Archive for the ‘Photography’ Category

On projects, 3D, and stitched photos

Saturday, January 25th, 2014

I keep hoping for bad weather. Bad weather would give me an excuse to huddle inside during the daylight hours, finish some art projects, maybe engage my kid in board games or Lego modeling. Alas, while the rest of North America is getting the foo walloped out of it, the weather here is consistently pleasant: clear skies, temperatures in the sixties or seventies during the daytime. That’s about to be a problem, since the record lack of rainfall here and dearth of snow in the Sierras will lead to a nasty drought. Water rationing is ahead, methinks, along with my shambling out to the garden with buckets of water salvaged from luxurious two minute showers.

stitching

I’m getting some stitching done nevertheless, although the work on the skin is tedious. I break up work/stretching cycles by listening to NPR or TED talks. Thus, the section outlined in green occurred during NPR Fresh Air’s “Klansville, U.S.A.” (37 minutes), and the section outlined in blue occurred during Luke Syson’s TED talk (13 minutes). And here I go focussing on the “how” (number of stitches, number of spools of thread used, techniques) rather than the “why” (drive behind the artwork). Perhaps the how is simply easier to talk about than the why.

While working, it occurred me that I’d really like to see a book which focussed on fiber art series, each artist showing 5-6 works in a particular series and talking about the “why”. Not a guide to working in series, not a how-to or exercise book, but rather a gallery in which people talked about their series. If someone could bribe Martha Sielman to create this book, I’d buy a copy. She’s done a wonderful job on the Art Quilt Portfolio series, as well as the Masters: Art Quilts books.

I stumbled across this the other day while cleaning my desk. Do you know what it is?

bearing

It’s an early 3D print, a functioning roller bearing. As in, it was printed out in this form with contained bearings. It was made by, I think, infusing layers of cornstarch with CA (Cyanoacrylate). Z Corporation was handing them out at SIGGRAPH, circa ’95 or ’99. (Yes, it is true. I don’t clean my desk very often.)

I remember watching their print head splutter back and forth across a bed of white powder, and realizing the possibilities. Yes, this particular roller bearing might be made of cornstarch and might not be particularly strong or operate smoothly. However, the potential was there. The potential for individuals to prototype or fabricate whatever was in their dreams.

Now, some fifteen or twenty years later, 3d printers are becoming mainstream. My local library has one. HP is muttering about making one. For a few hundred dollars, you can make one. Artists and tinkerers use them to create sculptures or Lego components. There’s talk about sending 3D printers on space missions so as to print spare parts or, for all I know, food. People have models of their fetuses printed to commemorate their pregnancies. There’s ongoing research in printing replacement organs for people, organs based on the person’s own cells. Imagine that, being able to print a new liver or kidney which wouldn’t be rejected, instead of waiting for a donation with all that that implies.

teeth

Under the category of TMI, or more than you ever wanted to know about me, here’s a 3D print commissioned by my dentist. I had some work-related stress which led to grinding and cracking my molars. That in turn led to dental visits and crowns. Even if one has a marvelous dentist, which I do (drop me an email if you’re in Silicon Valley and you want a referral), getting a crown isn’t fun. My dentist would do what he could to make it less ghastly, including plopping headphones on me so I could listen to music as he worked. However, there would still be a mouth full of nasty dental alginate while a mold was made, as well as drool. Lots and lots of drool.

Not anymore.

The last time I needed a crown, Dr. Smith got out a scanning wand. In a matter of minutes, my mouth had been scanned and a 3D computer model was made of my teeth. He sent the model off to a lab where a 3D print was made of the relevant area, then a mold to fabricate a crown. Fast, accurate, less annoying. No slobbery alginate! He even let me keep the 3D print. Any time I feel the urge to grind my teeth, I can do it with the 3D print instead of the teeth in my mouth.

That is the power of 3D printing, the power of 3D imaging period. I think that, increasingly, 3D visualization will be a good skill for people to have.

Mandiblur

My Pinewood Derby car

It doesn’t all have to be about printing Klein bottles or fabricating parts for astronauts on their way to Mars. Here’s a Pinewood Derby car I made, which was based on a 3D model. It’s hard to get much more mundane than that!

Gravedigger

The boy’s car

The Pinewood Derby is a race held for Cub Scouts. The boys carve cars from chunks of wood, then send these monstrosities careening madly down a track whilst hooting at each other. My son knew he wanted his car to be a coffin on wheels, but what should I make for the other car, the one to be entered in the family race?

PinewoodAnt2

Enter the 3D program. I made a virtual block of wood, the same size as the block issued in Pinewood Derby kits, then began messing with it. I didn’t know what I was trying to make, but I had a general idea of narrowing the body behind the front tires and tapering the front and the back. As I altered the block digitally, it dawned on me that it looked a bit like an ant! Well, why not?

PinewoodAnt

After just a bit more work refining the top and side cross sections, I arrived at some drawings that I could paste on the side of the wood block, then cut out on the band saw.

MandiblurSide

Here’s the final product, which I’ve dubbed the Mandiblur. (“Mandible” from the fact it’s an ant + “blur”, a touch of optimistic hubris.) It really is quite handy to be able to visualize things before you build them.

Here’s some other work I’ve been doing, although it’s not original. These are from some (free!) video tutorials offered by Little Web Hut, the artistic equivalent of slavishly duplicating a quilt from somebody else’s pattern. I encourage anyone who has the least bit of interest in learning Blender to go check these tutorials out. The speaker has a clear, well-organized style.

chain

Rendered view

ChainWire

Wireframe for comparison, to drive home the fact that this is an object and image we’ve created on the computer.

 

pepperSplash

Rendered view

pepperWire 

Wireframe for comparison

The one with the peppers amuses me. I’m not sure what the backstory is, why we’re hurling virtual peppers into a tank of virtual water, but it made for an interesting simulation. Maybe they’re dirty peppers, peppers we picked or purchased, and we happened to have an aquarium full of water standing by for just such an occasion. Yes, I think about such things. (Evidently it runs in the family, too. Last night my son asked my husband about a cartoon character, “Why is he able to shoot laser beams out of his eyes?” My husband looked at him incredulously. “Let’s get this straight. We have a cartoon character who’s a giant bearded package of french fries, and you’re asking me whether it makes sense that he can shoot laser beams out of his eyes?”)

I made these in Blender 3D, a 3D modeling and animation package which is free for the download. Some denigrate the software but, you know, it’s free and has tons of features. I’m sure its competitors such as Maya are very nice, but Maya costs a few thousand dollars. I can stay busy for quite awhile with the features in Blender.

Where I may be headed … I’ve always loved working in 3D. It’s utterly enchanting to be able to bring the worlds, the ideas in one’s head, to life. I may want to experiment with printing some renders on fabric and augmenting them with stitch. It’s a natural progression from my modus operandi of painting on fabric and stitching over the paintings. Really, though, it depends on the style of the render and whether stitching adds anything.

One obvious corollary is people printing photos on fabric and stitching over them. Alas, I’ve seen very few examples of quilted photos on fabric that I’ve cared for. There is some wonderful work out there which was informed by photography. Mardal and Hougs’ stitched fiber paintings come to mind, as do Jayne Gaskins’ and Carol Shinn’s densely stitched, photorealistic images.

Alas, many examples of stitched photography suffer from muddy hues, poor dynamic range, badly composed photos, poor image editing, and the stitch remaining a separate, jarring visual layer from the imagery. The latter is perhaps the greatest “sin” in my mind, rendering the whole exercise moot. The stitch contributes nothing. It’s as though a four-year-old shoved an 8×10 through a sewing machine: there is no unified whole.

That might not be an issue in the case of, say, making an editorial statement. For example, if one stitched horns over the forehead of a reviled politician, that would constitute a statement even if the stitch layer remained jarringly separate. By and large, though, that isn’t what’s happening.

Thus, we shall see if my experiment in printing renders on fabric then augmenting them with stitch pans out. I may very well end up with some expensive, laboriously created liners for the dog’s bed!

QN and SoCal

Saturday, February 25th, 2012

Last week, I attended the opening reception for Quilt National at the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles. It was fun. I renewed my acquaintance with Lura Schwarz Smith and met a number of museum visitors, who had insightful comments and questions. It was a pleasure to see the exhibit again, a different experience than perusing the works in the show catalog. I was glad to see that Farmer Brown is holding up well, still grinning at people and threatening to smack them with his gargantuan straw hat.

I can’t really post any photos of the exhibit, other than this sign:

Try not to hurt your eyes squinting. The Museum’s curator, Deborah Corsini, kindly gave me a “shout out” in the second to last paragraph. Remember the song from Sesame Street, “One of these things is not like the other …”? Yeah. It was all I could do to not hum it at the reception. Although there are several representational works in the show, by and large the show is abstract. So abstract that the likes of Mondrian and Pollock would squeal with joy, provided they were the types to squeal. I appreciate the Quilt National jurors’ giving Farmer Brown a chance.

(Speaking of jurors, Nelda Warkentin will be speaking March 18. I’m looking forward to an insightful talk. I’ll be participating in the gallery walk again as well.)

Immediately after the reception, I hit the road, driving 450 miles south to San Diego. I still haven’t caught up with email or blog comments sent during the last couple of weeks. (*cough* months *cough*) I wish I could claim that was atypical.

Why Southern California? Why, Lego Oland, of course!

Yes, it’s always a pleasure to visit Lego Oland in sunny Fornia. One can throw a child on a ride, then kick back with a cup of coffee and admire the many giant Lego sculptures. Slothful parenting at its laziest. For those without a suitably-aged child to act as a beard, I have the following photos:

There’s something ironic about creating a giant dinosaur out of petrochemicals, although I suppose actual dinosaur remains would comprise a very tiny percentage – if any – of the stuff pumped out of the ground.

A tranquil family grouping, also rendered in plastic bricks.

Legoland has some joyous fountains which almost rival those at the Place Igor Stravinsky in Paris.

Yes, of course. That’s the first thing female firefighters do after donning full SCBA gear so they can battle a raging fire: they slather on the lipstick. Sexism lives.

“Is that a Lego banana in your pocket, or are you just …”

Oh, never mind. I shouldn’t go there, particularly after getting hinky over the firefighter with the lipstick.

Very nice sea monster-inspired ostrich. Wish I’d thought of this.

Legoland employee toiling in the model shop, with only a sheet of plate glass between him and visitors. Poor guy. There is no escaping The Eyes.

Heck yeah! My yard would be about a thousand times more interesting if I had little grace notes like this around.

You know what this means, don’t you? That’s right. Somewhere, there are voracious aphids the size of a German Shepherd. Lock your doors and keep an eye on the Aspidistra.

I love these cars. I’d totally drive one around town if it was street legal.

A trip to Southern California also means a visit to Balboa Park. It’s practically a requirement. The Mingei had a neat exhibit of Post-War Modern San Diego design.

There I discovered a new favorite artist, Barney Reid. This wall hanging is very scrumptious indeed.

Jane Chapman, 1950
This shot is just to establish that we’re looking at a very tall, narrow wall hanging.

Here’s a little closer look at a section of it. What do we see? Abstract shapes rendered in fiber and heavy, very textural threads. The sort of thing the art quilting world often regards as Innovative Contemporary Art. However, this piece was made over sixty years ago.

At the end of a post on her blog, Kathy Nida has written a couple of thoughtful paragraphs about work being perceived as more or less artistic depending upon the medium in which its rendered. She asks what “makes a line made with a paintbrush or pen or pencil more artistic to those who consider what is art than the line made by a piece of thread or fabric?” In my opinion, it is because fiber is a pink collar ghetto. It isn’t intrinsically more or less artistic. It simply isn’t used as much by males, and therefore it isn’t as highly valued. If Kandinsky had chosen to create his abstracts in fabric, rather than in paint, there wouldn’t have been a question about whether the work was art or not. As far as the mainstream art world goes, a work’s artistic value is determined by the artist, not by the art.

Sixty years ago, Jane Apple Chapman and her cohort were making abstract shapes and marks with fabric and thread. Art regarded as craft. Today, we are still making shapes and marks with fabric and thread. Some of us create abstracts rather than figurative works because that is what we love or what we’re driven to do. Others of us create abstracts because we hope that in so doing, our fiber pieces will be regarded as serious Art. The same ground Jane Chapman trod sixty years ago.

Good luck.

Phyllis Wallen, Funform

Barney Reid, Cocktail Napkins, early 1950s
I like this man’s work.

I saw several of these signs around. This one was on a chair covered with faux fur. On the one hand, it’s amusing. On the other hand, I’d like to liberally plaster them all over my work. Many venues are scrupulous about keeping the bare hands of visitors away from fiber-based pieces. Some (*cough* Mancuso *cough*) are not. Last fall I watched dozens of people stroke and pat the piece I had at PIQF. They meant no harm, but the damage does accumulate. A little hand lotion there, some natural skin oils and soils there, perhaps a ring snagging on the work. Suddenly the piece I took to the show in pristine condition has acquired a shopworn aspect. And you know, I can’t exactly throw it in the washer to clean it, nor will anyone want to buy it if it’s soiled. Thanks loads, folks. So, bottom line, I wish people wouldn’t run their hands over things until they’ve purchased them.

From a Maneki Neko exhibit at the museum. They had an astonishing variety of these friendly cats.

At the San Diego Museum of Art, tucked away in a room beside the cafe, is this Huichol art car. It’s encrusted with literally millions of tiny beads. My photo is ghastly, but I hope will give some sense of the car and encourage others to go see it.

Another bad photo. My apologies to the artists.

Anyhow, it was a good trip and it’s good to be home. It left me with renewed energy to work, and work I shall – I’ve been pounding away at the current piece since October, and it isn’t anywhere close to done.

Quilt National and Sightseeing (35 gratuitous images)

Sunday, May 29th, 2011

I’m back from Athens, OH, having attended part of the Quilt National opening. I thought this sign was charming. It reminds me of similar signs from my childhood: “Welcome, National Association of Floor Cleaning Apparatus!” or “Welcome, DAR/AFLCIO Local 238!” Be sure and eat at Cutler’s, now!

It was quite an honor to be included in Quilt National, of course, but a greater pleasure to get to go there and meet the others and see their incredible work. If you’re someone like me, sort of introverted and with the social skills of a rock, you don’t get out much. In fact, you may avoid social occasions altogether.

However, I had no problems at QN. The artists at QN were a bunch of really intelligent, thoughtful people. That comes through in their work. Their artwork is enlivened by their life experiences as (among other things) domestic violence researchers, retired attorneys, occupational therapists at psychiatric facilities. I think that makes a real difference.

Posters, Crater by Bonnie Buckham, Entre Nous by Alice Beasley

The exhibit was organized by the director, Kathleen Dawson, and the staff at the Dairy Barn. They did a marvelous job and thought of everything. Not only did we each receive hard-cover catalogs of the exhibit, but they’d printed up posters with our work. The name tags also had a small picture of our work, which served as a nice ice-breaker when approaching another person. They also made sure there were tons of lovely crudites and such on hand: when things get awkward, stuff a cheese puff in your mouth! Organizing an event like that has to be a sisyphean task, but they all truly did a wonderful job.

Here’s a copy of the catalog of the exhibit, “Quilt National 2011”. It’s available through the Dairy Barn’s website, Amazon, and “other places where fine books are sold.” It is conveniently open to my work, Farmer Brown, shown on the lefthand page. On the righthand page, we have Full Measure by Joan Sowada – a delightful piece by a delightful person.

I suspect that the artists and the folks at the Dairy Barn would prefer that people see the artworks either in person or in the catalog, so I’m not going to post shots of individual works. However, to give you an idea of the space and the exhibit, here are a few photos of that.

Here my work, Farmer Brown, is peering over people’s shoulders and preparing to club them with his straw hat.

Here’s looking at you.

A lousy shot of the Dairy Barn in Athens, where the exhibit is held. The Dairy Barn website delicately refers to its originally being part of the Athens State Hospital complex. The State Hospital has also variously been known as the Athens Lunatic Asylum, Asylum for the Insane, Southeastern Ohio Mental Health Center, etc.

Some would regard this as a checkered past, something to be swept under the doormat; I find it fascinating. There was a time when one didn’t have to do too much to end up in an asylum. Being a “difficult” or rebellious child, getting pregnant out of wedlock, being special needs/mentally handicapped, or an elderly person whose kids didn’t have the means to take care of you would be sufficient. Once you were in, depending on the era, you might be treated with kindness – or you might be the recipient of shock treatments and lobotomy and subjected to random cruelties.

With those thoughts much on my mind, I ascended the hill near the Dairy Barn to view the facilities, whose buildings are now part of Ohio University.

This is a side view of what would have been the hospital administration building. It now houses Lin Hall and the Kennedy Museum. I was unfortunately not as pleased with the museum as I could have been. To whit, it would have been nice to know that the museum was tiny and half the exhibits were closed before I donated money.

A shot taken inside the Kennedy Museum. At least I got a fun photo out of my visit.

This is an art installation named “Buttress” by DeWitt Godfrey. It was worth driving up the hill just to see this, the lovely contrast between old architecture and modern art, and the similarity of both structures decaying.

A shot of the exterior of one of the wings of the former hospital. The doors which go nowhere were presumably for fire escapes. They’ve probably long since rattled themselves to death or were yanked down and melted into razor blades.

As you can see, the old girl is showing her age. The entire facility needs some TLC.

The roads in the facility are old-school brick roads. Downtown Athens has a number of these as well.

I think this may be the old tuberculosis ward, where asylum patients with TB were sequestered. Evidently one of the approaches to dealing with tuberculosis was isolation.

I’m sure Jesus would be glad to hear this.

Heaven knows what this building was or is now. I’m fascinated by the fact that it’s so pristine-looking, at a distance at least. I suppose I shouldn’t dwell on my loathing for brick coupled with Greco-Roman revival architecture.

Being a cheerful soul, I dropped in on one of the cemeteries.

I started thinking of this as “the valley of the forgotten souls.” I’m glad these folks at least got buried. I recently read a dismal article about psychiatric patients being cremated and having their remains stuffed in cans, which proceeded to sit in an abandoned room and quietly rust.

Of course, my trip wasn’t all art exhibits and fun visits to former psychiatric facilities. No, there was the lovely hour-and-a-half drive back to Columbus to catch my plane, during which I tried to drive safely and not fall asleep. I dimly remember trees, church steeples, and barns.

Do you know that no one in Ohio speeds? It’s true. Here in California I’m a slow driver, constantly having to veer into the rightmost lane to stay out of people’s way. In Ohio, when I’d move to get out of people’s way, they’d screech in right behind me, as if to take advantage of my going two miles over the limit. When I discussed this with my husband over the phone, he gave an evil cackle and said that EVERYBODY in that area and the neighboring states knows that you don’t speed in Ohio. Then he began tossing out terms like “fascist” and implied that horrible things happen to those who speed. I do wish he had discussed this with me before I made the trip.

Anyhow, I did make it back to Columbus safely and without a speeding ticket. With a couple of hours to kill before my flight, I visited the Franklin Park Conservatory. It’s a botanical oasis on the outskirts of Columbus, with a nice collection of Chihuly’s art glass.

I was so enchanted with the juxtaposition of plants and Chihuly’s work that I started wondering about unexpected ways to display fiber-based pieces. Typically I just slap mine on the wall and I’m done with it. Perhaps I could push the boundaries a bit?

One of the exhibits of the conservatory featured the release of newly hatched butterflies. On some level I just don’t “get” it – why import 900 cocoons per week just so you can hatch the butterflies out, have them die, then do the whole thing over again the next week? Why not try to breed or conserve them? But maybe I don’t know the whole story. Maybe butterflies are as plentiful as rats, wherever these came from, veritable nuisances that you call out a pest controller to eliminate. Anyhow, they’re pretty.

While I was there, another woman was stumbling around with a small digital camera held at arm’s length. Staring at the LCD display with a distinctly slack-jawed expression, she staggered up and down steps and paths, careening into fellow visitors as she pursued a fluttering butterfly. She was such a sight that I thought about photographing her, but that would have been mean. (Yes, writing about her is probably mean as well, but at least this way she can remain anonymous.) I wanted to tell her to relax and turn off the camera. You’re in this big, lovely greenhouse surrounded by the sounds of trickling water, lush plants, the splashing of koi, the scents of exotic flowers, fluttering butterflies. Why not use the camera in your brain?

That said, I did take a few photos of my own. Yes, I know; I’m a hypocrite. Here are a couple more butterflies:

This is a neat little structure:

There must be a hobbit around here somewhere.

A banana plant with bloom. I was really glad to see this. One of the pieces at Quilt National, Banana Bloom by Barbara Watler, depicted, well, a banana bloom. (When you get this year’s Quilt National catalog, flip to page 18. It’s an incredible piece, worked entirely in saturated colors on a dark background.)

I love the juxtaposition of Chihuly’s work with water. Again, what sorts of juxtapositions would work with fiber? I’m not interested in relegating a fiber painting to the supporting status of, say, a tablecloth, but what sorts of environmental things could we do? Room dividers? Hangings from banisters? Or is that really too utilitarian?

Hanging in the palm house.

A closeup of the chandelier. This is what alien lifeforms should look like.

Part of one of the greenhouses. After all, this was a conservatory. I shouldn’t have Chihuly glass in every image.

This is a ceiling comprised of art glass. It’s as though one is swimming in an ocean of exotic lifeforms. Once again – is this a treatment which would work with fiber?

I want to leave people with the following thought: I read or hear a lot of people saying that they’d like to apply to Quilt National, but their work just isn’t good enough. I felt the same way. I always try to bring my A game to every exhibit I apply to, but the nature of that A game changes over time. That is, my A game from five years ago might be this year’s C or D game, and certainly not as good as the best work others are making.

However, if you consistently do your very best work and put your heart and brain into it, you might just be pleasantly surprised. Give it a try. Go for it, whatever your heart’s desire is. At the very worst, you’ll be out a few bucks for the application and you’ll have a nice piece which some other show will probably be happy to exhibit.

Still Flooded

Saturday, March 12th, 2011

It occurs to me that it’s a bit ironic and grotesque to be working on a piece titled “Flooded” while the Japanese are reeling from the triple sucker punch of massive earthquake, tsunami, and reactors going haywire. People’s loved ones are missing or dead, ships are tumped over, and the tip of Tokyo Tower has gotten an unplanned rakish touch.

Meanwhile, I’m rendering a schoolboy splashing through water, a miniature tsunami at his feet. All so very pleasant and innocent unless you’re Japanese, in which case you’d probably prefer to never see a wave of any size again.

During the past couple of days, I’ve worked on the face and the water. Dry brushing ink onto the face was a fiddly business, although a meditative state takes hold pretty quickly when I’m working. If I don’t set an alarm, I can work for hours without realizing it.

You may notice that the hair and the background are just barely roughed in. I tend to iterate and then reiterate. I’ll make my way back around to these areas at some point. The face too, probably.

Here’s a view of the water-in-progress, laid out on my work table. It occurred to me that it should be grey rather than blue, since the source of the water is a flooded parking lot. Isn’t that a rather naive thing to do, automatically painting water blue? Then it further occurred to me that I don’t care. It’s my water. If I want blue-green water, I’ll make blue-green water. It contrasts nicely with the yellow sign and orange raincoat.


I splashed some kosher salt on the damp ink to give the water a looser, more organic touch. Probably this was a mistake. I’ll know when the piece is complete, if not sooner.

I’m actually trying to not worry about mistakes so much this time. Some areas have bled into other areas, or I’ve gotten dashes of paint in the wrong area. Ordinarily I’d go nuts over this sort of thing, maybe even start over. This time I’m reminding myself that this whole thing is going to change a LOT by the time I’ve stitched all over it. The “mistakes” may very well become hidden or I may even decide that I like them.

For me, the whole process is about the feeling of being alive, of creating, of really seeing. A few mistakes are a minuscule price to pay.

Lately I’ve been reading this book, Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera. It juxtaposes some of Rockwell’s reference photos with his finished paintings. It is intriguing, illuminating material for those of us who use reference photos.

So often there’s a tendency to try to exactly duplicate a photo, a single serendipitous snapshot, in paint or fiber. Rockwell, by contrast, would start with fairly detailed sketches of his desired concept THEN art direct reference photos. Rather than slavishly duplicating any one photo in his paintings, he’d project bits from many photos onto a canvas and adjust them to fit his sketch. He did this manually with a projector; one can imagine that he would have greatly enjoyed using Photoshop. The decisions and adjustments he makes when mining reference photos are illuminating.

This was the direction I’d been headed in before reading the book. Flooded is, in fact, the result of my deliberately taking a young model out after a rain so that I could shoot reference photos. I then edited and composited these in Photoshop to make what I thought was a generally pleasing composition, then created a cartoon for transferring to fabric in Illustrator. Whether or not the end result will be worthy remains to be seen, but it’s nice to know that this is a method with some legitimacy.

One could, of course, just print a composited photo on fabric and stitch over it, rather than making a painting. Although I’ve considered doing this, it doesn’t appeal to me. I find that when I’m drawing and painting, there’s a point when the image gets a life and a personality of its own. At that point, I quit looking at reference photos and let the image take over. Despite using reference photos or a composite image, I’m not really after slavish duplication.

It’s also the case that I haven’t seen a photo-based quilt, one in which a photo was printed on fabric and stitched over, that impressed or moved me. Or, to put it more bluntly, one which I liked, one where I felt the stitching enhanced the message, texture, or other qualities of the photo.

A typical example: someone magnifies and posterizes a photo of a flower, then stitches along the edges and veins of the petals. The juxtaposition of photo and stitching is jarring, quite obviously a photo someone sewed on. “Interesting flower photo,” I’ll think, “too bad they messed it up by sewing all over it.”

That is not to say that it can’t or doesn’t exist. I just haven’t seen it. Maybe I should try this method after all, see if I can please myself by deliberately using stitching to deface a photo or make it jarring.

She’s so ugly. REALLY ugly.

Friday, January 7th, 2011

It finally happened: I stumbled across a website which is more mean-spirited than People of Walmart. (People of Walmart is a snarky chronicle of Walmart visitors whose mode of dress is a little or a lot to the side of the bell curve. Some appear to be mentally disturbed, some have non-middle class social mores, and some are just having fun with their appearance. All are subjected to cruel ridicule by anonymous commenters.)

This site was devoted to photos of “ugly” people. Did I look? Yes, I did. Maybe that doesn’t say anything good about me, but I did. I was curious. What was so “ugly” about these people? What drives our notions of attractiveness?

The content was, perhaps, unsurprising. There were photos of people who had congenital anomalies, had clearly never had access to dentistry, had medical issues, had been in accidents, had made poor life choices, or had simply been blessed with an uncongenial set of features. There were also a couple of indigenous people, blissfully naked save a penile sheath, and a few folks who’d been caught on a bad day or had been photographed at an odd angle.

As is so popular on the internet, all of the subjects were unmercifully ridiculed. In a couple of cases, attractive young women had photographed themselves with an “ugly” person, posing and laughing as though the person was a bit of scenery like the Eiffel tower. No doubt it’s inconceivable to the peanut gallery that they’ll ever get banged up in a car accident, use meth and lose their teeth, become obese, or lose medical or dental care.

Many of the photos would have stirred the sympathies of a doctor or a dentist. I could imagine them thinking “Sweetie, your eyes are about to bulge out of your head. Let’s test your thyroid and see if we can make your life a little more comfortable.” Or: “My goodness; that underbite is so severe that you can’t chew. Don’t worry; I’ll fix you up.”

The site did make for an interesting hour or so of contemplating what we find attractive/unattractive, though. As researchers have previously determined, we notice asymmetry or features which are overly large or small. We aren’t always consistent, either: while a schnoz which is a tad large can be considered interesting and a hallmark of beauty, if someone’s chin is a tad small it’s considered “weak”.

Now, we’ve all seen drawings which are either stylized or have been made by people who know nothing about proportion. For example, there’s the classic tendency to draw someone’s eyes up near the top of his head rather than in the center of the face. It struck me that some of the people simply looked as though they’d been badly drawn. (I apologize for saying that about, well, people. Human beings with lives and feelings, people who no doubt get tired of being stared at and ridiculed.)

This in turn led to another thought: wouldn’t it be interesting to assemble a group of stylized drawings of people and use them as templates for distorting real-life photos? For example, one could adjust the eyes in a photo so they were up near the hairline or the ears were the size of peas. One could also base the adjustments on popular cartoon characters. How would our perceptions of the person change? How much distortion would cause us to think the photo was unattractive versus eerie/disturbing or cartoonish?

Thus, I spent a few minutes using myself as a test subject. In some cases, I altered photos of myself with software filters. In other cases, I used one starting photo and altered it based on someone’s artwork.

Like most people, I’m rather average-looking; I’m neither a candidate for a beauty contest nor do I draw stares and muttering from neighborhood children. There are a couple of nasty-looking moles on my face and without makeup my skin is spotty, but otherwise my appearance is unremarkable. You can be the judge of whether it is still unremarkable after alteration!

This distortion was based on a child’s drawing. I hope you like my new hairstyle.

This one was based on a person in a Miro painting. I didn’t spend much time blending the edges around the eyes, so it isn’t too compelling.

This was based on one of Picasso’s self-portraits.

This was done with a fisheye filter centered on my schnoz. I would find it amusing except that I did see a photo of a lady whose nose had about these proportions.

I think I look rather personable in this one. Friendly and interested.

I should see about a proper haircut.

This filter, and the one used in the previous image, had the opposite effect of a fisheye.

I personally find the alterations based on existing artwork more compelling than the ones based on filters. However, it was startling to see how far I could distort my face with filters and still think “Yes, I’ve seen people who look a great deal like that.”

I’m tempted to do another distortion series using pictures of frogs, Dilbert, or Marge Simpson as guides.

Oh. Do you want to know the URL of the site with the “ugly” people? Yeah, I’m not going to post it. They’re a bunch of jerks who ridicule people who are different or have had limited options. They don’t deserve a link.

Adventures in professional photography

Saturday, November 20th, 2010

I recently entered a show which offered professionally-taken photos of accepted work for a pittance, a mere $15. It was a nicety on the part of the show’s organizers, a service they offered with the knowledge that many don’t have access to professional photography.

I was immediately consumed with curiosity. A photo taken by a professional! I’d long heard people talking up the benefits of having one’s work professionally photographed. How would such a photo compare to the photos I shoot myself? Would I be blown away by its quality? Mortified that I’d ever subjected jurors to my self-photographed abominations?

There was only one way to find out. I sent a check off to the show. A few weeks later, a digital file arrived via email.

Now, I should preface the following comments with a little background. Although I’m not a professional photographer, I’m fortunate to have good equipment. In the past I shot my work with a Canon Digital Rebel; now I use a Rebel T2i.

I’m also fortunate to have learned Photoshop from Barry Haynes, author of the Photoshop Artistry books. He’s a brilliant man, a great instructor, and a wonderful photographer. One couldn’t ask for a better introduction to retouching photos.

My background also includes a stint as a 3D illustrator and a graphic designer. Notably, one company often had a need for product photos while the product was still under development. I would cobble together “photos” by modeling the product in a 3D program, then Photoshopping in details. These “photos” would then be used in advertising and product literature. (In one case, a VP told me, he elicited panic in a development lab by showing them a printout of my work. “Where did you get that photo?!” gasped one of the people.)

Thus, I have a few working advantages here and there.

When I photograph my work, I look for several qualities in the photos:

  • Absence of distortion – If the work is rectangular with straight sides, it should appear that way in the photo.
  • Good color balance – if the artwork is pink, it shouldn’t come out with a different color tinge.
  • Good dynamic range – the picture should show the full range of lights and darks that are in the work.
  • Well and evenly lit – the photo shouldn’t appear too light or too dark.
  • Shmutz – there should be no insects, loose threads, or other distractions on the artwork.
  • Background – it should be a plain color like white or grey, something which allows the artwork to stand out.
  • Crispness – the image should be in focus. If I use software to zoom in on a particular area, those details should be crisp.

To summarize, the photo should represent the way the artwork looks in real life. Although I can use Photoshop to correct many of the issues I’ve listed above, it’s best to get as good a photo as possible. The better the photo, the less retouching will be necessary. It’s also the case that many shows specify that submitted photos shouldn’t have been retouched.

Keeping those qualities in mind, let’s look at the photo which was taken by a professional:

By way of comparison, the following photo was taken by a non-professional, me:

In evaluating the professionally-taken photo, I notice that it is

  • Dark
  • Has a brown color cast; in the artwork, the wood is rendered in cool greys and blues, not browns.
  • The border of the artwork isn’t visible
  • Includes visible dirt/shmutz
  • The top edge of the artwork is bowed, possibly an artifact of being hung.

As is, it isn’t an accurate representation of the artwork. One can argue that Siesta might have been better if it included a broader range of darks the way the photo does, but the fact is that it doesn’t.

The photo I took also isn’t without flaws. Notably, although the work is rectangular, in the photo the border appears wobbly. I could have avoided that with a little more preparation when I was setting up to take the photo. However, overall, it’s a fairly accurate representation of the piece.

Inspection of the histograms, the “levels” graphs showing the range of lights and darks in the images, further tells the tale.

This is the histogram from my photo. It’s graphing the lights and darks in my photo, proceeding from black at the lefthand side to white at the right.

When I take photos, I “bracket” the exposures, taking several photos which have the shutter open for different amounts of time. If the thing I’m photographing has a good range of lights and darks, I expect to see that reflected in the histogram. I don’t want to see the “mountains” shown in the graph chopped off on the right or the left. I also don’t want to see them squeezed into a tiny area in the middle.

Here is the histogram from the professionally-taken photo. Notice how the whole mass is shifted to the left – darker – and the darkest tones are chopped off. This is exactly what we see reflected in the photo, that it’s darker than the artwork.

I could go through this exercise again, looking at individual channels to see where the brown color cast is coming in. However, I’ll spare you.

What did I learn from this experience?

First of all, you get what you pay for. Fifteen dollars is less than the cost of some school photos, the ones where children line up to perch on a stool and a guy with frayed nerves and an ulcer tries to get them to smile.

For that $15, the show had to line up a photographer. Somebody had to dig my work out and either hang it or lay it out for photographing. The photographer had to do the jillions of things one does to get a decent photo, a photo in which the artwork looks like a rectangle rather than a trapezoid. Maybe he or she shot several exposures and later had to sit down and decide which was best. (A possible source of the darkness and color cast: “Wood is supposed to be brown, right? Shot number three must be best.”) The photo had to be given to the show’s organizers, and a person there had to hassle with emailing it to me.

In other words, nobody is getting rich off this operation. If anything, they probably lost money by offering this service. They certainly were not well enough compensated to expect that someone would go over the finished images with a fine-toothed comb or compare what was on a monitor with the artwork.

The second thing I learned is that if we want accurate representations of our artwork, we need to be involved. If someone else is doing the photography, we need to be ready to express our concerns.

Finally, I learned that we shouldn’t be afraid of shooting our artwork ourselves.

To do a decent job, we may have to learn some things we hadn’t planned on, such as how to set white points and bracket shots. And yes, a professional with some time to devote to the task might do a superior job. However, in most cases we aren’t looking to shoot a photo which will be in the running for a Pulitzer. We’re trying to get crisp, reasonable depictions of our artwork. If we make reasonable preparations and give it a try, we might be pleasantly surprised at the result.