Art & Perception

In light of Sunil’s posts in which he displayed photos of a number of items about his household and, subsequently, led a discussion of Photoshop methods, I will add one of my own.

Each year we get a conifer and cover it with a grab bag of ornaments, many of them home made, which together form a gathering of memories and associations. Throw in some beads and wheat bulbs and we have something that, while something of a jumble, is just fine for us.

This year I have tried taking some shots of the tree for further manipulation. The re-shaping has been modestly tonal and chromatic, with an occasional wave of the magic wand. As has so often been mentioned in this blog, continuing to focus on a motif can and will lead to new visions. I have always accepted our trees as apparitions of an inside-out nature, glowing from within as they present various surface effects – all merry and light. This year the tree has been lurking at me, perhaps the result of some of my recent reading and viewing. I have approached the images in this mood.

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Happy Holidays folks.

Decorating the house for the holidays has always been a challenge. This year I used an idea from the linkage theme that I have described in earlier posts. You see a scissor jack configuration with offset center joints, the entirety of which can be pulled into a circle such as this. Some strings of lights and It was complete.

So much for the dry explanation. I do want to take this opportunity to thank all of you for the vibes and stimulation that you have provided over this last year and I look forward to more in the year ahead.

Let’s try for those images again.

Pele representation

Carved Pele in fruit mode.

Pele perfume bottles

Sorry for the inconvenience

For this last year I have been a Project Learn volunteer, helping Leon brush up on his reading skills. I have doodled during lulls in the sessions. Recently, my idle scratchings revisited an old compulsive tic. Some twenty years ago I stumbled across one of those holes in the fabric of existence that I have often felt a need to patch. I discovered that Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of volcanism, was visually underrepresented in traditional Hawaiian art. Since then I have gone so far as to attempt carved wood and plaster visualizations, along with paintings, all of which I have thrown out.

I began to wonder, while scanning these doodles into the computer, how they might be worked up in Photoshop. Here are some results. But before showing these, I would like to review a few Pele things.

This painting is typical of how Pele is visualized these days: a volcanically-adorned woman, or a tableau depicting an episode taken from her narrative. I have tried to treat Pele in a more symbolic way, pulling together “woman, island, lava and symbolic depiction” as more or less geometric constructs. A parade of discards testifies to my great success.

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Over the course of the last year I have made a number of cut wood letters. I have done so in order to gain process experience and to find the right combination of typefaces, dimensions and treatments in search of a decent question and answer linkage.

Watch a presidential debate and see the tangled relationships between the moderator’s questions and the varied kinds of responses. Messy and devious as it may become at times, the question and answer relationship is a fundamental aspect of the intellectual process. As such it calls out for plastic representation.

The final solution will likely be a tangled mass of big block letters. In the meanwhile I’ll settle for an equally tangled mass of this last year’s experiments.

These are three photos of one piece.

I’m still looking for the right colors. Early on I was giving each letter its own hues and patterns. This raised the visual density, but detracted from any clarity of intention. When undecided, I usually fall back to aluminum paint.

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Birgit has asked to see the original. here it is.

As pointed out elsewhere, this is a bunch of stuff hung up and in a sort of storage. The image in Cubey Do The First dispenses with the foliage.

In preparation for winter I painted a number of odd links in aluminum and hung them up.

In my lily pad post, and the waterfall one with Steve, I employed a stamping technique found in Photoshop. The process allows one to transfer bits and pieces between and around images. In this instance I chose a shot of the odd links and gave it the treatment. It ended up quite fractured and a bit Analytical.

I would so dearly love to get a like result in real life.

We might discuss the difference between what might and what can be.