in an effort to expand my culinary horizons, i’ve begun a tradition of trying a new recipe every sunday evening. this sunday’s explorations included a delightful apple onion cheese tart, a pear and chevre salad [of my own divine inspiration] and brownies with pumpkin icecream.
pano for iphone makes wonderful panoramas. just point, shoot, point, shoot, point, shoot, wait, and voila - a panorama is born!
this demonstration shows how well pano handles light changes, as it shifts from low light to sunlight and then back again. also, this photo gives a sneak peek into my studio.
these sorts of shots are what pano was made for. how killer is our view?
every three to six months i get the unignorable itch to redo one of my websites, which usually leads to the unignorable itch to redo all of my websites [in case you’ve lost count, that’s five sites - two blogs, two portfolios and a splash page]. since it’s inception in june 2006 [just after my college graduation], the artfolio portion of my website has had no fewer than five designs. my grapholio has had at least three variations, and the sketch and word blogs have had at least two since their creation just under a year ago.
so i have the itch. and you’ve been warned of the greatness to come.
i’ve recently stumbled upon penguin’s illustrated classics at our local bookstore. my first penguin classic is jane eyre, illustrated by the amazing dame darcy.
others include the three musketeers illustrated by tom gauld, fairy tales illustrated by anders nilsen, and little women illustrated by julie doucet.
it is somewhat disappointing that, as thoughtful and well-executed as the illustrated classic project is, it’s had so little publicity. penguin doesn’t even take the time on their site to distinguish the illustrated classics from their deluxe editions. it’s a shame that such good work should go unnoticed for a simple lack of marketing.
a great little live action + animation music video from minilogue; directed by varelsen and ljudbilden.
according to wikipedia, “site specific art is artwork created to exist in a certain place. typically, the artist takes the location into account while planning and creating the artwork.”
take michelangelo, for example. the man did plenty of paintings and sculptures that were not in any way site specific; works that could hang on any museum’s or collector’s wall. but he also covered the ceilings of the sistine chapel with biblical frescos that were both specific to and influenced by the site. though finished long before site specificity would officially join the list of “isms”, this piece is undeniably site specific.
jump ahead several centuries, to the mid 1970s. artists coin the phrase “site specific”, and the phrase becomes a part of every art students’ critique vocabulary. after all, isn’t it part of the creator’s responsibility to consider audience, scale and medium? and what determines these variables more than site?
jump ahead another several decades. another site joins the list of potentials - the virtual site. but, despite common perception, the virtual site is not one site, one medium, one audience. virtual mediums are not like museums, and what works on the internet church’s ceiling won’t work on the iphone’s light screen won’t work on the desktop’s cave wall. so let’s stop treating applications as site-universal and start designing them like the media-specific creations they are.
we should not seek inspiration to create. we should create, and in this process of creation, find inspiration.
we visit museums and galleries, concerts and symphonies, films and plays, to reinvigorate ourselves. we read the words of great authors, we study the thoughts of great philosophers, we listen to our idols, hoping their ideas will make us feel something that we cannot help but make tangible. but the subsequent flame of creativity has a short wick, and soon dies. this is not the flame of true inspiration, but rather, the desire to imitate our heroes, the desire to produce something great.
inspiration cannot be fulfilled by the creation of anything tangible, no more than inspiration is something that can be wrought from the tangible. the creative masterpiece is merely a byproduct of the creative process, a process that focuses on the creation of inspiration and the inspiration to create. lather. rinse. repeat.
so what if zune only has a four percent market share. so what if the zune software only works with windows. so what if i have an iphone, an ipod nano and a macbook air instead of their microsoft counterparts. this is way cool, and i work with the people who make it happen.
hans and i have spent the spring and summer of this year steadily building our cute art collection. a few notable findings by particularly interesting creators of cute are listed below.
a springtime gift for hans, a cookie by kickass-peanut. if it can be made plushie, this girl has done it.
a small gift from hans to me, created by violetpi. maia [as i’ve named the tiny kitty] sits atop a jewelry box made during my college days.
a charming little print by tad carpenter that we stumbled across at blue bottle.
a bird from the heidi kenney opening we attended at schmacy. we’ve named him garamond.
