Wednesday, April 30, 2008
I don’t think I’ve stopped tapping my feet since I started listening to The New Mastersounds six months ago. Sounding like a meld of Booker T. & the M.G.s and The Meters, it’s hard to believe this New Orleans-style funk band started in Leeds. Most songs are just the four members playing drums, guitar, bass and an oh-so-glorious Hammond. Now and then the sound is enhanced by guests playing horns, flute, or percussion. Here’s a link to their Myspace page, where you can get a quick introduction to the groove. After listening to “Nervous” and “Thirty Three”, don’t blame me if you, like I did, snag their last two albums as soon as possible. Enjoy.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Yesterday, Barack Obama delivered what some people called the most important speech on race in over forty years. Yet some of these same coneheads prognosticated that his poll numbers may go down as a result. Wait a minute. Obama can pack more thought into one sentence than our current president has in the last seven years and this hurts him? Are American voters so superficial that everytime you start talking real truth they start covering their ears, eyes, and mouth like the proverbial three monkeys? Sometimes I think America looks at race like that overdue phone bill on the counter we can’t really afford to pay right now….like it will somehow go away. Like someone else will pay for it. But one day you pick up the phone and there’s no dial tone. One can’t wear the Alfred E. Neuman “what me worry?” face forever. Other issues like health care and energy are going to take a president that can stand up and tell us the dirty truth. To talk about the heavy lifting it’s going to take to solve these problems. Obama is the first guy I’ve ever heard that does this. Sure, he’s campaigning, but I’ve never even heard campaign promises that come this close to the truth.
A month or so ago, I watched him on television stand in front of an auditorium full of auto workers while Obama said, “you can’t stop jobs from going overseas.” He went on to talk about moving to greener economies. It struck me that telling a couple thousand hard-working union members (I am a member of one) that they may have to rethink their job of the last twenty years takes serious cajones. The kind I would love to see in a president. I don’t think going to war takes nuts. But telling the truth does. If only telling the truth was a “family value”.
For a great minute-by-minute review of Obama’s speech on 3/18, check out The Rude Pundit.
Or another view, this time by Adam McKay: Obama Cracks my TV in Half
And just to change the subject, here’s an essay by Nathaniel Hoffman: It’s time to kick Jesus out of Politics
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Of course I’ve been throwing some paint around. But in the meantime, I came across a short article by Barbara Ehrenreich entitled “The Fall of the American Consumer”. Only slightly tongue-in-cheek, you almost wish it was more so. Because it only hints at the double-bind we’ve gotten ourselves into: we need to keep buying junk to keep the world economy going, while to do so creates growth at a scary pace. For more info, there’s an in-depth article on economic growth at Wikipedia.
But quickly: an annual growth rate of the Gross Domestic Product of 2.5% means it will double the GDP in twenty-eight years. A growth of eight percent means a doubling of the GDP within only nine years (a rate at which some countries are experiencing now- including China). I’m not an expert on the economy, but if there’s a doubling of the GDP, exactly how much is doubled? The amount of garbage we put out? The energy we need to keep the economy going? What’s the environmental cost of a doubled-up GDP? And, most importantly, inquiring minds at Monsanto are wondering if it can be fixed by an injection of rBGH?
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
…as in, I really, really hope that one year from now we don’t all look in the mirror and wonder if we got caught up in a Barack Obama cult of personality. I hope it’s not. I sent some money to the guy. I hope he gets elected. I hope that even one quarter of his ideas get implemented. After seven years listening to a morality-challenged, popsicle-stick-for-the-right, I need a serious friggin’ break from “compassionate conservatives”. “Change” might be the most overused word this year, but ”chance” is something I believe worth taking. And if there’s even a small chance that the way our government works can truly be more compassionate, I’m willing to stump for the guy.
And if it turns out to be Clinton, no problem. I’ll happily vote for her as well. Even knowing that in November, there are people who would never vote for her because of 1 Timothy 2:11-15. Someone in McCain’s campaign would make sure that little tidbit was slipped into the mailbox of any supporter who spent every Sunday wearing a tinfoil hat. I wish I was being facetious; I feel it’s closer to the truth than most would admit. I wouldn’t blame any particular red state; it could be your neighbor or mine. Ok, more likely my neighbor - Mitt Romney won Utah with ninety (ninety!!) percent of the vote in the Republican primary here. What? Are you kidding? Of course I was embarrassed. But instead of apologizing, how ’bout I make a pledge to move as soon as I’m eligible to retire. Which is in two years, eight months, and twenty-two days, but who’s counting?
But instead of baiting or bashing the O’Reilly’s among us (it’s way too easy), let me return to hope. My own hope, or wish that even a fraction of the ideas in one of Obama’s speeches come to fruition. He’s wonderful to listen to; it will be bliss if things actually change.
One of the things I’ve been doing for fun over the last year is some work for Liquid Silver Books, a publisher of electronic books. You may ask: romance novel covers? Or: e-books have covers? Sure, why not? Even virtual sales need something to draw the buyer. These covers aren’t very far from a lot of images I’ve done before, except for the addition of a male. Okay, so maybe for me that is a stretch. On the left is my most recent cover (sans male, in this case). On the “art/digital” page (link to the right) there is a version without the titles. I’ll be adding more soon.
Ok, not really forty-seven layers of paint, but I think I’ve gone five or six short sessions on this one by now. Yesterday I sat down and darkened up things a bit more, using the same colors- burnt sienna, burnt umber, and ultramarine. Liquin for a medium. I’ve really enjoyed the process of scrubbing the paint around, but part of me knows that I’m only darkening things up because I’m pretty damn scared to start adding real color. Because once that happens, there’s always a little voice that is going to remind you that you really screwed up now and can’t go back.
It still looks overtaken by burnt sienna, especially in the figure. I spent most of this session darkening the room and door. I was afraid if I darkened the figure too much, it would hard to bring her back up with lighter glazes later. Looking back, however, there are going to be areas on this painting that require some thick paint to make it as bright as I want anyway.
I also thought about edges. Where I wanted to lose some and where I plan to add some sharper edges with thicker paint later. Of course, when I say “thinking” it’s really more like “guessing”, as I don’t have years of oil painting behind me to base any decisions on. But hey, it’s a learning process. Even though I don’t have a ton of paintings behind me, things like composition and lost edges are things I’m familiar with through my digital art. But more on that later. Now…. on to add some color. yikes.
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
So here’s something I’ve had sitting around that needs to be carried to some kind of conclusion. Or demise. I’m not quite sure how it’s going to work out. The good news is that I think it looks ok so far. The bad news is that it looks ok so far and odds are that once I lay a finger on it, it’s going to scream downhill from here. But hey, someone’s gotta do it.
First let me recap where I am now on it. It’s based on one of my digital images, “backview” (original title, eh?). It’s one of the first figures I decided to translate to oil painting, and I did the very respectable thing for a learning painter by chickening out and trying the ‘easy’ side of a figure. I thought there wouldn’t be as much pressure if there wasn’t a nose or a couple eyes that I would end up painting upside-down. After drawing the image onto a 12″x16″ canvas, I began on the grisaille, which is just a fancy art word meaning “monotone”. Using burnt umber, burnt sienna, and ultramarine blue thinned with Liquin, I laid in all the tones. It’s taken about three sessions so far, each one building on the previous one, darkening things up a bit. And it need at least one more session before I really begin to lay color down and screw things up. (Continued)
One of the best collections of paperback cover scans I’ve seen online is at Vintage Paperbacks. There’s nothing for sale. There’s only the enjoyment of the pure browse, with hundreds of scans of cover work from some of the best illustrators of the time (1930’s-70’s). You’ll see samples from Rafael de Soto, Jim Steranko, Robert Bonfils, and Rudolph Belarski among others (Frazetta, Jones, Maguire, Saunders). Well presented, the site is easy on the eyes and a breeze to get around. I wish the scans were of a larger size, but given that there are over a thousand, I can understand. Despite the size, the quality is high. You can choose to view by category: artist, author, publisher or genre. Enjoy!
So #1 son and I were at my favorite used paperback bookstore the other day. Not that there are many other used stores around. We found some good science-fiction books, and a couple others I bought solely for the cover work. Buying something for just the cover is something I’ll do now and then…it’s only seventy-five cents and it provides a bit of detective work trying to find out who painted the cover (why the publishing company couldn’t afford one line of small print of credit is something I find highly irritating and will be writing about more later).
So after browsing for a while, my son calls me over through a doorway where we enter a huge room filled with shelf after shelf of romance novels. I mean, this was a three-car garage of a room. Packed. Made the previous room we were in look like a closet. I discovered there were offshoots of this collection- smaller rooms filled with sub-genres of romance. And one in particular got me interested enough to come back again another day to really dig in. (Continued)
More things added to the site now… more images uploaded as well as some wallpaper (in the ‘minutiae’ section). Still having some problems getting captions on images to show up, title of pages wrong, a few colors not right, etc. Credit that to my underwhelming comprehension of how CSS works and how to find the right value among 400 lines of code. youch. I’m getting there, but it’s going to take a while.
Thanks for your patience, and I hope you like what’s been put up so far. If you’ve been here before and are missing the old look, well, the look has changed, but all the content should be back again soon.
