Archive for category Visual Arts
Work in Progress: Xiao
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Visual Arts on August 23, 2010
A quartet of iterations, with the first likely release still a bit off. It’s Xiao (aka Debra Beretta)
Barefootage
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Visual Arts, linkedin on August 23, 2010
The remaining pieces are up at the Barefoot Coffee Bar, and so far the response has been positive. Thanks to Steven Lorenzen for his coordination (and banter on the merits of various Linux distros) this go around, and to Kate Saturday for always having been a keen supporter and easy person to work with.
Pictured here is some extra shots of the second wall I occupy, the bars in house phonograph (which I am far more impressed with than you might suspect) and some developmental pieces that almost made it onto the walls.
Developmental sketch: Danielle
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Visual Arts on August 18, 2010
The advantage of having worked at an art community site is that you can do things like doodle your former boss (in this case, the head of A&R at DevArt, Danielle Ward) and you don’t get in trouble or funny looks for it.
Done with an unknown brand of Japanese brush pen on Wausau 96 pound off-white bristol. This will definitely evolve over time, as I have a few ideas on the next layers of media that will go on this.
Sketch: Mark Holub of Led Bib
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Sounds, Visual Arts on August 15, 2010
I was reading a great one page write up in Jazzwise about how the In a Silent Way album by Miles Davis changed drummer Mark Holub’s life (it changed mine as well, hence the interest). The profile image is this campy number of him with a newsboy cap and an unlit pipe that I started working from.
I did not get very far, but it was a brief but fun diversion. Ballpoint pen, Tombo brush pens, some gouache, and a small amount of color touch-up in PS CS3.
BTW, his band Led Bib, is really a great bit of electric jazz-rock noise that deserve your attentive ears.
DevArt 10th Bash
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Observations, Out and About, Pop Culture, Visual Arts on August 10, 2010
The Missus and I left for Los Angeles late Friday evening and arrived at our hotel room sometime just before 3AM. Sleep came quickly, and morning involved a slow start and meandering pace up through lunch.
Speaking of lunch; to the woman who was our waitress…your perfunctory service suited our needs, but whatever weird eyeliner you had made you look like a heroin-addicted raccoon. Stop that.
Arriving at the House of Blues shortly after opening we were greeted secondly by my old boss, Danie, but first by Llamas. Not Lorenzo…just llamas. Two of them.
To be honest, I was much happier to be greeted by Danie, but the llamas were ok too. Got nothing against llamas, but Danie is a lot more likable, and she doesn’t spit arbitrarily.
While there were several panels, the one that I thought was the most significant was the public debut of Muro. A month ago I was at the DA HQ and got a sneak-peek at it with Angelo and Zack and I was floored. That being said, the polish and final additions they put in that months time were notable, and the final product is -and I am not prone to saying things like this often- something that changes the landscape not just a bit.
Seeing Stanley Lau do a quick demo with it also made me want to pull out my Pepper developmental sketches and complete at least one of them, maybe via Muro.
Most of the Bash was spent just catching up with old friends, and making new ones. I had not seen Danie or Richard or Bryan in ages (at the DevArt Summit at the Palladium in 2005), and I finally got to meet Keir and Stykera (who I now know is a fellow fan of Andy Patridge).
We ate “dinner” (read: bar food) with Spot, Penguino and Silvein, and cruised the floor running into ever more interesting folks (which admitedly is kind of expected and part of the reason you go in the first place). Also, nice to meet y’all (Mel, Rin, and anyone I may be missing).
The entire House of Blues was under DA control, and it was laid out with art and tools to make art (as it should be), with print galleries, Muro-stations (including a few using the Wacom Cintiqs) and an arts & crafts room. Of note, the third floor VIP Lounge is an amazing place with really cool crown moulding and stained glass. This was a great venue to have this kind of party in.
It was an incredibly well planned and executed little soiree. Kudos to everyone involved and my own thanks to everyone who attended. I still feel like DA is a real “social network” of people with a core set of interests (instead of just an aggregation of stuff), and I still feel like it has much more to offer than any of the comparable options available.
Looking forward to the eleventeenth bash.
Of note; spent the taxi ride home talking with the cabby (Armenian apparently) who really hated Turks and felt compelled to tell me about it in lurid detail. There was also something about St. Sargis, Kurds, and the beauty of the Russian language. I was not inebriated, however he may have been.
Also of note -and I wish I took a picture of it- was a huge sign on the freeway with a phone number and the words “I NEED DIRT“. Now realize this was in an agricultural area. There is lots of dirt there. I am wondering if the fellow with the sign just expects some random dude to call him and exclaim “NOW do I have some plenty heapin’ good dirt for ya!” or maybe “Sir, I do believe I may be -as a classy purveyor of fine soil products- be able to provision you with the dirt you seek.” but the sign was very LOL. Seriously, how do you arrive at the point in your life where you need to announce that, with your phone number attached, on a large sign at the shoulder of a major traffic artery.
@Barefoot Coffee Bar this Month
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Out and About, Pop Culture, Visual Arts, linkedin on August 5, 2010
While I have been suffering some logistical snafus all around, I managed to get part of a display up at Barefoot this evening.
I’ll be showing all of August, and I may rotate some pieces out midstream (I will definitely be adding some more in later next week), with most of the work being more recent items, as well as some developmental sketches.
VoTD: Rita Redshoes
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Pop Culture, Sounds, Visual Arts on July 31, 2010
A Portuguese artist that sings primarily in English, Rita Redshoes (aka Rita Pereira) has a fun, earthy alt-pop sound.
The video has some quirky choreography that reminds me of stuff Toni Basil may have done in the 80s.
…me.Works in Progress
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Out and About, Visual Arts on July 19, 2010
So, I have my slot for next month at Barefoot, and want a lot of new stuff to be there; trying to finish as many random things that have been floating for week and months (and in a few cases years) in the next two weeks.
Work in Progress: Jesidangerously
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Visual Arts on July 16, 2010
Just something I got around to beginning to rework from a previous attempt (at least a year ago).
Ryuichi Sakamoto – Out of Noise
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Pop Culture, Sounds, Visual Arts on July 14, 2010
I have had this on rotation intermittently since it was first released, and it occupies a really nice pivot in the relentless explorations of Sakamoto. It bears earmarks of his cinematic scores in spots, the minimalism of his collaborations with Alva Noto, and even some of the more subdued moments he has recorded with David Sylvian, but it sits well as its own statement.
The opening nine minute Hibari is an almost Steve Reichian bit of taking a seemingly simple motif and repeating it with never ending subtle variations until it takes on a melancholic kind of pulse. A lot of the electronic drones and washes have a certain grit that prevents any new-age flatness. If anything, the lushness is hidden behind a thin veil of the aforementioned austerity. Closing track Composition 0919 is also very Reich-like, but is arguably the only aggressive, staccato cut, and it closes the album.
Depending on how your ears arrive at it, this album could be music for nocturnes, or a soundtrack for elegaic winter mornings. In the Red really made me think of the latter; like it’s something I should have playing while drinking black coffee while looking out a window into a gray morning near the shore of some rainy beach.
Tama is the closest that the album comes to something sounding more sinister and menacing than sad or plaintive. It is held together by a lot of found sounds and minor key swells, and it would be very suitable for a David Lynch film.
For all its austerity, I find myself never getting irritated or bored with Out of Noise; the tone of his piano performances, and the fluidity of his phrasing is some of the best in his long career. The arrangements he chooses are emotive and rich, even when at the most ambient and seemingly ready to dissipate moments. Some of the emotional capital is tucked in loosely under pithy, occasionally scattered snippets of sounds and pads. It is graceful music, sometimes -I find shortsightedly- called “cinematic” (a term seemingly used by most others for tunes that people think belong in an art film but aren’t symphonic/classical enough for their tastes otherwise) when really its probably better to say that under the right environment, it becomes narrative music, making you tell a story to yourself…out of the noise.
Jojo Mayer v2
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Sounds, Visual Arts on July 9, 2010
This one may end up colored/painted/thrashed or I may leave it this way; I started drawing one head shot and then scads of hand/stick/drum/cymbals to overlay but so far this is the only configuration that has worked.
This is Jojo Mayer, who is probably the greatest technically accomplished drummer since Buddy Rich,and whose musical span is pretty wide: Screaming Headless Torsos, Nerve, Me’Shell Ndegeocello and others, covering an approach that is both hypertechnical, yet accessible and not overtly flashy.
Here is a sample of Nerve: [link]
And here with Depart: [link]
New illustration: Mekanixa – Miss Boux v5
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Pop Culture, Visual Arts on July 6, 2010
Steampunkish robotic fun.
I still do not think I am done with this, but I want to work on the other variant I have on the desk (as well as a few other working pieces, including one for a friend’s home)
This is a radically reworked bit of biomechanical madness, with the reference model being Andrea Boux.
I would not have even gone down this route initially, as I planned to do a more traditional portraiture, but when I noticed the electrical socket on the wall of the ref image, my head kind of wandered in this direction.
pencil, acrylic ink, gouache, granulation medium & some digital post processing.
Giant Robot needs You
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Pop Culture, Visual Arts on July 5, 2010
I don’t buy very issue, but I have been a spot reader of Giant Robot (along with Hi-Fructose and Juxtapose) for many years. The print business is a tough one, and GR is in need of some love.
Work in Progress: Miss Boux
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Visual Arts on July 3, 2010
This has two tracks it could go (and I may fork the main image and do both along parallel lines) and the reference is Andrea Boux. This is basically a pencil + processing in Inkscape and PS to play with certain lineweight/color combinations.
The Darkest Birds 2010-06-26 v4
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Visual Arts on June 27, 2010
As previously hinted at here, I have ‘finished’ an iteration of The Darkest Birds.
The title comes from a song and lyric:
Here come the darkest birds. They’ve got their reasons
This uses acrylic ink, acrylic paint, pigma microns, an iridescent black ink that later proved to be a problem, water-soluable colored pencils, gouache, pro-white on 96 pound bristol + PS CS3.
This is also the first image I worked through almost exclusively in 600 DPI range. Prior to this, for the last 7 years or so, the max size I could work with comfortably (and even then I pushed it) was images scanned at 300 DPI. This new workstation (8GB of RAM and a large swap partition and a 64-bit OS) is exactly what I was needing.
There is also another WIP pubbed here.
Vinyl Remix: Leonard Froen
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Pop Culture, Visual Arts on June 20, 2010
I’ve been tooling around with a lot of abstracts, but took a weekend break to finish something that had been lying around for at least 5-6 months (basically about once every other week I’d work on it for about 10 minutes before bed…getting nowhere slowly. Then I just kind of sped things up the past few days.
I have this habit of doodling afro-clad people in my notebooks, memos, margins of napkins (even on the tablecloths at certain restaurants, like this) and in this case, I kind of merged that habit to the head of revered songwriter and rather peculiar-voiced Leonard Cohen.
The 1967 album this was sourced from has been effectively obliterated under acrylic ink, acrylic paint, alcohol-based Posca pens, gouache, Pentel brush nib pens, graphite, acetate, torquing in PS CS3…and an afro. The finished iteration is at DA, and here are a bunch of the variations that led up to it.
subZERO Festival
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Observations, Out and About, Pop Culture, Sounds, Visual Arts on June 5, 2010
Yesterday was the 3rd annual SubZERO Festival. It was also Drawing Day 2010. I scribbled with a brush-tip pen in a small sketchbook while commuting up in the morning, and on the way to downtown SJ.
Ate at Eulipia and reminisced about the remains of what once was 10 feet above me (the Ajax Lounge). Eulipia still has a passable, but largely staid menu at this point. What it does have is location and aesthetics, as I ate street/patio-side and watched some of the live music, a fashion show and various species of pop culture casualties stroll on by.
I ran into Avery of Corpus Callosum (he was hauling a rather large bass drum, pictured below) and he told me that besides their stage gig they were also doing music for a puppet show. Bear in mind, I’ve seen ‘puppet shows’ done by CC and its associates, and they are quite impressive in style and substance, but any puppet show involving a 12 foot puppet robot operated by three people with teeth made of knives is worth seeking out.
Stopped in the Anno Domini Gallery, which is now my favorite spot down in SOFA these days; they had some great stuff overall (I had never heard of Dimitri Drjuchin before, but I am happy I know of his work now), but of particular interest was a show of Bob Dylan inspired material done by the uber-alpha illustrator Barron Storey.
It was the closest to the days of the old SOFA Street Fair that I had seen in that area since the days of the first SOFA Street Fairs (read: before it turned into a pay-at-the-gate for a lite, sanitized version of what it started as).
I wish I had taken more photos, but the camera battery went kaputski.
Futbol Fever
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Observations, Out and About, Pop Culture, Visual Arts on June 1, 2010
Sister Petronia Euclid v5
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Visual Arts on May 30, 2010
As usual these days, I’m on the fence about this one; parts I really like, parts I am exasperated with.
I initially debated putting an ornate halo around her head like some of the religious artwork of the Dutch masters and Portuguese Manueline era (think Vasco Fernandes). Who knows, I may yet to that to this.
As for the title, there is -also per usual- a musical reference in there. I will let you ponder as to what it might be.
Materials: Pentel brush pen, pigma microns, acrylic paint, gouache, pro-white, final processing via PS CS3.
VoTD: Yeasayer – O.N.E. (live)
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Pop Culture, Sounds, Visual Arts on May 22, 2010
So they are a little on the posturing hipster side in terms of just about everything else, but their tunes pull all the elements of 80s new wave and synth-funk that I enjoy. I first heard this track as part of some mix on KSCU, but this live version works really well (and shows that they can actually perform what they record).
This is likely appealing to the same people who drool over MGMT (hence the pretentiousness factor that the Pitchfork crowd requires)* but I find this generally more listenable than anything I’ve heard from MGMT so far.
* Is it just me, or are Pitchfork bands (and their fanbases) the new Prog-Rock scenester hell?
FOSS funnies, XKCD style
Posted by zeruch in Law, Pop Culture, Technology, Visual Arts on May 21, 2010
About the only thing wrong with this is that the year dates may as well both be 2003 or 2010 (or any of the several years before 2003, between 2003 and 2010, and probably for a few years to come after 2010).
Work in Progress: The Darkest Birds
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Visual Arts on May 19, 2010
This is just a quick color test; the pencils were run through Inkscape then pushed to Photoshop to play in. The title comes from a song and lyric by Nine Horses (a trio lineup of Davis Sylvian, Steve Jansen and Burnt Friedman),
Here come the darkest birds. They’ve got their reasons
VoTD: Karin Park – Don’t Stop Now
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Pop Culture, Sounds, Visual Arts on May 15, 2010
Karin Park is someone I discovered recently via a remix of Ashes by Grey Ghost & Mezzir. Her general sound is pretty stark and catchy, with a clean proto new wave sheen.
tight like that v4
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Observations, Visual Arts on May 8, 2010
Originally under the working title Droppin’ Bows On ‘Em (because I had that song in my head) it finished on Little Axe’s Tight Like That, which seemed more appropriate.
It is a little different than a lot of the abstracts I have done in recent memory, in that it is mostly built from unused layers of components done in 2004 in 3D and 2006 in acrylics on bristol. I kind of fell over them and something started clicking. I stitched the bits together in Photoshop last night. I am not sure if its fully baked or not, as I have this idea of extracting out the 3D forms and doing something akin to what I did with the letterform works Deed and Decay.
I chose a color scheme that has a certain fade to it; like age, or an ether over the memory of the original colors. Some nights I really don’t understand how I even get to these kinds of results, but at some level you don’t question it…you simply act on compulsion.
Herbie Scores Miles Biopic!
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Pop Culture, Sounds, Visual Arts on May 4, 2010
Herbie Hancock is going to be scoring the Miles Davis biopic starring and directed by Don Cheadle. I am a rather large fan of both musicians (with my favorite Davis lineup being the famous ’second quintet’ in the late 60s with Hancock, Ron Carter, Wayne Shorter and Tony Williams). And now, two works named for Herbie and Miles tunes; Mwandishi and what is possibly one of the greatest album titles ever, You’re Under Arrest You Have The Right To Make One Phone Call, or Remain Silent So You Better Shut Up.
Truth be told, I think Cheadle is quite underrated; between Hotel Rwanda, Traitor and his spots in the various Oceans films, he’s a consummate performer, and well suited to playing Miles.
Vinyl Remix: Grace Jones
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Pop Culture, Sounds, Visual Arts on April 30, 2010
I haven’t put one of these out in a while. The vinyl remix series lives on, this time with one I started working on in 2004-5, based off of the sleeve to the 12″ release of Slave to the Rhythm from the incomparable Grace Jones.
I sincerely love her late period music (her first few albums were pretty much pedestrian disco), which combined a keen pop sense with a weird mix of dub, jazz and avant-garde bits thrown in. While Grace gained celebrity for her completely larger than life appearance and brash behavior, her music really has become sublime with age. She collaborated with everyone from Brian Eno and Sly & Robbie to Tricky, Wally Badarou and Wendy & Lisa.
I quite like her voice in both its modes: stentorian talk-singing, and torchy chanteuse.
This has rice paper, acrylic ink, acrylic paint, halftone, alcohol-based markers, pentel brush pens, and God knows what else, processed via Photoshop and Inkscape.
Another reason why Pitchfork is played out
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Observations, Pop Culture, Visual Arts on April 26, 2010
see more hipster robot webcomics and pixel t-shirts
…when DS can make these kind of punchlines with it.
Work in Progress: Imani Coppola
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Pop Culture, Visual Arts on April 25, 2010
So I did the pencils for this in 2007 (using Cretacolor graphite ) referenced from an interior image on Imani Coppola’s debut record, Chupacabra, which sported the top 10 US hit Legend of a Cowgirl back in the late 90s. She recently popped back up with collaborations on Mike Patton’s Peeping Tom project and her own new band, Little Jackie.
Visually, she is a striking figure, musically she is just as odd since she wraps really accessible pop structures with very eclectic bits of ‘other stuff’ thrown in. What can I say, I dig a gal who can sing well, play violin nicely, be influenced by Faith No More *and* Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam, and sport the most gravity-defying hairstyles imaginable.
I started adding paint and junk last month in small 5-10 minute bits, which has started giving this thing an interestingly disjointed look.
VoTD: Devo studio
Posted by zeruch in Aesthetics, Pop Culture, Sounds, Visual Arts on April 24, 2010
Devo probably conjures up very specific memories for people of a certain age. Much of their artistry was in their ability to chokeslam popular consumer culture with tongue rigidly planted in cheek.
The video is also pretty good for people who are pure outboard gear heads.