Blog

Up Late

Tonight is the first night I have stayed up past 2AM since I’ve been back in LA. To mark the occasion, I went out and took some pictures, although I need to be up fairly early today to finish some panels at a friend’s studio. I also made this favicon at some point tonight.

it is a yellow duck.

I drove to my best location for the 76 ball (PCH and Sunset) only to discover the original orange ball is no more. It has been replaced with a new red one. It doesn’t seem like there are many of the originals left, especially those that are illuminated, and maybe none that revolve. I am not nostalgic for them, and I realize it is the plan of ConocoPhillips to do this; I am just making mention.

Flowers at Night

Nacht Blumen is the working idea (title) of a batch of paintings I am planning to make. The pictures I have taken for these paintings are flowers at night with no light source other than street lights, which are typically low pressure sodium vapor lights. These lights produce a near monochromatic yellowish orange light, and as a result mutes most colors. The paintings should follow these images fairly closely, especially in the limited range of color that the camera will record.

In LA

Trying to get back into the swing of things, and plans are being made for me. Attending an opening near LAX tonight, then dinner and not dancing. I am compiling my receipts as I failed to get it all ready before I left for New York, so I can file my taxes. While taking a break, I stumbled upon Ralph Goings’s website. By stumbled upon, I don’t mean discovered him; he started out in Sacramento where the Crocker Museum generally has a painting up. The picture below is an image I took at the Corner Bistro on Jane a few days ago.

Back in LA

I am off to pick up my near month long held mail—more later. Here is a picture of a planter outside the Spotted Pig where I had my last meal (a Cubano Sandwich) in New York, and out of my window on the trip back.

Out with an iPhone and No Camera

“Went out last, didn’t stay late…” well a little late, home by 4:30 AM. Do people footnote blogs? The first six words are from a Carl Perkins song. So, I went to Starr Street Projects in Bushwick for a screening of 4 films by Polish born, Russian stop motion animator, Ladislaw Starewicz. There was ice cream and beer as well. The picture below is of the ice cream booth with an overly powerful light.

A DJed party followed till the beer ran out which was around midnight. The next and final stop was Sara Grady’s birthday dance party in Williamsburg that was DJed by Pat Mahoney (pictured below).

Cool School

I went to see The Cool School a few days ago, here in New York. I found it fairly interesting. In some ways it is very much like the documentary Dogtown, in that it deals with a specific scene, in this case Ferus Gallery, and doesn’t really contextualize the situations. In fairness, I don’t know the timelines of events well enough in either film to know what was excluded or what was ignored. The context in both films seemed to be there wasn’t anything else of any interest or importance happening.

They did mention the blackballing of certain artists—specifically Richard Diebenkorn for making figurative paintings. I was wondering how they were going to deal with people like Lynn Foulkes. They showed a still of him painting and that was about it. He was apparently blackballed though like Diebenkorn he didn’t seem particularly damaged by it. The filmmakers used John Baldessari as a counterpoint, though I think some of his comments were about LA in general and not exclusive to Ferus artists. Overall, I think it was worth seeing.

from my phone

A Little Behind

I have meant to post more frequently, but it hasn’t worked out thus far. Last week I was in Washington DC for a short visit to see some art, meet up with some people and take some pictures. Everything was great until I was catching the train back. There was a derailment in Virginia which caused the train to be a little over 3 hours late. Amtrak poorly notified us and as a result I nearly missed the train. I ended up getting back to New York around 6 AM.

view from Union Station.

Low Light

This picture is a test to see how the camera shoots under low lights. I corrected the color a bit, and also a slight bit of contrast. This is nothing I would ever use in my work (at least for the foreseeable future). Most of the things I shoot have some sort of internal light, so I thought I’d see how it handles a pretty much unlit object.

Watercolors

One of my plans while I am here in New York is to make watercolors. I am trying out geometric backgrounds. These paintings are still in progress, and shot under bad light. As always the images I post on this page are saved for web, so the color range is a little limited.

each image is 5.3 X 12.6 inches

Follow-up

I went out around 3 AM; it was pretty quiet out.

For this image, the only things I added or adjusted was the reformatting of the image ratio and i filled the area i added with the existing color. I didn’t remove or coverup anything, although I did nearly double the file size.

Oh, and there was a poster in the bus shelter. That is the danger of going out well after the time when they typically install new posters.