Michael Barrett
A new mega-gram for mid-August.
I have spent so much time on trains in the last two years that they have invaded my thoughts and dreams. This image is built from a quick sketchy painting of Tacoma at dusk from the old Amtrak station. Other imagery includes some photos from my last (literally) morning train commute up to Seattle and a snippit of journaling from my newsletter.
I like this idea of mixing my snapshots and my paintings together. In reality photos and paintings are oil and water. If they’re all digital they’re all equivalent and they blend together colored water.
Digital media is intrinsically a collage, might as well embrace it.
Sarah Meyohas project “Speculations” are photos of mirrors in mirrors in front of mirrors.
I imagine that time travel feels how these look.
My most recent Mega-gram. Here I chose to create a composition of color and shape painted on top of some snapshots I took.
I tend to prefer to make figurative art but I really enjoy looking at abstraction. I figure that since I’m using Instagram as a playground or a sketch book I may as well experiment there.
Originally I was using a service called “Later” to post these grids to Instagram, but that required an Instagram business account, linked to a Facebook account, with a Facebook page. That’s a lot more Facebook than I want.
My plan was to write a script to automate posting, but I had been dragging my feet. Then I learned some lovely people put this together and saved me the trouble.
Now I can point some JavaScript at a folder full of images and post away.
The latest entry in my newsletter project 100 Doodles
This is a good overview of the problem as experienced by users of the web. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone examine what happens inside of organizations and what drives the inclusion of terrible trackers and other garbage.
Steven Forder is a painter who teaches at the Long Island Academy of Fine Art. He works both in traditional and digital media. His images have a cinematic quality to them.
Art @ Abouthalf.com
Today I launched a new portfolio mini-site for my artwork.
I wanted something I could put my own spin on, but I didn’t want something as bloated as Squarespace (or as expensive).
I set up a small static site using the Metalsmith static site generator. I modeled my portfolio sort of like a blog. Each artwork gets a “post” with the title, date, some tags to categorize the medium, a picture, and perhaps a short blurb.
The home page for the site simply lists all the works in reverse chronological order. I added some links which will allow one to see one category at a time.
To keep the site fast on mobile I use the Blazy lazy-loader for images. Blazy is small and minimal but still has an API so I can call it on demand when filtering on the home page.
I used simple CSS columns for the layout - this lets me fill the screen on a large monitor without having some complex layout algorithm.
On the whole I’m pretty happy with the result. It’s small, simple, and fast. It came together over a couple of days with only a minimum of cursing at Metalsmith’s lack of documentation.
Megagram for August 10
The piece above was uploaded to Instagram as 27 separate images which create a large tapestry on my profile. My source photography came from an early Wednesday morning at the train platform in Tacoma. The sun was coming up; it was already hot.
When I’m painting I tend to favaor very minimalist composition, but for these I think it’s a good opportunity to explore composition and design. So here I experimented with some pattern and abstraction right on top of a source photo. I like the direction and I want to continue it.
These photos are eerie. Some remind me of melting old shacks in North Carolina. Some seem like perfectly composed sets for a science fiction film.
Kenichi Hoshine’s paintings reminde me of traditional woodblock prints and color-field abstraction all at the same time.
Never do the math
I am changing jobs. One of my primary motivators for the change was my commute. I did the math (never do the math) and over two years I have spent nearly a month and a half commuting by train to Seattle. And this was only working in the office 3-4 days a week. I know people do that south sound commute every day for years but don’t understand how people can put up with it.