You are here, it's not a virtual world

Well it is a recession and money targeted for research has been being diverted for years. What will this generation do in the name of progress? How do you use what we already have to go forward? Man, it's quite a trick to keep old values and move on to new frontiers. Our vision of the future has moved from clean and sanitary with enlightened human perfection to grunge and urban decay with anarchy and corruption. We have sort of given up on ourselves and are giving in to baser elements. Technology has not really been pushed down into our society except for cell phones and computers. Our other possessions are anchored in the past. Home furnishing are the major block to the perception of progress, we like period furnishings and antiques. We detest history yet love to look back to a romantic past, less complicated and more peaceful. Even I have dreamed of an electric African, being as advanced as can be yet still primitive or at least tribal in many ways.

In our looking back we try to make new art on old forms which doesn't work too well. We are so stuck on square shapes. Square defines what is a picture, windows, plumb walls, ceilings, floors, rooms, buildings, city blocks. Yet, when you look at the earth from space it does not resemble a "Borg" ship, is not a cube. It is so easy to manufacture a flat surface with 90 degree edges and border them with a frame. No matter what we put in the frame, it allows us to look back on an ancient technology. And you wonder why we don't progress. We think ditching the square will release us from our values also. Relax, your values are in you, not in the things you construct around you. The things reflect you, but are not you. You can make adjustments, the things don't change, become antiques, don't move on with us.

The latest love of my art life is to look at both African art and sci-fi art. The organic and the technical go together so well. I like the idea of using the present as a bridge between the past and the future. It sort of destroys the disconnect. I am not talking about turning tribal markings into facial or body tattoos or turning family reunions into tribal gatherings. Nothing we do can fix us or change us from what we are, humans living in today. We should stop trying so hard. Art and the things we gather around us though, create an environment around us in which we live. Art can have an effect on us, how we grow up, develop, are inspired. And I would like to avoid a grunge future and also the clean, sterile future. Neither are very practical or healthy or account for our ability to be decent. I am working to release both the death-grip of the past and the fear of the future.



So here we are, don't speculate, just move forward, when we get there, we are what we've become. We remember, we dream, but we live in today.

real world and virtual world collide

As a young teen really wanting a car filled my dreams. In the mail I would get this aftermarket car catalog "Whitney's". It was thick and full of fuzzy dice to bored and stroked engines. I used to mark it up with pencils, then pens, then highlighters, then markers. You could buy the parts to build a car from scratch. My favorite was the sports car built on a Volkswagen Beetle chassis. If you thought Pokeymon geeks were bad, you haven't known car geeks. Anyway, this is what Linux is like, a computer aftermarket. The only thing missing is the catalog. If the internet were not here, there would be a thick catalog, listing and describing all the parts. You would know what Linux is, how the parts work together and how to get it the way you want it. Actually if you know where to look the internet resources are quite good.

What's on the Linuxville guide's real desktop these days? Besides my excursion into the annals of computer graphics history, I am looking at the kinds of art that can be produced on a computer. Beyond digital photos, web pages, ad art, banners, game design, animation and special effects, if you have intent to print, there is still a lot. I have also discovered that if you plan to do more than web surfing and email you might need more computer resources than average users need. Graphics tend to be memory hogs the more complex they are.

Been library hopping lately. Even though I can reserve a book from anywhere in the system and have it delivered to my local branch, I am disappointed by what I see on the physical shelves. Book procurers only buy mostly MS windows related books. This is in spite of how many people already know about MS Windows in good detail. Linux which is free to own and use gets very little shelf space. I am not so worried about Linux as it lives on the web. But free and open source applications get even less shelf space. The GIMP books are rare, Open Office.org books are also rare. People use public libraries as a free resource, yet when they get there only find books about the most expensive software in the world. Talk about opportunities lost to lift and educate the masses. The reference librarian should be quick to say if you don't have this software try this open source one. Then I must complain about the Photoshop presence. The computer graphics sections has tons of Photoshop books then also again in the digital photography section. Two subjects not covered in my travels, digital art as in actual drawing/sketching and digital painting as in fine art. Yeah, you can find comic/game animation, sometimes computer fantasy art, but far too many digital photography books. Books you do find are on a professional level, not beginner or intermediate levels. Libraries should be in the educational opportunity and idea possibility business. Linux, open source software, computer art and design all fit into these themes.

Filling the blank canvas

Culture is such a funny thing, even in Linuxville, schools of thought, conventional wisdom, what you need to know and taboos. You get raised up a certain way, shaped by family life and peer pressure. If you get the chance to peer beyond the small bubble, it's a whole different world, for a while. This was my life in and out a small suburban village outside a big city. I got a break from the peer pressure noise in college. I discovered free jazz and met people from other cities and country's, got to talk about ideas that didn't involve chasing girls, doing drugs, drinking beer or even obsessing over sports. I wore my dashiki every chance I could, played my saxophone and conga drums in a drum and dance troop, wrote poetry I hope no one remembers. I bought a vibraharp and a thumb-piano. But my restless exploring mind didn't stop to take time to learn these toys. In the deep recesses of my mind I wrestled with forms and shapes and expressions, what to put on the blank canvas, for I was also a painter. Acrylic paint was just the thing, it dried fast and didn't stink of turpentine. There was so much to resolve and painting just could not keep up with the flurry of images, my imagination so frustrated, my hands not so skilled. Leaving college, I got into electrical drafting, well, it paided the bills. I learned a different kind of drawing, pushing the artistic dreams into the background. I let my new learned skills season and shape my ideas. I would often get scolded by other artist for not working on my art. So for years I kept notebooks, sketching and working out the dreams in my head. My main problem was the media. I was still thinking of acrylic paint, wire and clay and other tangible junk that artist use. One day at work I got to maintain a wide plotter. I marveled at how the little image on my computer screen could come out so big on the plotter. So I chanced to scan in a drawing from my notebook and plot it out rather large. It was ugly but it proved a concept. Today there are wide inkjet plotters that print the same quality as that letter size photo printer on your desk. So, we found the medium that's suitable and an output that's versatile and sufficent, all we need is content. This is where the problem begins, the blank canvas or screen. My notebooks have become a starting point, I guess. You can imagine, being a draftsperson for so many years has had to have some effect on my techniques or style. And to top it all off, since I was not totally schooled as an artist professional, I am somewhat free from constraints, though there is much I don't know. Yes, you have to forget all your training to remember what you actually learned, that's suffering. Something comes to the top, pushes through your mind, pulses through your hands. You become resourceful, you find a way to express it. With me the computer has grown up just in time, it is the right tool for me. Then I don't have dreams of going where other digital artist seem to be going. I have a view to which I can apply these tools, somewhere between simplicity and complexity. I see every room has six surfaces, every house and building, multiple rooms, all waiting for somebody's art. Why not mine?

bells and whistles or chiming in and pucker a tweet

Wouldn't it be great if you could get all you ever imagined in a drawing program and all you had to do was click the icon. It doesn't happen in the real world and it won't happen on your desktop. Besides, if you take the human element out of drawing on the computer, you wouldn't need the human and you couldn't call it art. You'd call it math, science or programming. But still the most complex iteration of code could never equal the subtle expression in a line under control of the whims of thought, emotion and imagination of the human mind and articulation of the hand. Mimic maybe, but never equal. In art we call "workflow" the process that gives form and direction and the final result. Process can be computerized but there is no one program that does it all well. So, we have bit-mapped software and vector software. I am learning to use both on the same projects to make up for what the other lacks. You learn to import and export parts of a drawing to work on it with the most advantageous tools. Bit-mapped programs have erase as well as undo, then you can trace the bit-mapped image back into the vector program and integrate it back into place. It is like a sidebar to explain a point in detail, then getting back to the main story. Gimp and Inkscape work great together. In Inkscape, I think the object fill is so limited, even if you can get it just right you can't alter it much once in place. But if you design your fill pattern, export it as a bit-map into GIMP, make tweaks and adjustments, import it back into Inkscape, trace the bit-map, now you can do a Boolean operation to fit the object to be filled. Yeah, it is a pain to go back and forth, but they say artist must suffer to get great art. And just think, because it is all on your computer you don't have balled up sheets of paper all over the room, reminding you of frustration and anguish. Trial and error is replaced by discovery and recovery. Don't forget to save your work often, "to back up is the beginning of wisdom."

What's so cool about computers is if you come across a color combination you really like, you can save the picture and use a color picker tool to find out what that color is. Gimp has a built-in color picker tool and there is a stand alone application called Gcolor2 in Ubuntu Linux you can download. This app will tell you the numerical value of the color many other applications understand as well. Then if you need companion colors that harmonize or compliment, Agave is the application which suggest which colors work well together.

So, to dispel the notion that computers replace the artist, automatically producing output that can't really be called art. Computers are tools, they require skilled manipulation and imagination, just as would any art materials and media. Computers do nothing without an operator and without an artist, be it a programmer or pixel pusher, can not make art. If you are stuck on traditional artist media, that is fine. But the technology to produce/reproduce art works has progressed to a great degree. You have to ask which is the original art work, the graphic file or the finished printout or copies?? Digital changes everything. In drafting, we see a machine like precision and clarity of details. You can have that in art but I'd rather not. I like the hand drawn and the opportunity to discover the story. If it looks like a square I don't want to measure it or know if it's true, the impression of squareness is enough, that's art.