Message and Aesthetic

A problem in mixed motives. Things are made because a patron is willing to pay the costs of production. What gets produced is a compromise between the patron and the creator. Self patronization is rare and has been more rare in the past. I suspect it is a cause of starving artists. The opening line of Genesis is: "In the beginning there was the word and the word was GOD." This is a tell for christian religious art. Islam and Judaism have prohibitions on imagery.

more later.

Plan?

I will be in the Adirondacks 7/7/09 ~7/15/09

More pictures is my intent. The Loj or Johns Brook to start. Look at the upper still water on the Indian south of the Moose river plain. Plans tentative.

Portrait?

Me in the studio last spring. The structure is student work.
Nick Foley is seen in the green sweater Sean has the camera.
Nick thinks and talks. Sean draws and paints.
Both work hard. The frame is far too dark. I will republish after post processing.

The first frame is the modified image. I have done what I can for it. The shirt is Ann's humor.

Large white oak, local

thought on painting

In medieval times, painters were mercenaries. They made pictures for patrons, religious or secular, it was a design project with an explicit aesthetic. William Blake Is an early example of an artist as we understand the term.
The romantics of the nineteenth century were Were painting popular drama. The impressionists leading on to the fauves were answering a question: Why are we not photographers? Dada does not paint. cubists explore perception. expressionists emotion and image. abstract expressionists do color and texture toward emotion. they were all jazz fans.

more soundtrack

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpO5xIltlyU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPG1OnOrhis

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0MTQpDgSFc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3O5nPM0atg0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMwUuS4CFT8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEKKqNc2b0Q

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWuwoGqYgjg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhlZCzzoTVY

Next night Sunday, summer solstace.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knU-r_6DylM

Aesthetics and Fashion

I believe these are not separable. A reasonable simile would be Siamese twins with too few organs to make two functioning independent persons. As I think on this it occurs to me that aesthetics and fashion have different bases.
Aesthetics is the search for beauty through philosophy. Fashion is the active pursuit of beauty. Add the market place and have a three body problem, an inherently unstable and unpredictable system.

hear this.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/podcast-me/

It is a thief of time but well worth anyones attention.

early spring, witch hazel

I am still learning the way of photoshop.
This camera has depth of field limits.
I need to practice portraiture.

On design ( Preliminary)

This is an intention and a project.

Design is a profession without an official curriculum. One becomes a designer by being recognised as a designer by others recognised as designers. A design education helps but is not required. In this respect it is rather like Science. Such a recursive entry does not make for a satisfactory definition. " Design is what designers do" amuses me but is not helpful.

In the very broadest sense designers manipulate perception at the behest of clients.

About a year after leaving Parsons for the second time I put in some time thinking hard about
"DESIGN". The forty years or so of existential accretion crystallized into a statement. The object is ornament. The dual meaning of this statement was intentional. Object being both a physical construct and goal or other desired end point . Object is not an infinitive because it is not additively applied. The physical object is beautiful in itself. Adding to it does not increase its beauty. Subtracting from it does not improve it. As an example take type. You have probably noticed that I am writing in Times Gothic. When I was introduced to graphic design, my class followed fashion and used sans serif faces, mostly Micrograma bold. I was unhappy with the legibility. It took years for me to notice that book designers in general used serif faces for text that was to be read. It took more years for it to come to my attention that the serif was inherited from the Romans who took it from the Greeks. The accent at the end of the stroke adds to the legibility of the letter. A manipulation of perception.

This is an attempt at an historical approach.
Ornament is sin. Corbu, Adolf Loos, Catholicism, protestant, Rennie Mackintosh, Elephant portfolio, Wright. Glass chain? Marc Isambard Brunel?
Whistler, Ruskin, Gothic, William Morris, romanticism, socialism, impressionism, photography

There is a bipolarity in culture: additive - subtractive. objects illustrate it. it is ideological.
What is under consideration is aesthetics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesthetic
I object to this approach. Aesthetics for me is the very practical and applied craft of producing a graceful and useful object. It uses the social norms rather than the personal.