In my interpretation of this week’s theme at Illustration Friday, I decided to capture the little sparks of “electricity” that you can feel by reaching out and touching someone.

As C. J. Franks once said:

“Love and electricity are one in the same, my dear. If you do not feel the jolt in your soul every time a kiss is shared, a whisper is spoken, a touch is felt, then your not really in love at all.”

This week my Bind-It-All and DreamKuts machine arrived in the mail. I ordered it through Bonnie’s Best Art Tools, and was impressed with how quickly and well packaged it arrived.

As recommended, I started out with a small project, only 6 punched holes.  I designed my cover with a collage of elements ranging from a butterfly duo to Grumbacker Finest Oil Paint.

The sketchbook measures 4.75″ x 4.5″ making it the perfect size to carry around in a pursue or backpack.  It’s filled with 160 unlined pages of 50lb acid-free paper, and is coated with diamond glaze, an adhesive that dries to a clear glass-like finish, on front & back cover.  Then the entire journal is bound with a brown wire coil.

It’s available for sale in my online Etsy store for only $10 so go get it and let the creative muse flow!

It’s a Surreal World opened on Friday, April 4, 2008, at the Progress Energy Art Gallery in New Port Richey, Florida. The featured artist of the evening was Patrick Stickney who explores dreams, meditations, and myths in his paintings.  He works in various media depending on what fits the subject matter and his inspiration of the moment – acrylics, tempera, charcoal, ink, colored pencil, paper collage, photo montage, and even enamel spray paints.

The exhibit also included three soft pastel paintings featuring my new goddess series: Polyhymnia, Summoning Brigit, and Mari, Goddess of Dreams.  This series explores various archetypes from the religious to creative muses with dreamlike imagery.  Polyhymnia features a nude transposed against a guitar with little cute goldfish swimming around.  Summoning Brigit is another goddess posing nude this time with a long flowing piece of silk amidst a colorful background with a hidden light bulb.  And finally, Mari, Goddess of Dreams, has a nude cradled by heavenly wings against a full moon and imagery of transformation symbolism with the butterflies against a stark ocean view with deep red poppies.

The exhibit also featured a new mixed media painting created just for the exhibit entitled, It’s a Surreal World.

[Featured in the photo: Polyhymnia, It’s a Surreal World, Summoning Brigit, Mari, Goddess of Dreams, Shakti, & Chaos Theory]

Along with these new paintings, the exhibit also features three large scale metallic prints of original paintings that have sold in prior exhibits and on my online Etsy store, Surrealmuse Studios: Shakti, Chaos Theory & Original Desire.

Other exhibiting artists include Eva Diana Berman who was born in Germany and grew up in Bavaria.  For this featured exhibit, she selected works from her portfolio that explore the discrimination, aggression, and violence that impact women, and explains:

Today, on a regular basis we are reminded of the fate of some of these unfortunate women. Some are scarred forever, some go missing, and some become pioneers to stand up for women’s rights.

It is these facts that prompted me to create the “Fractured Roses” series. Through the use of slashes and breaking up the planes of the canvas I intend to invoke feelings of uneasiness in the viewer as a reminder of the vulnerability of women.

Another exhibiting artist, Melissa Fiorentino, who’s influences range from Michelangelo to Piet Mondrian, strives to bring a convergence of the human passions, emotional thrills, despairing nightmares and the conquest of dreams together to the conscious and unconscious level of the human aspirations.  A variety of color schemes, intense and sometimes risky subject matter help Fiorentino’s work to project a very shocking and different motive . She tends to have a unique style bringing a representational piece, abstract and a portrait all into one. It is a way to allow for there to be a reality and dream or nightmare enclosed onto one image. As Melissa explains in her artist statement:

Nothing speaks to me more than our own emotion .. Basically my main goal is to … [bring] together a surreal and abstract idea of what a person feels while they are experiencing life.

Featured below, another one of Melissa’s paintings encompasses an esoteric metaphysical feeling next to Sherry Shamback’s Spellbinding Garden & Altar Stones, spiritual words encased in cement. The small round ones have astrological glyphs on them and double as (stick) incense holders.

Branden Lukes, another exhibiting artist of the evening, displayed very large paintings that were done on different types of wood.  It is surprising how the different textures of wood in each piece really contribute to the whole experience work.  His use of  simple colors and sweeping black lines is evocative of modern comic books, anime, tribal tattoos, and finer graphic novels.

The exhibit also includes works of art by Virginia Erdie, Kathrine Jakob, Wes Trigger, the curators of the event, Paula Showen and Michelle Collins, along with many other gallery members.  It’s a beautiful exhibit so do check it out if you’re in the area now through May at Progress Energy Art Gallery:

6231 Grand Blvd.

New Port Richey, Florida 34652

Phone: (727) 848-6500

You can read more about the exhibiting artist bios & artist statements here on PEAG’s website.

After after the art exhibit, we wandered the streets of New Port Richey and discovered the festivities of the Annual Chasco Fiesta that featured pow wow dancing and various vendors from food to arts & crafts.

It’s a Surreal World opening this Friday from 6-9 pm. at the New Port Richey Art Gallery.  I’ll be featuring my new goddess series along with the featured artist of the evening, Patrick Stickney who finds that:

Inspiration comes from our contemporary world, the internal imaginative world, cultural symbols, and ancient mythology.

Other exhibiting artists include: Paula Shown, Eva Diana Berman, Branden Lukes, Virginia Erdie, Melissa Fiorentino, Kathrine Jakob, & Wes Trigger.

Directions to the event can be found here on the event posting.

Over five years ago, I designed and created my own version of magnetic poetry.  It took a full Sunday looking though the dictionary to select the seven hundred words that ended up being  printed and cut into individual words that very same day.

So now, I’m sharing both a 1600×1200 and 1024×768 desktop in honor of that day and this fabulous tutorial on Technical Advisory Service for Images [TASI] that features my photograph of Magnetic Poetry under the Creative Commons license.  The tutorial explains in great detail how to find images on Flickr.  It also provides links to some interesting third party Flickr search sites.  My favorite is Color Fields, which allows you to search simply by selecting a color of interest.  In addition, it featured some color selection tools that limit your search to certain search terms such as flowers, urban decay, and stock images.

As a visual artist, I’ve experimented with various mediums, but over the years, I’ve let my paint brushes collect dust while I explored soft pastels. 

I found myself in love with the richness of color, and how quickly I could capture the emotion I envisioned with soft pastels.  For once, I found a medium that could keep up with my inspiration.

But lately, I’ve been wanting experiment more…challenge myself to embrace the muse in all her shapes & forms.  So tonight, I picked up the paint brush for the first time in years.  While I didn’t have much time to paint, I was able to get a solid layer for a series of 12″ x 12″ paintings I have planned out.  Unlike my ususual style of female portraits, this time I’ll be exploring various acrylic collage techniques.  One of the paintings will feature a Buddha image.  Another a peacock.  And the last two paintings will feature a lizard and lotus.  While they are all images that have been painted before, all of these images hold meaning for me that I wish to capture on canvas.

As Jill Badonsky states in The Nine Modern Muses: 

If we pay attention to the present moment, we will discover that inspiration is not elusive or out of reach…Creative electricity is everywhere, and when we connect to the voltage of our awareness, anything in our environment can be come a conductor of new ideas.  Everything from the way the grass blows to the music of a child’s laughter can become art of our lives and the substance of artistic expression.

[Submitted for this week’s theme “A Passion for Canvas” @ Step Outside your Box Saturday]

Lately, I seem to be finding more and more sophisticated projects that transform computer data into art.

Alex Dragulescu’s project: malwarez, visualizes the dreaded computer virus as a 3-dimensional, living organism. The images in the collection were commisioned by internet security company, MessageLabs, and breathes life into viruses, trojans and spyware code.

From Alex Dragulescu’s site:

For each piece of disassembled code, API calls, memory addresses and subroutines are tracked and analyzed. Their frequency, density and grouping are mapped to the inputs of an algorithm that grows a virtual 3D entity. Therefore the patterns and rhythms found in the data drive the configuration of the artificial organism.

The featured images contain stunning renderings of internet nasties such as Stormy, MyDoom, Mytob, IRCBot and Netsky.

SOURCES:

[Gizmodo.com] World’s least favorite computer viruses as haunting 3d art.

[Alex Dragulescu] project: malewarez

[MessageLabs] Know Your Enemy

I was surfing today and came across the website of Leonardo Solaas. I have to say that I am quite impressed at how he uses interesting techniques of visualizing data to create artistic images. One of his nifty projects, Dreamlines, allows users to enter search terms and then the application uses Google’s image search. Pixels become data values which are then compiled to form a constantly changing and shifting image. I used the search term “surrealmuse” to create the images here in the post.

Another project, Migrations, takes two completely different sources and smashes their data together. The first source consists of random fragments of The Quixote, the second comes from randomly selected words from the world news of the day according to the BBC. The words from both sources tangle with one another to form an interesting visual set. Salaas says that “…letters migrate between them to show the simple fact that, in spite of all their distances, they are made of the same stuff. The foundations of our culture, the accounts of the world we live in: all is language.”

His site has quite a bit more fun applications and is definitely worth a visit.

[Leonardo Salaas]

This week’s theme at Illustration Friday is “Leap”, which is the perfect opportunity to share this soft pastel painting I’ve been working on the past month.

It represents a leap into experimenting. The semi-nude woman appears in a half awake dream state. The wings gently hold her as she chases butterflies, creatures of transformation and renewal, while the deep red poppies are in full bloom alluding to endless possibilities.

We must continuous challenge ourselves to evolve, to experient. As Marcel Proust once stated:

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

So if you find yourself emerged in creating from comfort, challenge yourself to try a different medium or style. These experiments in time will lead to inspiration, and possibly even a new direction with your artistic path.

MIT Researches have produced an amazing set of images as part of their New York Talk Exchange (NYTE) project, which are currently on display at The Museum of Modern Art from February 24th through May 12th 2008. The images are part of the Design and Elastic Mind exhibit which explores the dramatic ways in which changes in human communications have impacted our collective psyche as we gleefully slosh through zeros and ones. This is the age where the Oracle at Delphi is at your fingertips, after all. You don’t know how to do something, or where to turn for help? You are just a few steps away from the keyboard or phone. Our lives are indelibly changed as a people, and as individuals, and this exhibition has alot of cool items on display that explore this kind of thought.

Sources:

• Yahoo News
• Museum of Modern Art
• New York Talk Exchange