sound of one hand clapping

this is probably the biggest mess of bullshit i've ever produced. i am truly embarrassed by this project and if i had a choice would not turn it in. if there is any doubt about my efforts, however, im pretty sure i'd fight to say i worked really hard. for nothing.
really really really regretful.

sp666ch

for the audio loop project i was hoping to turn the bush files and noise files we were given to use into something that sounded like a back-masked record. every file used besides the noise is bush's voice, including the satanic "we choose death" and the eerie repetitive "white man in a suit."

hopefully it'll be up soon.

bleak white men: part 1

"what matters most is how well you walk through the fire" -charles bukowski

i've had an adoration, a bemusement, a disdain and a love for bukowski all at once. i love the way that he writes and yet it drives me crazy. he produces some pretty good quotes however, and in a surprisingly broad range. this includes emotional range. much like giving an art piece context, i feel like his life gives him context. bukowski lived his whole life in los angeles. fame was pretty fickle to him, in that he had numerous rejections and failures. he worked as a postal worker. he worked in a pickle factory. he lost his only love. he was a womanizer. he was an alcoholic. he was down on his luck more than a few times.

nothing about that quote makes me think of fire. nothing about bukowski makes me think of fire accept for maybe an image of burning cigarettes or burning paper or paper that caught fire from his cigarettes. regardless, it seemed more important to focus on the feeling of what he was saying. it's optomistic, and yet something about it feels empty or perhaps maybe a little helpless and weary and yet at the same time there is no dread from any of these sentiments.

i guess all of these things are in my mind most comparable to the feelings of contemplating time and space. in annie hall a young alfie points out "the universe is expanding." i guess its kind of like that. a bleak white man will take this sentiment as he will.

all spaced out man

for this project i wanted to focus more on mood than on anything else. that kind of lent itself to scale, focus, and color to convey a mood rather than font or lettering specifically, although of course they always will.

i was hoping to make it to printing today, but at the risk of sounding whiney, illustrator is pretty fickle. right now i am taking a quick break in my process to explain the process of what im doing so that i dont forget and to explain how things came together. my quote and final product are as of yet a secret but i figured i'd explain the synthesis.

i wanted to make a universe that would span a whole wall. i really like space photos themselves and some of the trippy things artists have been doing with them lately. the colors are surreal and the way they come together is in and of itself a mosaic. plus you can mess up and it still looks nice because isnt that the way organic things are supposed to look?



so i started with this picture of the galaxy. there are more colorful ones and crazier ones but i figured i'd keep it fairly simple for better clarity. then i taped paper around the perimeter of the wall i want to use and labeled the columns with numbers and the rows with letters. turn off your ceiling fan when you do that. its not as funny but it will make things go faster.

i dont have a problem with anyone who takes images and uses them, but i kind of wanted to make my own universe thing time. with the swirling colors and all. using the space picture as a guide, i drew and quartered it into the same rows and columns as my room. i used it as a reference for base colors and color progression. basically, i set down a base tone, usually a blue. then i overlayed shapes in various colors, changing the opacity to tint the sky. then i spent some serious time warping things.




i liked the swirls and things, but the way the colors were didn't really resemble the free flow of colors. i tried and failed to master the blend tool with no luck. this was about the time the computer lab started bailing out of illustrator. i think my many clicks were overload and i wasnt saving constantly enough so i was beginning to get frustrated and loosing alot of time and work very quickly. when using illustrator, it's a good idea to a) not open anything else on the desk top and b) give the program little breaks so it can process things better when you open it again.

when things didnt blend, i thought about using the masks that come on photoshop and are applied super easy. they are applied super easy because everything is already rasterized. i tried to use these effect right off the bat but the program wanted to rasterize, then pixelate, then rasterize, then pixelate BLAHBLAHBLAHBLAH. this caused a string of frustrating program crashes. i went home and downloaded the trial version for my lap top. then i realized it was best to select everything in the piece, select object: rasterize. then select effect: pixelate. i chose 3%.





then lather, rinse, repeat for a-i and 1-10.

beef cake

ROBERT BOLESTA is the besta.

chunky ice cream letters

i was hoping this would look more like chunky acrylics or something but its more like watercolors.

ice cream letters

also, i ate a lot of ice cream in russian until the day i started crying because it was just too cold on my fingers.

letters

this is an abstract thing created in illustrator. i started with a letter from the russian alphabet and then wanted to do a sequence that would make the letter look like it was melting; like if you cut out all of the letters and arranged them in a flip book you could watch the letter melt into something unrecognizable and confusing. it looks more like a swastika than i would ever like which is really really creepy. the drips and paint explosions are just varying sizes of the same exact letter morphed and manipulated.

O

oprah's empire is, too me, extremely alarming. this book is meant to completely repulse oprah's target audience. it's a novel from her book club and an exploration of oprah's way of branding.

giantisms

YOSHIKAZU YAMAGATA: NOBODY'S HOTTA

-via

cam-WOW

found these while researching the cheapest possible disposable cameras for an artclass project. so good.






do i have a problem if i actually really think i need a couple?

i really like stuff made out of other stuff

becky washington as the tallest man in the world

leonard stadnick lost his spot as tallest man in the world to zhao liang which is rather unfortunate because he took some pretty fantastic pictures that kind of looked photoshopped because the scale is so off.
for the self portrait assignment, i thought of this coffee table book i'd seen before and later looked up: TSUBI SIGN OF THE TIMES. i want to travel and see a lot of places, but what i like the most about the ksubi book is the thought of putting something plastic and far removed from the world in a million places in the world. i was supposed to do a million pictures but i more or less ran out of time.

metals&more

maybe it's because its my favorite thing to think of touching something familiar that feels way way different then it ever should
but

JEFF KOONS MAKES ME SWOONS.

speaking of color

WILL SWEENEY IS NOT A WIENIE.

nineteen-ninety WHO

i am completely unashamedlyabsolutelyexistentially exotericly andatthesametime esoterically obsessed with vena cava and their really amazing blog.






they turned me onto the ndebele and these super amazing prints that have amazing colors very reminiscent of things I remember from the nineties. of course the more saturated pop culture version: me, i grew up in north phoenix. the closest we came was whatever my dad was listening to and watching In Living Color and Fresh Prince.











vena cava girls also mentioned the idea of VERSACE and other fashion crews carry out these patterns and colors and things.





it also makes me think of wild style and also of basquiat and more, which i will post about once we are rich enough to get wireless in our house again. the idea that i am most playing with is the same styles and techniques applied with neutrals: slate, charcoal and dove; tan, beige and champagne. I like neutrals so there. I like the idea of these nikes, where everyone is trying to go as bold as possible. Yeah, art that has the feel of these nikes.