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Posts Tagged ‘digital manipulation’

Love {like prying a magnet off steel}

Posted in art, Books, Digital Manipulation, Experiments, Poetry, Quotes, Writing, tagged , , , , , , , , on December 10, 2013| Leave a Comment »

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Steel. Digital manipulation, text brush. December 2013.


Movement Song

By Audre Lorde


I have studied the tight curls on the back of your neck
moving away from me
beyond anger or failure
your face in the evening schools of longing
through mornings of wish and ripen
we were always saying goodbye
in the blood in the bone over coffee
before dashing for elevators going
in opposite directions
without goodbyes.

Do not remember me as a bridge nor a roof
as the maker of legends
nor as a trap
door to that world
where black and white clericals
hang on the edge of beauty in five oclock elevators
twitching their shoulders to avoid other flesh
and now
there is someone to speak for them
moving away from me into tomorrows
morning of wish and ripen
your goodbye is a promise of lightning
in the last angels hand
unwelcome and warning
the sands have run out against us
we were rewarded by journeys
away from each other
into desire
into mornings alone
where excuse and endurance mingle
conceiving decision.
Do not remember me
as disaster
nor as the keeper of secrets
I am a fellow rider in the cattle cars
watching
you move slowly out of my bed
saying we cannot waste time
only ourselves.




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Fallout [silence]

Posted in Digital Collage, Digital Manipulation, Experiments, tagged , , on November 24, 2013| 1 Comment »

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Digital manipulation. Paint application on Android. November 2013.

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Digital manipulation. Paint application on Android. November 2013.

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Sometimes a Portrait

Posted in art, Digital Manipulation, Drawing, Ernest Hemingway, Poetry, Writing, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on September 2, 2013| 4 Comments »

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Ink on Hand Book paper and digital manipulation. Berkeley, California, 2010.



Sometimes it takes finding a portrait you do not remember drawing….a sketch you do not immediately recognize as your own- yet find intriguing and technically correct, to remind you you are an artist, you can do these things.
You, in fact, do these things- it is your work, a beloved toil- your ink on paper is like rubber on the road for others.
Days with no art are never complete, nor true – or honest, as Papa Hemingway would say.

I can’t help but thinking one should not need such reminders….

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Variations on a Saturday Night …and Gillian Welch

Posted in Architectural Photography, art, Art Gallery, Art Show, Digital Manipulation, Music, NaBloPoMo, Photography, Poetry, Writing, tagged , , , , , , , , , on November 10, 2012| 3 Comments »

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The set above was designed by Jenna Ann Mac Gillis for the performance
‘The Desperate Characters of Mercer County’ which took place at San Diego Space for Art on November 10, 2012. Read all the lurid details of this Americana story here.

…

Like a Gillian Welch Song

I can feel poetry
rise out of silence
like an undeniable tide,
a Polaroid floats to the surface.

The words appear
Oh honey, just take out your lighter,
they are written in lemon juice

Loving you was like
carrying a cardboard suitcase
in the rain

In the absence of

I collect mugs by my bedside
Ride in empty buses
-straw bale leggings-
and always get to the theather
after the movie ended

I walk among the Saturday night revelers huddled around a screen
-the miniskirts march in lockstep

It’s date night in San Diego
a cold one too
knights in shirt sleeves have donated their coats
and presents are opened inside cars.

I steal glances and compose poems
that don’t help anyone tonight.
The lines start to sound
like a Gillian Welch song.
If you have a mind like a diamond,
expect it to cut.

I was in love with the dream of you
And now I am shackled to a ghost.

Some kinds of pain never die;
they can only ease a little,
and not every day.



San Diego, November 2012

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La Gattamorta and Auden on Love, Time

Posted in art, art,poetry,writing, Design, Digital Manipulation, Experiments, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 19, 2011| Leave a Comment »

La Gattamorta. Digital Manipulation. May 19, 2011.

 

 

As I Walked Out One Evening  
by W. H. Auden
  
As I walked out one evening,
   Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
   Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
   I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
   'Love has no ending.

'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
   Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
   And the salmon sing in the street,

'I'll love you till the ocean
   Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
   Like geese about the sky.

'The years shall run like rabbits,
   For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
   And the first love of the world.'

But all the clocks in the city
   Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
   You cannot conquer Time.

'In the burrows of the Nightmare
   Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
   And coughs when you would kiss.

'In headaches and in worry
   Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
   To-morrow or to-day.

'Into many a green valley
   Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
   And the diver's brilliant bow.

'O plunge your hands in water,
   Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
   And wonder what you've missed.

'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
   The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
   A lane to the land of the dead.

'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
   And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
   And Jill goes down on her back.

'O look, look in the mirror,
   O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
   Although you cannot bless.

'O stand, stand at the window
   As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
   With your crooked heart.'

It was late, late in the evening,
   The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
   And the deep river ran on.

 

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Love Quatraine

Posted in art, Digital Collage, digital collage, photography, writing, architecture, Digital Manipulation, Experiments, F R A G M E N T S, Photography, photography, Spontaneous Constructs, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on March 6, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Photography and Digital Manipulation. March 6, 2011.

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Dispatches from Milano: Sketching and Card Making

Posted in Architecture, art, Artuesdays, Cures for the Nothing, Digital Collage, Digital Manipulation, Drawing, History of Architecture, Paper Goods, Photography, Poetry, sketchbook, sketching, Writing, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 18, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Santa Maria Delle Grazie with Bramante's apse. Milano. Pilot pen on paper. January 2011

 In the monastery adjacent this church, just a few minutes’ stroll from my house, one can find Leonardo Da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper’. The apse (widely attributed to Donato Bramante, and dated around 1490) is significant as it signals a crucial transition from the Late Gothic style of the nave to a splendid Northern Italian Renaissance in the apse, the choir and cupola.

.25 technical pen on cardstock. January 2011.

Photoshop manipulation of pen drawing. January 2011.

MITI’S RECIPE FOR SKETCHING:

Day One: Look. (First Encounter)

Day Two: See. (Visual Analysis;walkaround…resist the urge to take photos. Training your eyes will not only lead to better sketches, better lessons learned from the Architecture itself, it will lead to–if you are so inclined–even better photography in the end. Notice, examine and mentally record -on the exterior- connections, details, rhythms, proportions, materials; on the interior: spaces, rituals, light, sequences, apertures, passages…)

Day Three: Sketch. (even quickly…by now you learned the lessons, you acquainted yourself with the building. You begin to understand.) Use the verb ‘to draw’ as in drawing water from a well, draw information (this last advice comes from Travelling the World with an Architect’s Eye)

Tips for cold-weather sketching: stop when your legs fall asleep. Wear half (I call them ‘homeless-style’) gloves to keep the hands free. Listen to warm music on your ipod. Bring a thermos or mug with hot, organic, unsweetened english breakfast tea.

And…

for impromptu urban sketching, carry your pens with the very handy penholder by Muji (did I mention before that I love Muji?)

Sketchbook by hand book, penholder clip by muji.

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Digital Coffee with Mussolini

Posted in art,poetry,writing, Digital Collage, Drawing, Writing, tagged , , , , , , , , , on August 26, 2009| 1 Comment »

Terragni, Casa Del Fascio, Como, 1932

As part of the exploration in coloring with coffee, I wanted to experiment with overlaying digital sepia tones to previously drawn sketches.  The building above is Terragni’s Casa Del Fascio. Terragni is often overlooked as one of the pre-eminent modern architects in Italy, mainly because it has been hard to separate his architecture from the political regime of the time. Taken on its own, though, this building is single-handedly one of the most fascinating works of architecture in Italy –and the most illuminating example of Italian Rationalist architecture– due to its play of extruded volumes, transparencies and honest use of materials.

In 2003 none other than Peter Eisenman published an opus forty years in the making, Giuseppe Terragni: Transformations, Decompositions, Critiques, a thorough analysis of this and another work by Terragni, Villa Frigerio. Thanks go to Raul Diaz, AIA, for telling me about this book.  Surprisingly (or should I say, not surprisingly, the author being the controversial Eisenman), the book garnered very mixed reviews by readers on Amazon.  Nonetheless, the fact that Eisenman spent forty years focusing on the Casa Del Fascio speaks volumes (pardon the pun) on the work, mind and intellectual acuity of this Italian Rationalist.

I had the fortune to visit this building in the Spring of 2007, on the same day that I saw the Mausoleum of  Antonio Sant’Elia (Architect of the Italian Futurist group).  The sketch below is an example of what happens when graphite drawings are scanned: the original had much more contrast and much of it-along with the ‘life’ of the drawing- was lost in the digital translation.

I therefore bumped up the contrast in Photoshop and played with sepia tones and shadows. A great way to make a sketch presentation-ready. Another way to gain some layering would be to layer via-cut the body of the building, and subtract the volumes on the upper floors (the indoor-outdoor spaces).  By playing with the blending options of this new layer, new shadows could be cast, which would give a three-dimensionality to the sketch.

Casa Del Fascio, scan of original sketch (notice loss of contrast), Como, 2007

Casa Del Fascio, scan of original sketch (notice loss of contrast), Como, 2007

Casa Del Fascio, contrast corrected thru Photoshop, Como, 2007

Casa Del Fascio, contrast corrected thru Photoshop, Como, 2007

Casa Del Fascio, Sepia color with Photoshop, Como, 2007

Casa Del Fascio, Sepia color with Photoshop, Como, 2007

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