Busy No 2 at SCAN this week

Busy No 2: (on the bottom right) is on display at SCAN this week at the library. Here it is nicely grouped with two other works. I am thrilled they took it. It has never actually been shown before....

Threads - a seasonal weave

I haven't written a post in quite a while, so I thought I would start with a picture. This fluffy bit is all digital,   a digital doodle.

Emerging from something or other

This morning's doodling. Made using Pixlr.com then finessed using the creative kit on Google+

First Layer: Chromebook as canvas

This is the first layer of a new painting I've started -  just a doodle so far really, and it's just black and white, though that will change. The canvas is the white cover on my Chromebook. Okay I am nuts. I was admiring some of the laptop covers I saw which are sold on various sites around the web. They seemed too pricey though - I thought it would be easier and cheaper just to paint the thing itself. Call me crazy, (or reclusive, awkwardly antisocial in many cases. )

I used an inexpensive acrylic paint in a squeeze bottle. I only have black  right now, so when I get more colors I will add new layers and post a photo of each as I go along.

More abstracts: Purple Neon Night

This composition makes me think of unexpected chaos at night in New York City.  I like all the reds, purples, and dark brooding smoky blues, the hazy blackish green on the edges. It seems noisy, exciting, yet it's too much and the viewer is hiding. I am not sure what I am making when I do this sort of work. I just keep adding and tweaking until I am satisfied with the effect.

More circles in pastel

Android artwork:

More phone art

Woohoo!  More phone compositions. Different phone this time. Virgin Mobile. Prepaid. No contract. I sold the iphone and ditched ATT. I had 4000 plus rollover minutes, paid for 450 minutes a month I never used, and was starving for data.  Oh well. On the bright side, I'm paying half the bill and now am getting mostly data and only paying for 300 minutes a month i won't use.  I don't miss iOS at all even though I'm only on Froyo Android. Made with a free version of the MagicDoodle app. Something new everyday.....

Seeing through the haze of actions and reactions

This digital abstract represents something for me today, namely - how hard it is sort through what is actually happening between humans.  Sometimes a person wants something from you - but it isn't obvious what that is. Sometimes you answer a question with what you think is your fairly simple reaction and step out into a mine field of replies.

It's hard to know what to make of it all. It feels like this picture, as if you were trying hard to see the simple line drawing or pattern through all this colorful and busy fog.

And in this technological world, sometimes technology allows people access to you at all hours, in a way someone you weren't particularly close to would never have had only a decade ago. Electronic communications can arrive when you are tired or half asleep or ill. They might seem to alternate between mild friendliness and something bordering on an aggressive insistence.  I have to learn not to check my mail so much and not to reply to email after say, 10pm. or before 8am. I really have to learn that. Like I had to learn not to pick up the phone and let it roll to the answering machine so I can deal with whatever it is at a later time when I have recently counted all my marbles and know where they are located.

Technology can also complicate things. Right under the "To" field in Google's webmail there is a line that says "Send also to:" which is followed by a list of people you might often email at the same time as you email the address in the "To" box.  If you have an oversensitive trackpad on your laptop (as I have on my Chromebook), you might hover a fraction of a second too long on the way to the Send button and find you've wisked an extra recipient into the "To" box.  Ah well. The kaffuffle is on - it always is I guess. Maybe life is just an extended kaffuffle.  hmmm.

The picture was created and edited on a phone, and then in enhanced Picnik back when that was available.

Abstract made in web-based browser programs

It's Xmas eve and the days are moving fast toward years end.
This picture was begun while sitting at Molten Java in Bethel this past Wednesday night. I connected to the web over the wifi and usedg Deviant Art Muro to make a few sketches. This was further processed later in Picnik

Sun, blood and darkness - a digital pic

Title:  Sun, blood and darkness. This digital abstract bit was originally an MS Paint file. It's last facelift was in Picnik. I have a feeling this little file should actually be big, wall-sized like a Pollack. If I could print it out onto canvas, I'd have some extra brush work to add since this file is small.

There is this sporadic, insistant intermingling going on in this picture. of the red and yellow, of the beige and black. For me it bespeaks the relentless stippling of ideas and culture. There is always disturbance and spillage.

POEM with artwork - after Jay Defeo's The Rose

Cosmic Super Nova, Mountain, Flower, Nirvana

on Jay Defeo's the Rose 

 

On top: The Rose, Bottom:
my response to it

At the start was a vague idea

 about climbing mountains, the forms,

 the form   of mountains

It became   a mountain of paint

a canvas 11 feet high,
8 feet wide, 11 inches deep

A mountain eight years long.

There were brushes for painting it up, 

slathering on the peaks

Knives for carving down the crevasses

making symmetric straits and canyons of implosion

hacking away material

to get down into the mythical center

of this inverse starburst..

Cleaning the brushes

sharpening the knives

day after day, month after month

year on year, the daily wrestling

the readiness to cascade to the center 

of toil her commitment leading deep, 

and growing deeper though glistening white

Like the expansion and contraction 

of a universe And those opposing planetary forces

the building up and the wearing away, 

 the building up the carving down into 

 the building up despite the erosion of sharpened steel 

 in her own two hands she shaped it with 2300 pounds of oil paint.

And when it was done it lurked behind a wall

like a dormant volcano 

or a lover you no longer want as a roommate

and she refused to paint for years

Later she painted smaller-sized botanicals, 

little but weighty abstracts as if the literal enormity 

had gone out of her.

Eventually the mountain went down the fire escape 

They took out the window took out the wall 

to get it out of the Filmore Street studio

to let it unfold in public view 

let it flower, this endless road

this journey of making

the name came late,

The Rose, 

a concentric flower

petals, arrayed around a center
of daily sweat followed by stillness

its silvery shimmering a monument 

of whites of lights and highs accented 

by shadowed abyss, this human reaching 

for meaning reaching and collapsing

 into the event horizon of art

c MM Walker  2011
written for a Free Poets Collective reading  celebrating the Women Beat-ear poets, writers and artists, held at Broad Street Books in Middletown

Update: It's on display at the Whitney currently http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/JayDeFeo

Made with web-based browser programs

This new abstract was made completely with web-based browser loading programs on a Chromebook with a Chrome operating system/Chrome browser. These programs are web/browser-based and completely free.  If you have raged that illustrator or painter cost so much. Give them a try. DeviantArt Muro,  Pixlr and Picnik and others.

Obsolete tech devices as canvas and frame

I painted this abstract (above) in an odd place - inside a dead Sharp Personal Organizer, "512K" which, for a short  time many years ago, was invaluable. (Click on the picture to see it even larger - I think it makes the size-transition well) Of course, every darling is brief in the tech world and the planet is littered with abandoned, non-functioning gizmos. Painters - recycle! Below you can see it insituo - in the frame and substrate.

Fiddling with new program

I have been fiddling with a new program from the mac app store. It's called Paintr and it is fairly inexpense on sale for $7.99. This is my first experiment with the program. Just fiddling. I will be using this to sign my work digitally in the future as picnik has proved ahh, unreliable.

Photo: The Shattering

Another everyday item has deteriorated into an odd state due to a lack of house-keeping will.  The fractal pattern is formed by cracks in dried cocoa on the bottom of a white mug. A few days after I drank the cocoa, I came across the mug, carried it to the sink and looked down inside it, thought wow, gotta take a picture of that. I obscured the cup rim and edge with the vignette effect in iPhoto.

Painting: Busy No. 2 - Tentacles

In darkness - who knows what is waving its tentacles frantically about? This is a sort of an obsessive vision. Once I started I couldn't let it go.  The style began with a previous work Cat Dreams, which is more readable, and notches that style it to a frantic, uncomfortable rush. It's oil on canvas board. Like the previous bit "In the Museum" I am not expecting a lot of folks will like it. But some how I needed to make it anyway. Below are earlier stages of the work where I envisioned the lines as highways, even added cars. Some may prefer these but I favor the end result at the right.

 

Painting: Busy No 1 - Cat Dreams, oil on canvas board

Cats are busy when they're awake, and who knows what they dream about. Maybe little birds or mice running, or leaves skittering on the wind? This painting is busy too, with color and movement of dots. I don't know why. Just a fancy I had I guess.

blue crazy quilt

This is a strictly digital work. I have two more that are similar in style. Some folks I know hate them. I think these three pieces represent some of my most interesting work. As always, movement has a large role here. It is partially conveyed by the lines, partially but the journey of each color within the whole.

For more
https://picasaweb.google.com/100545602569648912341/MMWSAbstractArtwork