The Photons of Pentecost

I have been working on this picture for months. And years, if you count the digital sketch for it, which I did in 2006. This is a fairly large picture for me, 30" x 15". And it's on canvas, which is not my preferred surface to work on. The painting hung around my studio for more than a year, with only its pencil outlines, and I finally started painting it in the spring of this year. Then I neglected it, mostly because of technical problems. Some of this picture is airbrushed, and airbrushed acrylic paint doesn't stick to the primed canvas surface very well. Painting by hand is not much better. So this was a struggle to work on. But I finally got it done, so I can show it this weekend at DarkoverCon. My show there will not really be appropriate to a fantasy convention, because I am displaying space abstractions. But I do want at least a few people to see this work. Eventually I hope to assemble it and other space abstractions into a gallery-ready collection. 

The title of this piece is "The Photons of Pentecost," which is one of those religious/physics combinations I like to explore. When I have my formal art weblog "Art Product" ready, I'll post this there and talk more about the theological speculation that inspired this picture. In the meantime, "Art By-Products" will not be updated until I return from the convention.

The Bloody Sun again

I am finding some old Darkover art of mine as DarkoverCon approaches. This one was done in 1979 for the frontispiece of a hardcover edition of M.Z. Bradley's works published by Gregg Press. If you notice, it is the same situation as my previously posted painting of the young thing with her lover and her angry brother. This time I did it in ink on board, 8 1/4 " x 6 1/2".

I would have loved to do a graphic novel interpretation of a Darkover tale, i.e. "Darkover Comics," but Marion Zimmer Bradley hated comics and so would not give her permission for the project.

Panettone

The boss came to me about an hour and a half before I was to leave for the day and said, we need a big sign for our Panettone holiday breads right away, to advertise the successor to a display which frenzied buyers had depleted. I'm not even a panettone fan, you couldn't tempt me with the stuff. I obliged, being a pro after five years of working in retail signs, and dashed off this one in about an hour, leaving some time for putting equipment away. Done in opaque acrylic markers on a black-painted Masonite board. There may or may not be an economic depression, but people are buying gourmet food with great enthusiasm. I hesitate to say they're buying like there was no tomorrow, lest that be true. 

Construction Site, Somerville 1986

I've been looking through my archives of old sketches and art bits from the '70s and '80s. In the '80s I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a life which now seems to me like a bohemian dream, although I was not too happy with it when I was there. I had plenty of time to wander around the neighborhood making sketches. I drew this construction site on May 1, 1986. I looked it up on Google Maps and Google street view and if you type in 244 Beacon St., Somerville, Mass. you will get an image of what this building looks like now, or at least recently when the Google PhotoVan went through there. The edge of Somerville was only a few blocks from my house. You will have to turn the picture around to get the building I drew. It appears to be empty and for sale. The wonders of modern technology never cease, but the economy goes on sinking into the abyss. 

K2 Yellow Background

When guys have gadgets, they refer to them not by their function (a camera, a synthesizer) but by the alphanumeric code for it (the PMC2000 or the RS4890). Women with gadgets are more likely to simply refer to it as "the scanner" or "the printer." I read this in NEW SCIENTIST magazine, so it must be true. Henceforth then, all these abstract geometric sketches that I do on the iMac in CS2 will be numbered K-(x) where (x) is the sequence number for the concept sketch. This one, K2 with a yellow background, is another essay into the 2009 color scheme. It also reminds me of  Wolverine's yellow and black costume. If you don't know who Wolverine is, you probably wouldn't be reading this anyway. 

Harvard Graduate Dorm Kitchen

I have been rooting around in my closets trying to find vintage art and also trying to reduce clutter. Vintage art is not clutter. In 1977 I was a graduate student at Harvard, studying Greek and Latin classics. I lived in a residence hall that had once been reserved for ritzy Radcliffe girls. It had a dining room, an elegant sitting room with a piano, and a garden courtyard. Upstairs, where the rooms were, was a kitchen and small dining room where we could make our own meals. This is my rendering of part of that upstairs kitchen. I did it in Pentel markers, which were the only type of colored markers I knew about back then. I used a ruler, which is unusual for my sketching. By 1979 I had left graduate school for good. It was a painful decision and I disappointed some people by leaving. But I was miserable in graduate school and the price of academic respectability became too high for me to continue.

K-Speed Kandinskification

I'll call this a "K-Speed" image, with the "K" standing for Kandinsky. It's a "speed-paint" in Photoshop which is created in a half hour or less. Preferably less. Wassily Kandinsky, with his geometric abstractions, is one of my biggest influences, at least in this style. K. would have loved Photoshop. At its best, CS2 is an endless set of Colorforms, those plastic stick-on shapes which I loved so much in my childhood. 

I talked to my father on Thursday night, or rather I tried to. He wasn't making any sense. My mother says he sits at the dinner table for four hours, from around 8 PM to midnight, serving out his compulsive eating rituals. He falls asleep at the table, then wakes up and continues the food ritual. He was able to drive around by day for a couple of hours and do errands, but most of his life now seems to be spent in an incoherent twilight. My mother seemed disturbed and probably was, but there's nothing I can do to help them.