made? The different hopscotch games would be great subject matter, but what is the reality of seeing them in the real world? The thought of being able to come up with different subject matter definitely piques my interest though. It sure would break up the monotony of the same-old landscapes people take.

The second portion of the reading assignment dealt on the formation of patterns. To turn this toward digital photography, I would like to think that taking pictures of existing patterns could become pattern forming. I was in a restaurant the other day and on the wall were a series of artworks that fell in line with Punya’s “take a picture of a letter, but it cannot BE the letter” assignment. There were artworks that said, “Love,” “Faith,” “Sailing,” and “Peace.” The artist even did “Michigan” and “State,” with the first letter being each school’s logo. The rest of the letters were of everyday items, or creatively cropped and manipulated photographs that generated the visual image of the letter. Was this a pattern? Yes. Was it intentional? Yes.

I talked to my obsessive nature in taking pictures of the same subject matter over and over. There is a reason I do that (other than I like what I am doing). I repeat my processes, trying to improve on my last work sessions. If I set out to take a series of pictures that dwelt on lighthouses, I would keep doing it until I was happy with my progress (which rarely happens…I am my own worst critic). I can form patterns without even knowing that I am doing so. I just do what I like to do and try to be the best at it I can become.

What do you see?