Watch this essay. This is why it shouldn’t matter if anyone is reading the blog or paying attention to my art work in any other way.. :

Autotelic:

A self contained activity, one that is NOT done with the expectation of future benefit, but simply because the doing itself is the reward…

 

When the experience is Autotelic the person is paying attention to the activity for its own sake. When it is not, the attention is focused on its consequences.

 

 

The Long Game Part 3: Painting in the Dark from Delve on Vimeo.

His name is Ryan Muirhead. There are more links in the article.  Read it here.

Check out her TED talk. You will find it intriguing.
Note: there is some nudity in some of her images.

Tell me which you think works best:

The first:

The revised:

I’ve spent way to much time ‘learning’ Photoshop. Watching course videos and reading books. Now I need to actually start building things. To that end I’m going to take images that catch my interest and mimic that image. That will help me focus on the image, really examine it to understand what works, what doesn’t and work on my PS skills by building my own piece based on the original.

The first image I used is a TINY bit violent. I saw the image and was intrigued by the overall concept before I really paid attention to the detail. Sorry about that. But it gave me something to work from.

Here’s the original. I pulled this from a blog post by Chase Jarvis on ‘The Best Album Art’:

Here’s what I built:

I think what caught my interest on the original was the grid and how the artist used that to pull the piece together. I’ve been struggling with how to build backgrounds, so I’m paying more attention to that than anything else at the moment. The background is what ties everything together. It’s the most important neutral element. It needs to be there, it needs to work, but it shouldn’t be obvious. Looking at the two together I’m thinking I should have made the grid less dense. It may be too heavy on this one. I may try one with it expanded and see how that works.

Feel free to give me your thoughts.

We see things not as they are, but as we are.

A talk about beauty from TED:

A story, a work of art, a face, a designed object — how do we
tell that something is beautiful? And why does it matter so much to us? Designer
Richard Seymour explores our response to beauty and the surprising power of
objects that exhibit it.

How beauty feels

This story wouldn’t be as profound without the image that goes with it.

I pulled this story from here.

Back in the fifteenth century, in a tiny village near Nuremberg, lived a family with eighteen children.

In order merely to keep food on the table for this big family, the father and head of the household, a goldsmith by profession, worked almost eighteen hours a day at his trade and any other paying chore he could find in the neighbourhood.

Despite their seemingly hopeless condition, two of Albrecht Durer the Elder’s children had a dream. They both wanted to pursue their talent for art, but they knew full well that their father would never be financially able to send either of them to Nuremberg to study at the Academy.

They tossed a coin on a Sunday morning after church. Albrecht Durer won the toss and went off to Nuremberg.

Albert went down into the dangerous mines and, for the next four years, financed his brother, whose work at the academy was almost an immediate sensation. Albrecht’s etchings, his woodcuts, and his oils were far better than those of most of his professors, and by the time he graduated, he was beginning to earn considerable fees for his commissioned works.

When the young artist returned to his village, the Durer family held a festive dinner on their lawn to celebrate Albrecht’s triumphant homecoming. After a long and memorable meal, punctuated with music and laughter, Albrecht rose from his honoured position at the head of the table to drink a toast to his beloved brother for the years of sacrifice that had enabled Albrecht to fulfil his ambition. His closing words were, “And now, Albert, blessed brother of mine, now it is your turn. Now you can go to Nuremberg to pursue your dream, and I will take care of you.”

All heads turned in eager expectation to the far end of the table where Albert sat, tears streaming down his pale face, shaking his lowered head from side to side while he sobbed and repeated, over and over, “No …no …no …no.”

Finally, Albert rose and wiped the tears from his cheeks. He glanced down the long table at the faces he loved, and then, holding his hands close to his right cheek, he said softly, “No, brother. I cannot go to Nuremberg. It is too late for me. Look … look what four years in the mines have done to my hands! The ones in every finger have been smashed at least once, and lately I have been suffering from arthritis so badly in my right hand that I cannot even hold a glass to return your toast, much less make delicate lines on parchment or canvas with a pen or a brush. No, brother … for me it is too late.”

More than 450 years have passed. By now, Albrecht Durer’s hundreds of masterful portraits, pen and silver point sketches, water-colours, charcoals, woodcuts, and copper engravings hang in every great museum in the world, but the odds are great that you, like most people, are familiar with only one of Albrecht Durer’s works. More than merely being familiar with it, you very well may have a reproduction hanging in your home or office.