Tag Archives: art

Luck and Creativity

The Cheap Seats (S.Calhoun 2015)

The Cheap Seats (S.Calhoun 2015)


Today, I grabbed by DSLR and took some photos of the early spring ground at locations where ‘complexity’ of the certain sort my symmetry-based photographic art is founded upon could be found and captured. The above image is a quickee.

I updated my Artist’s Statement at My Naive Art online gallery site.

Here it is, although I hope you’ll follow the link and check out my gallery.

ARTISTIC STATEMENT

Creating visual pieces is a musical process. My guiding intentions are to learn by doing experiments, discover unique territories by implicating factors of serendipity and novelty, and, enjoy my adventurous creative process.

My art’s goal is to first grip the viewer, and next draw he or she into exploration and into surprising experience. This comes to a fine confrontation between apprehensive sensibility and artwork in my recent symmetry pieces. These have been described as approximating the effect of a Rorsach pattern. Yes!

Pareidolia is the psychological phenomenon where people see recognizable shapes in clouds, rock formations, or otherwise unrelated objects or data.

It is by my artistic intention that I aim to evoke a moment of psychological discovery to be waged in the representational folds of the symmetry pieces. So it is: I hope for the viewer to inhabit an evocative experience of Pareidolia.

Echoing both my research interest in serendipity in adult development and my musical aesthetic as an improvising composer, the raw exploration involved in seeking out a compelling artistic production is deeply woven betwixt intentional technique and generative/stochastic procedures. The aim is to capture an opportunity for myself and viewers of pure experience.

As pianist Paul Bley aptly said of jazz, ‘it is composing in real time.’ In my visual realm, I compose in serendipitous time.

Stephen, March 2015

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Thank you Stan Bowman

perfectprints.com Stan Bowman, artist and giclee printer, principal of Perfect Prints, Ithaca, NY

Stan Bowman, pulling a canvas giclee of my piece “No Mind, No Problem”

I did a lot of research on giclee printers, First, I considered northeast Ohio. The most prominent such printer didn’t respond to a web inquiry via their own form. Too bad! There were several others that united around the principal of being really expensive. I looked beyond the region and encountered, what for lack of a better term, are giclee mills.

While doing all this research, I established my criteria: personal touch. I can soft proof for detail on my own Canon printer, and, I also can soft proof on the Canon imageProGraph 8400 printers Office Max have dumped in the laps of their weakly trained print center staffs. Still, it was important for me to speak with the actual printer. Although he or she was to be tasked with straightforward and technologically undemanding reproduction of my digital artwork, I knew I would have noobie questions about medium and finishing.

Stan Bowman’s one man Ithaca giclee shop came up in a google search. Everything quickly came into focus and then dropped into place. I initiated the first round of print jobs after asking him a few questions. Stan is friendly and a pro. His prices are much cheaper than the least expensive local printer. Five stars.

Stephen Calhoun, fine artist

the artist with the large giclee of King of the Mardi Gras

All this reproductive activity is focused on freeing my art work at its largest scale to land on the walls of discriminating collectors around the globe.

Art Gallery: My Naive Art

Art Laboratory Symmetry Experiments: Symmetry Hypothesis on Tumblr

 

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Game Memory

All of the assets in the game are made in Blender using free models from 3D Warehouse. The game itself was made in Unity, and runs on a server in The Netherlands. Up to four players can be on the server at once, but they never see or exist together at the exact same moment. Over the Alex has become obsessed with lag and what it means for memory and the self and this project is the result.

via Creative Applications.net

Nothing of This is Ours – Multiplayer game by Alex Myers

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Artist’s Way of Flow

Alchemical Function versions

The first example is the final version. Second is the original photograph of lilies taken in our backyard, and then follow several versions. Recently, I’ve taken my one year+ experiments in applying symmetry translations to photographs and other sources in a new direction by applying additional generative content to the pre-mirrored raw sources. If that content is itself a symmetry, then I can mirror the symmetry in the mirroring of the conjoined source.

Alchemical Function

2014 – Alchemical Function – 18×12″ proof

The final version reflects–pun intended–the layering of a pattern over the photo of the lilies. This pattern was derived on the iPad using an app, then mirrored, enlarged, layered at partial opacity over the photograph and mirrored a last time.


symmetry experiments: tumblr

my naive art: online ongoing gallery

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New URL for Symmetry-Hypotheses

2 Views of Coleridge

Two Views of Coleridge

On July 2 I publicized the new Tumblr site for barely washed results from the symmetry section of the visual lab.

Soon enough I realized the title of the Tumblr blog and the URL were not in alignment. I cast off the old URL and sent all the old addresses into something like intertube purgatory. However, the now congruent site at least reflects its theme in its titling and addressing.

symmetry-hypotheses.tumblr.com

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THE VOID (trailer)

“THE VOID”
Panoramic interactive projection, 4.0 surround sound

Saint-Petersburg, Russia
Loft Project Etagi gallery
May, 2013
behance.net/gallery/THE-VOID/11871447
Audiovisual installation “Void” is an attempt to visualize the idea of emptiness.
Emptiness here is regarded not as an absence of everything, but as an initial state when anything can appear. To see how dark room turns into the Big Bang epicenter a visitor should become “empty”. Every move and sound, captured by sensitive equipment, stops the 360 degrees audiovisual flow around.
“Void” is a social experiment, to see how long today people can stay totally calm.
Credits:
Visuals/ programming: A. Letcius, A. Sinica, M. Udchenko
Sound/ programming: A. Kochnev, K. Suhanov, S. Perevoschikov

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Painting on a Pad

h/t iPad Creative Blog.

The IPad Creative Flickr group has lots of wonderful ‘way cool’ creations.

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Glisssssssssendo

Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one…
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

Wallace Stevens

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Stars Raining

The White Diamond by Werner Herzog
The White Diamond is my favorite Herzog movie at the moment. This is not to say it’s his best movie, and certainly I can rattle off a dozen moments from his opus I treasure, yet, this beautifully realized documentary about human aspiration under profoundly human circumstances is it, for me, right now.

Up date on my previous post; Mad German Auteur, Now in 3-D! is a somewhat untamed interview and recollection by Chris Heath at GQ.

WH “There is nothing glorious about making a film. It is an endless sequence of banalities.”

CH With a magical goal?

WH “Yes. But shooting a film itself is nothing but banalities. [Then, as though reluctantly, he continues.] However, there’s very rare moments where I get the feeling sometimes I’m like the little girl in the fairy tale who steps out into the night, in the stars, and she holds her apron open, and the stars are raining into her apron. Those moments I have seen and I have had. But they are very rare.”

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Spirograph and beyond in the 21st Century

Tony Orrico (Youtube channel)

also: Leslie Halliwell–>Portfolio–>Spirograph Drawings

DIY, or, Random: Dynamic Spirograph at Deviant Art (Flash interface and programming)

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Kinetic Sculpture

Really intriguing creativity to be found at youtube, searching on kinetic sculpture.

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Cluck ‘champ

The Holy Chicken of Life & Music from NOMINT on Vimeo.

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Light Strokes

Artist: Random International
Installation at Sadler’s Wells
for Wayne McGregor’s production of Far | Random Dance Company

Working at the fringes of innovation in science, art and design, rAndom International have developed a series of projects and installations that aim to re-interpret the ‘cold’ nature of digital-based work by providing the viewer with the opportunity for a more hands-on experience with technology. Their work emphasizes the ephemeral quality of information, harbors an intense curiosity toward experimental processes, and includes a body of diverse installations, commissioned works, and performance projects. More recently, rAndom International has investigated the potential of endowing usually inanimate objects and environments with behavioral qualities. As part of their evolving relationship with Wayne McGregor | Random Dance. src

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Where’s Werner?

Werner Herzog {Wikipedia}

Much to my delight, I discovered the series of youtube videos featuring German film director Werner Herzog reading excerpts from children’s books. Probably the full impact of these films is only accessible if one is familiar with Herzog’s art. Still, lacking this background, I suppose their deadpan existential content would be amusing and rewarding.

Also: When Werner Rescued Phoenix

(For me, Werger Herzog is cinema’s most provocative humanist, and, he’s also–by far–my favorite director on today’s film scene. If you haven’t received one of his transmissions, The White Diamond (2004), is my own pick as a good all-round starting point. Herzog has directed many a masterpiece, so my advice is to start with this recent film and keep on going. In fact, there are only a handful of directors with a comparable output. And no director ever ripped off a string over ten years as Herzog did with Aguirre, the Wrath of God, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Stroszek, Nosferatu the Vampyre, Woyzeck, and Fitzcarraldo. )

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Animated Evolution

Charles Darwin

Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.
Abraham Lincoln

via blublu.org

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Heaven of Hattler


Composition of the Spiritual World (LeSage)

1923 (aka Heaven) is one of two animation loops directed by Max Hattler, inspired by the work of French outsider artist Augustin Lesage (1876-1954). 1923 is based on Lesage’s painting A symbolic Composition of the Spiritual World from 1923. Hat tip Meathaus Cartoon Brew

1923 aka Heaven (by Max Hattler) from Max Hattler on Vimeo.

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Water Music

The Dubai Fountain – Baba Yetu

The Dubai Fountain – Bassbor Al Fourgakom

The Dubai Fountain – – Bijan Mortazavi

(Burj Khalifa Tower, Dubai) hat tip to NETBROS, Metafilter

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Abstract Steel

Anish Kapoor’s London Tower is posed as the centerpiece of not only London’s Olympic Park, but of London itself.

From the Guardian.UK, is something about the artist’s inspiration in his own words,

Kapoor said one of his references was the Tower of Babel. “There is a kind of medieval sense to it of reaching up to the sky, building the impossible. A procession, if you like. It’s a long winding spiral: a folly that aspires to go even above the clouds and has something mythic about it.”

Thomas Keyes, writing at the useless-knowledge web site,

“And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter. And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called BABEL; because the Lord did there CONFOUND the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.”

and:

Here is a comment from a Christian apologist on Babylon: “With all the effrontery of our modern apostates, they called their city and tower Bab-El, the gate of God; but it was soon changed by divine judgment into Babel, Confusion.”

The only trouble with this statement is that BABEL (or BAVEL) does not mean “confusion” in Hebrew, except by someone making an allusion to the passage from Genesis. In fact, the word BABEL is an extremely unlikely word in Hebrew, which, like Arabic and other Semitic languages, uses triconsonantal roots. A typical Hebrew root, like KELEV (dog) or SEFER (book), has three consonants, which may be referred to as C1, C2 and C3, that is, K-L-V of S-F-R. Words with C2 and C3 the same are common: BALAL (to mix, confound, involve, embroil); SOVEV (revolving, spinning); KOMEM (rising). But words with C1 and C2 the same are very unusual. BAB can probably be explained as having lost a medial W. This can be seen in the Arabic word BAWABA (great gate) as against BAB (gate).

(The holding interpretation stills wins the day, Thomas.)

So it shall be for me that Kapoor’s odd looking work will always be associated with his mythic enthusiasm. Kapoor’s web site is stellar.

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Weakshot – Caramel


Weakshot

Caramel

Both these abstract montages use some screen snaps from my Dreamlines experiment, and other materials that include an old photo of me and a bud from a long time ago, used in Weak Shot. Weakshot also uses some news photos of the failed Russian missile test that spooked Scandinavia for a day last month–thus the title.

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One of the First Special Effects

GEORGE MELLE A TRIP TO THE MOON (1902)

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