Senele gave me a HUGE canvas for my birthday. Having him help me gesso it wasn't a really great idea, but we both enjoyed painting on it together!

Video:

Quick post about a recent painting.. This is the "Luncheon of the Boating Party" by Renoir done in a few of the styles of Marc Chagall.  In my in-progress photos below, you can see my studies: first a pencil sketch of the Renoir, next a pencil sketch of the Chagall characters of it, finally a pencil sketch outline on the canvas itself..

Can you recognize all the Renoir characters?  What about the Chagall ones from "Birthday?" Click the large thumb to get to the annotated Flickr page.

This week's TIME Magazine issue had an article "Man Makes Life" that had a line within that caught my attention:

...nobody doubts that it is our DNA that determines what we are ... [in the same way that] digital etchings on a CD determine the music you hear.

This struck a chord with what I read in the cover article in a recent past issue of SEED Magazine ("The Future of Science .. is Art?"). This article suggested that abstract ideas represented in concrete artwork (music, sculpture, drawings..) are more easily studied than the theoretical concepts and math themselves.

I was browsing my flickr photostream and came across an old favorite image I had uploaded long ago:

It's a collage I call Out of Differences showing the elements of fish and bird representing their inability to coexist, overturned to demonstrate a strong "this ain't right" effect and a solitary individual leaving a crowd through that difference into an unknown. Hmm.. an expansion on this collage could be to simply extend the whitespace of the path before this departing individual...

I thought this was an awesome picture I captured out in front of Wal-Mart today in the parking lot with my cell phone. It's a Mustang car's emblem in the front grill under a sheet of ice from this winter's freeze. The picture turned out just perfectly.. I invite you to click it for the full size:

Oh Where to begin!

But I had already begun-- last year. I made a prototype Christmas yard decoration which spells out a backlit "JOY," and, on Christmas Eve, even the Baby Jesus' silhouette illuminates. It was constructed out of cardboard, lights, and lots of duct tape. It turned out pretty decent, but alas, it was not weather-worthy, and it was too late in the season to rebuild it properly.