More Whitman

Still trucking into Walt Whitman's epically long poem "Song of Myself":

" This is the meal equally set, this the meat for natural hunger,
It is for the wicked just same as the righteous, I make appointments
with all,
I will not have a single person slighted or left away,
The kept-woman, sponger, thief, are hereby invited,
The heavy-lipp'd slave is invited, the venerealee is invited;
There shall be no difference between them and the rest.

This is the press of a bashful hand, this the float and odor of
hair,
This the touch of my lips to yours, this the murmur of yearning,
This the far-off depth and height reflecting my own face,
This the thoughtful merge of myself, and the outlet again.

Do you guess I have some intricate purpose?
Well I have, for the Fourth-month showers have, and the mica on the
side of a rock has.

Do you take it I would astonish?
Does the daylight astonish? does the early redstart twittering
through the woods?
Do I astonish more than they?

This hour I tell things in confidence,
I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you."

-Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself" Section 19

Need to go down to Kinko's to see if getting prints of my larger digital works is worth the cost but I haven't gotten around to it. Senior show is looming as well as FWMoA members show...

Inspiration Resolution

I really enjoy reading Nathan Abel's art blog (http://nathanabels.blogspot.com/) because he manages to post profusely about his inspirations and you can really see how they relate to his own work which is endlessly interesting. So, I'm going to start trying to do that more often myself.

I stumbled upon and begun reading Walt Whitman's 52 section poem: "Song of Myself". It contains a lot of transcendentalism as well as inspiring bits and pieces all relating to his own feeling of his place in this universe and his body's oneness with nature. Although there are many lines each and every one of them are immensely powerful. I've read up to part 12 and will continue to try to do at least 10 each day. Here's a bit of my favorite (2):

"Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with
perfumes,
I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.

The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the
distillation, it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

The smoke of my own breath,
Echoes, ripples, buzz'd whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and
vine,
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing
of blood and air through my lungs,
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and
dark-color'd sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,"

-Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"

Toledo/Detroit Road Trip

Took a much needed road trip to Toledo and Detroit over spring break with my pops. On the first day, we stopped at Toledo's Museum of Art that had an amazing collection for being free. After leaving there spent hours going back and forth along the Maumee taking in it's and the city's incredible beauty. I highly recommend visiting sometime. I spent some time getting some great photography such as:

Every shot was better than any I had ever taken before.

Stayed in a hotel that night then headed up to detroit which had a larger and much more impressive collection than Toledo but was costed 8 bucks to get in. I got to take many photos of the exhibit and will post up particularly inspiring works when I get a chance. Right now I'm working on digitally altering all these stock photos I took in Toledo into some hopefully impressive new works.

When I get back to school on monday I'm going to jump into my "senior project". It's going to be pretty massive and will take the rest of the semester. I'll keep you guys updated.

Some Photography Based Stuff

Some simple photographic images edited digitally. Click for full size. Took a day off school to visit IUPUI's Herron School of Art for an open house. Saw some cool stuff but overall still feel like I made the right choice in going to IU.

Photography, Radial Digital

Oh boy... I've done a ton of stuff since my last post... (!!click to see full size!!).
Um... first I did some photography on a beautiful morning when the sky turned red:


I took about 20 photos and filled up my stock for digital stuff quite nicely. I also took some photos the next night when the sky became incredibly foggy and got this as a result:

Before getting around to creating the awesome digital collages that were to be created from these photos and also got around to doing some mixed media (acrylic, paper bag, and sepia india ink):

Also a humorous mini installation entitled "It's a Trap"... this is the fourth photo from the series:

And finally the digital collages from the photographs (along with their full rez detail shots):

The actual full sizes for all of these have dimensions in the upper 40s and 50s of inches! Massive overwhelming images of light and color!

"Gears"

(right click "view image" to see these full sized)





More digital photography using tv screen captures. The detail shot shows the full resolution. My pops and I have talked about it and I think perhaps a lower resolution than what I have now might be better to clean up some of the blurriness. But overall, I'm still rather pumped about the progression of this process. I've proven beautiful art can be created from the smallest sliver of a the original picture:

Morning Star

So I watched a crappy horror movie with my buddies and filled up my camera with screen capture stock photos and then set to work on collaging them. After experimenting with rotational symmetry I am very happy to present this result:

(right click view image to see full size)
This is, unfortunately, an extremely scaled down low resolution version, the full size is 51"x40" and you can see the patterns from the television's screen much more clearly. They interplay and work as textures to really give the piece punch. Here is a detail pic of the full resolution version: