Ah, what fun one can have on a sunday night with some cardboard and a roll of adhesive tape. I was sitting thinking, in the special thinking room on that special thinking seat and wondered whether, if i had any sort of voice for singing, I could have been the front man for a group.
The guitar really is just cut up and taped together from a cardboard box I had brought home from the supermarket a few months ago for another project, and it has been acting as a stand in the wardrobe for another box I brought home at the same time but which my wife now keeps her supply of funky new belts in. Of course, in the excitement of taking the picture, I actually held it the wrong way around, so some editing was necessary - and while I was at it I gave it a very 1970s flare, and went green this time.
As I have mentioned before, I don't buy props, I just use what is around me. I might add that the guitar looks a LOT better in the picture than it does in reality, it's cardboard color for a start, and doesn't have any knobs on.
If you are going to make prop, don't make it perfect as the eye is good at spotting imperfections in detail: while a few broad strokes to indicate something and the brain fills in the details itself. The chances are, if I had not mentioned the guitar but talked about something else, you would have assumed I really had a guitar. You might also have assumed that I could play the guitar, which I can't. I could have just posted these rocker images and said that I had a jamming session, and you would have believed that as well, if you didn't know me. Remarkable, but true.
Sunday, October 11, 2009
051 - Rock Guitarist
049 - F is for ...artist
I wouldn't normally show the images I take with my camera that I use to create the final image, it is rather like asking to see the contents of my laundry basket. Or, if you buy a painting, you are probably not that interested in first been shown the blank canvas before the artist applies any paint.
However, in my quest to try and demonstrate what I believe is the difference between art and craft, between skill with tools and the idea behind what one attempts to create with those tools, I need some examples.
If you built a house, you are unlikely to tell everyone that you used a Thompson No. 2 hammer, or that you believe a house built with the cheaper Samson Powerforce hammer would be in any way inferior. What is important is the house, its quality. A good craftsman would know the limitations of the Samson, and work round them.
I used Gimp to edit the image because I understand the limitations of my camera and the wall I use as a studio, but mostly because I am not interested in photography but the images themselves. At that point it really doesn't matter what tools I use, as long as I am comfortable with them.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
060: Low Life, High Thrills
Playing Cards
This is my trinity.
The Dealer: Confidently playing the cards, relaxed, and sure of where he is going.
The Doubter: Weary, seen it all before, just knows that failure is just around the corner, taking the cards as they come.
The Darkness Within: The mysterious stranger that most people keep well hidden as it is often not very pleasant, but my Darkness Within is an acknowledged friend my other two turn to for help, the one that keeps faith and in touch with God. The cards? They are all the same.
As I rarely play cards, I was not sure where to go with this one, I found it hard therefore to find my art as my life seemed to have so little contact with them. However, when my Darkness Within spoke, I listened and set up this triple shot, and then later understood the relevance.
Sunday, September 7, 2008
049: Dunce, the Knight's Away!
Copycats
Today I took a shot for a group that I didn't really want to do as I had already planned a different shot and then the choice was changed. Other than the disappointment in not doing the shot I had planned for Flikr Group Roulette, this one led me to a crisis of confidence - but then it also taught or reminded me of some things. Basically, I had to do a copycat image, and that meant I ended up doing a comparison between my image and the one that I had copied.
And technically, there was no comparison. Argh!
*breaks out the vodka, drinks himself into a stupor*
Once posted, it quickly generated some comments. It had made some people happy!
*screws cap back on vodka bottle*
Hold on, isn't part of my art the giving of simple pleasure?
*Puts vodka bottle back in the cupboard and washes glass up*
In ye olde days, several careers ago, when I was an apprentice mechanic, responsibility for my on the job training was given to at what the time seemed an ancient geezer. Fred, of the white hair and the impossible responsibility, had the knack for training up new comers to the trade, and probably welcomed the largely uncritical extra pair of muscles when man-handling Morris Ital gearboxes back into place while lying on our backs under those blessedly unreliable cars (we became a specialist team one summer with those gearboxes, doing around twenty of them).
It was a large garage with about fifteen mechanics and body shop people, plenty of technical skill to be in awe of. And yet with Fred I never felt that my lack of skill was a problem, nor do I remember him doing much in the way of direct teaching. In fact, I learned my skill by observation, and it was not just technical skills, for not everything one did was by procedure or repeating experience. Technology changed, and there were always new and unexpected problems that no one had seen before. What I learnt was to feel the cars as systems, almost like a person, to visualise what was happening.
I had, although I was not to realise it until many years later, was to stumble upon art in a car workshop. And my art was not the same as Fred's, we often arrived at the same or different conclusions, by dissimilar thought processes.
One day I was watching Fred as he tested the set of bronze rings from one of the gearboxes for cracks. He was relying on his experience, trying to physically pull these rings apart to see which of them had cracked through, the cracks being too fine to be visible. I then picked them up and carefully tapped them on the vice, and those which were fine went 'tiiinnng', while those with cracks went 'dnk'. Although lacking the technical knowledge, I had discovered a better and easier method of testing.
Other than being proud of myself, I did not think much about it, but several career changes later I began to realise how important it is to lay technical skill aside sometimes and rely on one's art. Without any particular linguistics training, I continue to surprise my wife, who is a doctor of linguistics and who has been teaching language and teachers of language at university level for over 25 years, with insights into her core skills. The secret is not to be overawed by knowledge and technical skills in others, but to look and try to understand what you are seeing.
The photograph I was copying was technically good, the art there for anyone to see - a sexy, feminine image. Mine was flat, rough around the edges and masculine, but isn't that one of the things I have been working with all summer? The contrast between the masculine and the feminine, often mine?
Then the original idea I had had came back to me, it wasn't a competition in technique, I was contrasting, my lack of technical skills was not a problem. I was not supposed to be working on fine skills, it was the contrast itself mixed in with humour that had driven me. Almost point for point I had contrasted the two images, leaving only the basic alignment of them the same.
It has been another piece of the jigsaw that is me, another step in bringing my life into focus, to understand my core processes better. And in line with the see-saw concept I outlined previously, my image had driven me to write all this.
046: Peer: Glass
Asymmetric
Our bathroom door is such a useful thing, it has appeared in so many of my images in many guises and disguises. This is the most mysterious so far. The hardest bit was sitting on the floor while I experimented with the positioning of me and the camera, but in the end I chose the second I took.
Notice the kind of waterfall effect of the light above my head? That was due to my Sony and its habit of corrupting some picture. The other, perfect shots I discarded in favour of this one. What is inspiration? Everything you deliberately choose to do or also what happens when you choose a deliberate path. I know that some of the shots will have the defect, yet I choose to keep on using that camera, nothing more than taking advantage of your camera's or your photo processing program's functions, except you can neve be sure when it will happen.
It is like using a special prop, the art is in how you use it, not in the fact that you have got it. Here I applied my art to the effect, draining the image of colour, tinting it and then putting two images in one, at different width compressions. I have no guide as to how to do it, no training, nothing more than experimenting with paints and deciding how best to use them to create an effect that I may not have consciously conceived off prior to the editing process. But the ideas were conceived.
Saturday, July 26, 2008
7: Inspire & Be Inspired
Inspiration is not what we do normally, it is something that occurs in the dark depths of our minds. Here is my invention, designed to shed some light down those dark corridors of the mind, along which we creep blindly, felling our way.
Inspiration, like some kind of strange rabbit, can be encouraged to poke its nose out of that dark waren, but that means we have to do something specific. It is easy to go through life and only occasionally notice the nose of an inspiration rabbit, much harder to learn ways of encouraging one to appear on cue.
