spring at last or Seeing Grean

i've been so incredibly busy lately and the weather has been so fine, i haven't sat still long enough to write a blog in quite some time! this flower petal isn't even a spring flower! it's from the dead of winter -- which around here is not so dead!

the TV of Tomorrow show last week was FANTASTIC! what fun we had! mostly the techies kept to themselves and the artists kept together, even though we'd never met before. the show was a conference for folks who work in the development end of interactive tv. the idea was to explore the possibilities. in keeping with that theme our art all had something to say about tv and many of us imagined where it might go.

one piece was a robot that was peopled remotely. there was a tv screen with the person's face broadcast live and you could talk to her and she'd talk back. the robot could move around the room because it was wireless. this was created collaboratively by some art students. it became the intersection for the artists and the techies. being so overtly techie as a piece it was easier for the techies to approach.

the was also a student journalist there so i had my first newspaper interview. i wonder if her published anything!

on Sunday i drove up to Petaluma to pick up my art from the Aurora Colors Gallery and had a nice chat with the owner. in the car i switched out frames cuz i hated that Plexiglas and took that piece and two others down to Ben Lomond for the "Seeing Green" show at the Santa Cruz Mountains art center http://www.mountainartcenter.org/

so i will have three rather green pieces there- the show opens friday night with a party and goes for a month. i still have work up at the Frank Bette Center in Alameda. for now it's in their "Green" show and that will be follow by our Alameda on Camera work. all 40 photographer's and our vision of the city!

i'm printing out - for the fourth time - the piece for that show as i write this. it has a great story behind it which i will share when i post the image here. i'm reprinting it to get the sharpening just right. it's very textured and it looked to grainy, then too blurry, and then grainy again.

i ended up sharpening different parts of the image differently. over all used "High Pass", for which you have to make a copy of your background layer because it is a destructive filter and when you are done you blend it with the original layer. I have some of my own tricks that i've added to this hidden gem. i like making the hi pass layer black and white to avoid adding a color cast and playing with the blending modes and opacity.

i made a separate layer for sections of the picture that had unique issues. one part for example, was so deeply orange / red that it was loosing detail when it printed. rather than desaturate (which i'll try if this doesn't work) i put this part on it's own layer and sharpened it in such a way as to emphasize the hidden yellows. this created a more textured look and lessened the orange / red blow out.

it's coming out of the printer now. well i won't decide til tomorrow whether i need to keep working on this image. often the print changed a bit as it dries over night.

matting and framing

matting and framing has been the order of the day! I know it's not exciting but it has to be done! I had to ready 5 pieces foe the TV of Tomorrow show at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. the show opens tomorrow and i dropped off my work today. I finished all my matting and framing before the weekend so i could relax! i continue to improve but i have issues cutting the mats just so, and more now the problem has been a silly math error in calculating the size of the hole! I know how to determine the size of the margin - i subtract the size of the image from the size of the matte and divide by 2. so if my image is 10 by 18 and my mat is 16 by 20 then i subtract 10 form 16, to get the difference of 6, which is divided in 2 because there are 2 margins on each side. and then subtract 18 from 20 and get 2 divide by 2 is 1. well that would be a bad looking matte if it were 3 inches on the sides and only one top and bottom but you get the idea.
I have started using light mattes. i've always used black, but you can't actually get museum quality mattes that are black because the coloring ruins it's archival qualities. It's still acid free and all, it's just won't last quite as long. so people really expect off white. I'm not sure at all i like the way it looks! but i did it for the show. I got wooden frames so i could put the real eye screw things in it and i even used archival matt on the back and taped up the back to the frame! this reduces the effect of pollution. were i to get better at the taping part it would really protect it well, but I'm still leaving tiny wholes so it's not fully sealed. I guess this is boring but artist have to do many things that are maybe not so exciting! however, tomorrow night i go to the artist's reception for the TV of Tomorrow show and i expect that will be very exciting!

Using Photoshop

This is another of the images i created for the TV of Tomorrow Show. I thought i'd write a little about the process. it was very heavy Photoshopping!
Each image has three main components the model (guess who!) who crawled through a window multiple times, the monitor, and one of my art images. I first had to made fantastic selections to remove the model from the background. I don't use selections in order to place the image in a new background often. It's much more sensitive work than selecting part of an image to make a mask where the edges aren't critical. So i spent hours on it! In the end the best tool was using a paint brush in quick mask. I used my pen tool extensively and it's so much easier to draw well with that. I also had some frustration with selecting the real black screen out of the monitor. I don't have a steady enough hand for those long straight lines so i'd click the paint tool at one end of the screen, and then shift click on the other side to create a straight line between the points. well alot of the screen wasn't really so straight, it has a slow graceful curve to it!

When i brought all the elements into one image i used multiple layers of the art and the model in different blending modes. I created masks for each layer using a combination of gradients for a slow fade in or out and the pen tool for detailed work. In one of these images i used six different layers just for the model! some would be "color burn" or "overlay" but just letting the blend happen on her foot and hand, letting it slip over her shoulder a bit.
finally the forth element is the background. All of them are other art photos of mine. in this one i used a very new early morning blue waves shot to contrast with the deep orange poppy.
So it was fun, great exercise for the OCD side of me!!

I will be in the TV of Tomorrow show!

I'm very excited to announce that my images will be part of the TV of Tommorrow show (link above) being presented by Tracy Swedlow's InteractiveTV Today [itvt] http://www.itvt.com/
I created a series of images for the show about the future of TV. These images tell a story of the future TV which will provide immersive experiences including touch and smell: the breeze on my face, the perfume of the chaparral! Remembering a family photo of us kids staring open-mouthed at the boob tube, capturing the passive TV experience of the 60s, I created the family photo of the future, capturing the immersive experience drawing us into a complete environment!
The TV of Tomorrow Show, March 13th - 14th (Tuesday-Wednesday) in San Francisco, California at the famous Yerba Buena Center for the Arts http://www.ybca.org/ . The event will present the most thorough examination yet of the emerging interactive multiplatform TV space, will also include [itvt]'s inaugural Awards for Corporate Achievement in Interactive and Multiplatform Television. The event will focus exclusively on the delivery of interactive TV on multiple platforms (e.g. cable, satellite, telco TV, wireless, Internet TV, DVRs, handheld devices, iPods, game consoles, etc.). My work will be projected as part of a curated exhibit of contemporary artworks that exemplify the theme, "TV of Tomorrow."
OMG!!! i just checked and the early registration fee is $744.12!!!! Therefore i expect that all of my fans, friends and family to attend. order tickects early!

interactive TV

i recently heard about this show about the tv of the future put on by an organization that promotes interactive tv. my daughter had give an image of mine as a gift to the parents of her girl friend where she stayed over christmas eve. the friends mom is the organizer of the event and the have a juried commutation that results in your art being available for sale at the show. so i submitted a few pieces. now i know how come i don't think of my self as a conceptual artisit! the piece had to be about the future of tv, and had to have a tv or computer monitor in it. so this is one of the pieces. and this is what i said about it:
The future of Interactive TV is more than recording a show and watching it later or playing along with a game show. Even with PS3's technical advances, and even with Nintendo's Wii new motion-sensitive controller, I dream of more! I daydream of immersive experiences including touch and smell: the breeze on my face, the perfume of the chaparral! Remembering a family photo of us kids staring open-mouthed at the boob tube, capturing the passive TV experience of the 60s, I created the family photo of the future, capturing the immersive experience drawing us into a complete environment!