New things

Just signed up to show a portfolio at portfolios.com--so see how it runs against the ispot. Both have value. One is more expensive than the other...and it seems that portfolio.com might have a few more bells and whistles that could sweeten the deal. We will see. Got a phonecall literally out of the blue today for a nice job at the big educational institution nearby...but I will not jinx it..but, fingers crossed, it could be cool. I think Erich and I are up to it.

Did I tell you about Erich's blog? He is doing it with his very funny friend Dave. There are several story lines going along with comic strips and my favorite, the "Million Dollar Ideas". Check out the unicorn!

Itchy to get this paper done -- the last one, that is. It's supposed to be on something that inspires you. I am going with Birds. Must show images. Did a sweeping surf and got all sorts of gems and quotes...so I have some of it holding...just need a thumbnail outline and go! l try to engage today. It was time consuming doing the portfolios work which isn't adding up to moving the ball forward re the Syracuse work. Hopefully..

Check out his fun project> Inspiring submissions!

they say SNOW on Friday

Discovered a new illustator yesterday. He is Ronald Kurniawan. His work is wonderful, combining letters and symbols with these surrealistic backgrounds in a dreamy and thought provoking way. Expert in jumblessums it all up. Take a look. I love the way letterforms pop up--either 2 dimensionally or 3 dimensionally--merging with the picture or overwhelming the image as if they are transformers or science fiction leviatians. His palette is very somber and sophisticated. His drawings are lovely and expressive with fish and octopus, boats and letterforms.

Mr. Kurniawan cites the Tiny Showcase under his friends section. Take a look at their goals, art and artists. Very cool idea.

Can you imagine snow? Halloween has yet to happen...and the poor little children with their snow boots and flying slush does not a magical halloween make. Figured out the bluetooth configurations on this computer yesterday to my delight (and frustration). It is stunning how macintosh computers are sold with not much more than the cords you need to plug the machine in with. Instructions? Thank goodness for the help buttons and all the data on the web to walk you through the possible channels and problems out there.

Busy fighting the fight today--trying to smother the feelings of stupidity and frustration I am experiencing from the state of the world. Now we have nuclear bombs. If it was bad before, now we have bombs, propositions to boys, failing economy, education for the rich,no healthcare and this fruitless war. Things must change.

Influences Start With A Letter

Ronald Kurniawan
Oil and acrylic on wood
24" x 36"

From Nucleus Gallery, 30 West Main Street, Alhambra, CA 91801

Meet Tommy Kane

I just did. Wow. Wow. Wow. Check him out!He is truly inspired as a designer, art director and to my thinking, an illustrator/artist. His journals are sublime (look out art crawl folks!)--My favorite being the one with the Obey Giant on the cover filled with wonderful likenesses and funny/insightful copy to accompany it. His blog is filled with knock-out sketches that are forceful, direct and humorous as I am sure Tommy is himself.He makes me want to whip open that moleskine and get drawing.What do you think?

Illustration Friday

Penelope Dullaghan is the creator of this good idea. Each Friday, a topic is posted and the IF community posts their answer to the topic--with lots of talk between the participants. I think this is a brilliant idea as it puts a little pressure on illustrators to produce and think even when there isn't a client. Plus, generating the Web 2.0 community of illustrators and people interested in pictures is a definite add with many of us solo in the studio with the need to reach out. Penelope also has a fun halloween show, Black and Orangethat encourages artists to post images in black and orange to her Black and Orange site. She even has judges! Nigel(my high school pal who is doing a little independent study with me...poor soul!) and I are going to submit to this show as part of our project. Should be fun. I may try to get on board with Illustration friday to drive more pictures and thinking.

Frost warnings for this morning.

a beautiful fall day

Looking out of the front door at Camp Street with the flanking bass trees at the end of the walk.

Working on pictures of devils with valentines. Discovered a cool website of great illustration, illustration mundo filled with great portfolios, good writing, even some audio podcasts. Take a look>>it's a fun time. Check out Clayton Junior!
Inspiring.

Finished up packaging concepts and plan to present it today using our new techno tool, Webex. There is a solution in this group...I hope. Rumor has it that we might have a direction on the poor holiday card.Moving forward.

Ain't technology great?

I have been fretting about how to increase service and better communications with our clients. As many of the folks we work with are way out of the area. The phone and pdfs are the lifeline to our communication and we do alright with them...it just feels a little hollow. How could we do better? How could we increase the fun factor? So, team Luckystone talked about it and decided to try a short term relationship with Webex. Webex is a way we can share files, even transfer files real time with our customers with browser enabled technology. It's simple. It works! It has a "Dummies" book. And the customer service and personal exchange I had in just finding out about Webex was extremely open and honest. I feel like I am truly buying a service but with service as an emphasis verus "now I can talk to tech support and not solve my problem". They asked terrific questions--really trying to understand our needs and scale. They made us feel as if our business had as much import as the huge clients they have. Granted, it's a new technology toy, and we will really need to ask ourselves if it has added value to our working relationships with our clients, but I sure hope it does. Take a look.

Teddy Dog

Here she is. Patiently waiting for me to take her picture which I think scares her. She even let me put a bumblebee costume on her and acted like it was an everyday occurance even though she hated it. Her whiskers are coming back in...and she is soon going to look like the swiffer we got at the pound. Cloudy already. I have a scarf wrapped around my neck and head to keep from my teeth chattering. Woke up at 3 a.m and started cataloging my work in my head after looking over the illustration work done for the summer encampment review. Big movement in the work (better)--and encouraging as the change has come all at once. I was itchy when I came back from Syracuse, feeling out of sorts, not knowing what to do, how to do it etc. I hate that feeling...but generally with that itchy feeling comes good change. I am beginning to recognize this as a symptom (like scratchy throat before an allergy).

Am thinking of trying to do my academic dodobird illustration a la the pumpkin. Two color job with midtones etc from the black and second color.Very bold and graphic...looks like some sort of print...and doing the translation is fun and relatively quick. Cracked open a few books early in the a.m and discovered that I am jazzed about the German expressionists and want to see what I can learn from them. Reviewed the mix at the I Spot and things are doing a little better than last month. Added a new image...took out the pinecones. Listening to a way junky book, The Templar Legacy, essentially the Templar version of The DaVinci Code. Are you an Audible fan? I am. Tons of good options to listen to...and worth it. Sign up and get the free book.

Blue Sky Day

Atop our plateau early fall. It has gotten chilly and I am glad a little time was put into cutting the iris down and pulling weeds as the work is going to incrementally increase as the weather gets colder and colder. Working on the medical test project today--not much fun in that vein. Took Shady out after disposing of Mei Mei's grand gift (a perfectly intact squirrel left outside the back door)--a beautiful creature. We were looking for mushrooms to no avail. But, we did see lots of color, asters and leaves. Pilated woodpecker siting yesterday.Need to buckle down and finish the paper started last week (albeit weak)...and start the next. I have a ton of illustration that must get done and I havent had a block of time to dig in...life somehow has gotten in the way. We did some work for Steuben last night that have some promise, particularly some really cute ideas R has put forth. He is a very good designer!

happy birthday to me!


Today, today's my birthday! Full spectrum of weather--rain, overcast, bright blue high skies, clouds, brilliant sunshine. Nothing much happening here. Working on glass design and decoration that are moving forward. Ordered a kazillion bulbs for planting this fall and for giving this winter. Need to think about how we package the paperwhites this holiday. The fam gave me a birdfeeder and an iron arm that holds it. Also, some "brit clogs" from muck boots. We also bought some half off Russian sage, sedum, tree peony (for $12.), and a big, luscious lavender. Now time to sock them in for eye candy next spring and summer. Exciting!

the travels of Rip Van Winkle


Everyone in New Jersey have perfect haircuts, new shoes, pressed shirts...clean and straight. A little undoing for their perfection. Today, I go back to our plateau and normalacy. It rained last night and my hope is the little plane is not diverted to Morristown but here in the North Terminal of Newark Airport.

My birthday is coming up!

Mick at the Meadowlands


The lobby of the Sheraton Meadowlands was a buzz last night as the Rolling Stones were playing at the Meadowlands. Lots of talk about parking and shuttlebuses. From what I overheard, it's quite a scene...not really about music but more about the thrill of logistics. There were lots of yellow haired grandmothers and grandfathers with matching clothes getting ready to rock out with the stones. Funny times...For me the beacon of the Sheraton and their promise of soft beds had me planning my sleep.

However, I did start (not silly start, but seriously start) one of the papers for Syracuse's Aesthetics course. I will be using Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation" essay as my starting point. Take a look. Her writing is succinct, her concepts are tangible and discussable unlike that freakin' Clement Greenberg who is mired in dense omphalos--navel gazing and assumes the reader is right with him. I am a pretty dull bird who reads a lot, but with Greenberg, I really just want to put the book down. I agree with Sontag when it comes to discussions of aesthetics and "smarty pants"critics and curators--just move on. Let the work speak for itself. If the content means something to the viewer then, so be it. If the viewer just sees a beautiful image, so be it. Why does the visual world need an umpire to make the calls on beauty and it's value? Why does the artist need an intercessor to explain meaning when "what you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG)? No cultural intrepration, no contextural interpretation, no explanation that the artist had braces when he was 11 years old and has been drawing gleaming gums on his figures in direct response to that experience. From my limited perch, the critics should get some real jobs/. Like writing good books middle schoolers would like to read.

I now will step down from my soapbox.

Cardinal is another in the holiday/non-holiday ideas.

more on the holidays, less time for me!

A bit rushed today as I had a quick request to am-scray down to Tboro, NJ to meet with my great client. Not much here. Tired...got up at 2:30 a.m. and didn't go back to sleep but churned through a nice little process document about how one makes a publication or a graphic design...approvals,changes, reviews,etc. Am psyched that I have that insto-chango "Dryel" to do a little home drycleaning in the dryer (if you don't have this stuff, its a must...albeit it is so "magic" that i am fearful it will at some point give you a dreadful and fatal disease) to be partially presentable. Maybe I'll even brush my hair. Working up on our little plateau with the tribe of Rainbow beings and shaggies, one forgets to pull it together and look like a person.

The ornament is another non-holiday, holiday card with a "global" theme. I am fearful that it is too Christmassy as it is an ornament...so likely to be dinged.

final pumpkin


Glorious blue sky, puffy white clouds, brilliant light day on our little plateau. The weekend sported some pretty amazing storms coming in from the west that kicked up for real whitecaps on Cayuga Lake. Pretty quiet here--clients sending us a lot of work work work...to turn pretty fast. No news on the holiday cards. Or the PC holiday, nonholiday cards...whichever is picked. The bulb company (!!click here) called the other day to confirm my ginormous order of way over 500 narcissus bulbs that I ordered in the bliss of spring--anticipating the next. We are getting narcissus, daffodils and those lovely stinky allium to naturalize. I think I am going to hire the local population of 14 year olds to lean into it with me. Your thinking?

The pumpkin/ Harvest graphic is for the October 19th 2300˚ event at the Corning Museum of Glass. 2300˚ is an event filled with daring do with hot glass, a cool (more often than not) local group of musicians and sometimes a show opening or special hands on thing for people to partake in. The 2300˚ events have been featured as a significant, local "thing to do" and well worth the trip if you are nearby. You never know what is going to happen. Learn more>

This makes it all make sense


I love this stuff and thought you might enjoy the read too. I believe this really speaks for itself. Some of the descriptions and nomenclature is positively hilarious and quite Victorian. What is Odzee?

University of North Carolina Press Summary of the text:
Despite its widespread popularity in antebellum America, phrenology has rarely been taken seriously as a cultural phenomenon. Charles Colbert seeks to redress this neglect by demonstrating the important contributions the theory made to artistic developments in the period. He goes on to reveal the links between the tenets of phrenology and the cultural ideals of Jacksonian democracy.

Learn more>

Find out what PHILOPROGENITIVENESS is. Find these:INHABITIVENESS,ADHESIVENESS, ALIMENITIVENESS,VITATIVENESS. Lovely words with a large, eighteenth century flourish.

Not much here. Slugging away on thises and thats...plugged into left wing political talk podcasts--getting my blood pressure up about the state of the world and George Allen of Virginia. I hope we see some change in November. We all sure need it.

Image from S. Wells, New Physiognomy, or Signs of Character..., NY, 1871. Copy is from a Boston College Phrenology and Fine Arts page for our education, edification and most of all, entertainment!

Pumpkin Leaf


As you can see, I have been monkeying around with a single color job (or two) with pumpkins. Interesting investigation. Need to do more. Dreary today. Lots of exclaiming in the paper about the extent of our rain...(lots). The apple harvest will be bumper. Am churning away on illustration and assignments for SU. Also did some research on nailing down the possibility of offering CPR to any high school student (costs etc) all seems very do-able. Need to move that forward a peg today.

Found a really nice history of illustration blog (beyond the fantabulous Leif Peng's Today's Inspiration--truly an inspiration--the ideas, the writing and Leif's great collection of images from all sorts of sources from ebay to yard sales):

100 Years of Illustration from Paul Giambarba, a former art director with Polaroid. This blog shows a selection of beautiful images--trending towards painting and art. It is a sweet oasis. Paul also has a cool blog about the branding of Polaroid from 1957-1977. Nice. He talks about this process in a nice and personal way--bringing the personal light that is often lost in discussions about branding etc. Take a look.

Shady was chasing cherry tomatoes yesterday. The progression from pinecones > buckeyes > acorns > and now tomatoes is pretty amazing.The only thing she doesnt eat completely is the pinecone. All else are snacks.

It is impressive to see the cherry tomatoes bounce bounce bounce down our big flagstone walks with this black shot springing behind it. Maybe more of this fun today.