As a huge fan of poster art, I’m delighted that Jay Lake linked to Timothy Anderson’s Art site, full of retro posters (and retro book covers) for sf and fantasy books and films.
Wonderful, wonderful stuff.
The Italian language text is a clever way to reference the spaghetti westerns. Of course, Esperanto text would have been a much better choice.
Jackie and I were over by Parkland College to do the final harvest at our garden plot, and took the opportunity to visit the Parkland Art Gallery, where the current exhibit is a set of large oil paintings by Morgan Craig.
I’ve been meaning to mention Parkland’s art gallery for a long time. It’s an excellent small gallery that shows a wide range of art. Students, faculty, local artists, and internationally known artists are all featured. It is one place that, despite our straitened condition, we donate to. That’s not only because we want to support this great resource for the community, but also because they respect and appreciate even their small donors. Our $50 donation to the Parkland Art Gallery makes us patrons. A $50 donation to the Krannert Art Musuem doesn’t even make you a friend (maybe a passing acquaintance).
Sorry for the crappy camera phone image of the art, it really doesn’t do it justice—check out the exhibit link above or Morgan Craig’s artist site to get a better idea of the art, which shows great mastery of line, mass, and perspective. (The leftmost picture in my image, for example, is foolish thing desire.)
I wanted to put the picture up, though, to talk about the color pallet. Most of these pictures are rich in teal and orange. It’s a striking paring. (For one thing, the colors are complementary—that is, opposite one another on the color wheel—so they pop when viewed together.) These pictures of urban decay use them well: the teal for unrusted metal and the orange for the rust, the orange for daylight and the teal for shadows. But a little goes a long way, and as you can see from my crappy little picture, this exhibit was really heavy on the teal-and-orange, something that I’ve been perhaps over-sensitive to since reading the article Teal and Orange – Hollywood, Please Stop the Madness. (Don’t click through to that post unless you want to be similarly sensitized.)
Anyway, given my own interest in the theme of urban decay, I found this a great little exhibit. If you’re local, you should definitely check it out. Visiting it has reminded us that we really ought to go see every exhibit at the Parkland Art Gallery. It’s so close, and the exhibits are so often excellent, that it would definitely reward the minor effort involved.
Jackie has an update about her latest project, in which she’s weaving something called Huck Lace.
I mostly wanted to draw attention to the third picture, in which I captured Rapunzel “helping.” In this case, she’s helping by poking her face up through the warp.
Pure luck that I got that picture—her head wasn’t even headed that way when I pressed the button, but there it was in the captured image.
In the post yesterday I found my contributors copy of the Russian magazine Esli (If) with the Russian translation of “Watch Bees”!
I’d been keeping an eye on their website, expecting that they’d update it with the new issue before I got my copy by international mail, but the paper copy arrived first.
Very interesting to see my name transliterated into Cyrillic characters.
I happened to know that the character that looks like P is pronounced as R, so I was tentatively able to spot “Brewer” in the table of contents by the placement of the Ps. I still wasn’t sure, of course, but my feeling was somewhat strengthened by the initial character of my first name looking like a Greek Phi.
The table of contents directed me to page 111, and flipping ahead to there I was able to confirm my story by the interior illustration:
What a great picture! It captures a key scene in the story while avoiding any spoilers.
I haven’t very often gotten an illustration for one of my stories, so I’m especially pleased.
I’ll try to figure out the artist’s name and see if he or she has a website I can link to. (The name is there on the picture, but in Cyrillic characters. And it’s a long name. I guess my next step is to spend half an hour hunting for each character on a Unicode character table.)
My mother-in-law, who speaks some Russian, has been asking after this issue. She’ll be very excited to learn that it has arrived.
If you’re a fan of anime-influenced art jam-packed with memey goodness, I’ve got a treat for you: Doctor Emery’s Nightmares.
[Update 2013-12-06: Doctor Emery’s Nightmares is back! I’d take the original link down when the site was taken over by some advertising crap. Now Doctor Emery has a new tumblr site, so I’m pointing there.]
When it comes to physical objects, I’m at least a generation behind the cool kids. (I not only still have an iPod, my iPod still has a hard drive.) But when it comes to internet memes, I figure I’m only two or three steps behind. I mean, I read BoingBoing. I have an account on Reddit! Even so, I usually have to visit Know Your Meme two or three times for every one of Emily Mongeau’s comics.
But if that’s not you—if you already know your memes—then you’ll find Emily’s comics great fun. And if, like me, you’re a few steps back on your memes, you can still enjoy the art.
Oh, and I should also mention: Emily drew the picture I’ve been using for my favicon for a while now. It’s a picture of my totemic animal: the sloth.
Here it is in slightly less faviconic form. Have you ever seen such a handsome creature?
I always like poster art. In particular, I like the way poster artists manage to make such effective use of a limited color pallet. Several of these are excellent examples:
[Update 2016-02-14: That link seems busted, but a search still finds the exoplanet posters: http://www.chungkong.nl/?s=exoplanet]
With just a few shades of the same color, the Chungkong paints a whole alien world.
—via Jay Lake.
I was pretty productive these past two weeks. I finished a major rewrite pass on a short story that the Incognitos had critiqued a while back, and passed the story on to a couple of first readers. I wrote several posts for Wise Bread. I did some preliminary investigation on a tech writing assignment.
I thought that was great, not only because it’s nice to get things done, but because it makes me feel like it’s okay to spend time on various less (or non-) remunerative projects, such as art, poetry, and Esperanto.
I’ve just come to realize, that this is a harmful way to think.
I’ve always had these recurring bouts of unproductivity. The previous several weeks were an instance of it: I sat at my computer and tried to work, but I didn’t get much done.
Back when I worked a regular job, these bouts were always terribly stressful. How do you tell your boss, “Sorry, I just don’t seem to be able to get anything done”?
I had several coping skills. Because of the kind of work I did, my managers never really could know how difficult a task was, so I could just say, “It’s turned out to be tougher than I thought.” Also, even when I couldn’t make any headway on my major tasks, I was almost always able to do something. I got in the habit of seeking out smaller, one-day tasks that I could do. That let me be productive (so I felt better) and gave me an excuse to be late with my main task (so I was less stressed).
Now that I’m not trying to work at a regular job, the stress level is much reduced. There’s no boss whose understanding of my productivity needs to be managed. There’s no job to be lost if that management goes poorly. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t still have these periods of unproductivity.
As I was saying, since this latest surge of productivity, I’ve felt free to spend some time on less remunerative projects, like doing some writing in Esperanto. And that brought me to a realization: It’s dumb to think that I shouldn’t work on stuff that I’m interested in, just because it’s not the most important work I could be doing.
I think part of the reason I’ve been doing it is that I thought it might motivate me to get my important work done. I know some people bribe themselves by withholding permission to play with side projects until they’ve done an appropriate amount of work on the main projects. But it has never been an effective technique for me. Maybe it helps a little when I’m just feeling lazy. But being unproductive is different from being lazy, and it doesn’t work at all for that.
More important, I think I’ve finally figured out that this behavior is actively harmful. These other things I do—drawing, poetry, Esperanto—probably help me be productive. They’re not a waste of time that I could be spending on important projects. Rather, they’re a pathway back into productivity. Being productive—even being productive on something that doesn’t earn any money or advance my career—is still being productive. And experiencing productivity after a period of unproductivity is positive. It leads to more productivity.
In the past, getting started being productive again has always been the hard part. Maybe this will help. Maybe, if I can be productive on some frivolous task (without agonizing too much over the fact that it is frivolous), I’ll be able to bootstrap that experience of productivity into productivity in other areas.
In the meantime, I’m being productive again in a wide range of areas. Go me.
In my family, “brain chemicals” is the shorthand term for unmotivated negative feelings. That is, when you’re feeling sad because something bad happened, that’s normal, but when you’re feeling sad for no particular reason, that’s brain chemicals. (On the theory that you’ve probably got a chemical imbalance or something, and that you should probably see a doctor about it when you’ve got the time.) The same applies to anger, frustration, anxiety, etc.
I mention this because I often suffer from brain chemicals, especially this time of year, when the days get short and dark and cold.
I’m actually doing pretty well this year. I’m doing a bunch of things that help. I’m taking my vitamin D. I’m trying to get outdoors for some actual sunlight, any day that there is any. I’m getting my exercise in. (For many months now, Jackie and I have been lifting weights three times a week and doing an hour of taiji three times a week. I’m trying to get in an hour of walking and at least a few minutes of additional taiji on the other days of the week.) I’m being productive. I’m getting enough sleep.
Still, despite all that, brain chemicals seemed to be setting in yesterday. I was feeling over-busy, under-accomplished, and frustrated. So, I went to level two in the fight against brain chemicals, and scheduled an artist’s date.
I think of it as a date with my muse. A proper artist’s date involves going somewhere and spending time with something that spurs creativity. That could be almost anything, and if I did them more often (and I really should) I’d probably have to broaden the range of places that I go. But I don’t do them very often, so I can usually get away with taking my muse to the same few places.
I started at the Krannert Art Center. Much of their exhibit space today was full of stuff that I had little interest in, but outside the museum proper there’s a changing exhibit of student work that’s often more interesting than the work in the museum itself. Today it had the work of school children. There were a lot of interesting ideas—for example, a low passageway made of cardboard where kids who’d studied ancient cave paintings had painted their own—even if only a few of the actual pieces spoke to me.
Connected to the museum is the school of design building. They often have some student work on display in the hallway, and I rather liked a small group of pieces by students who had apparently had the assignment to create a brand identity for themselves. They produced the same elements that a brand identity package from a marketing firm would provide—a name and logo (provided in a couple of sizes and formats, in both color and black & white), together with some key terms and images that could go into a branded ad campaign.
It was everything an artist’s date needs to be—a reminder that creativity is everywhere, a reminder that there can be joy in art of all sorts.
I was already feeling better today, and expect that I’ll feel even better tomorrow.
One of the unique events in Champaign-Urbana is the Jazz Walk. Bands (duos and small combos) are scattered across the sculpture garden at Meadowbrook Park, and you walk from one to the next. The result is a series of surprisingly intimate performances. You have each group almost to yourself, sharing one or two or three songs with a shifting mix of perhaps a dozen or so other pedestrians.
You can linger longer if you like, but the event only goes on for two hours, so if you spend too much time with one band it begins to eat into your time to spend with the others.
As a bonus, you get to enjoy the sculpture as well.
I liked all the music, even the groups that didn’t play exactly my sort of jazz had the sort of energy that makes a live performance worth attending.
It was a cool, cloudy evening, and was already getting a little dark for photography, but I thought my camera did pretty well—I got an adequate shot of each group, and a few pretty good ones.
Somebody came to my site after searching for information about the haiku earring parties at WisCon. That reminded me that I’d never gotten around to putting up a picture of Volcanoes on Vacation, the earrings I exchanged a haiku for at WisCon some years back.
So, here’s the picture.
I’ve lost my notes from that haiku earring party, so I don’t have the exact text of the haiku. I could probably recreate it, but the gist of it was one volcano lamenting the fact that they always vacation somewhere on the Pacific rim. I remember that the last line was, “Next year, Michigan!”
Jackie’s other earrings from haiku earring parties were documented here:
Elisem‘s haiku earring parties are always a highlight of WisCon for me. They’re a big part of the reason that I’m always sad when I have to miss a year.
