Explorations of time and space are important to many artists. One of the early photographic pioneers of exploration is Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904). Those in Portland are fortunate to have the opportunity to see a nice collection of vintage Muybridge collotypes from Animal Locomotion at Hartman Fine Art (154 NW 8th, Portland OR).

I wrote a bit about this show at my fairly regular First Thursday Blog postings. PORT’s Arcy Douglass also wrote about Muybridge & Cubists in this posting. But I want to go further and show how Muybridge’s work fits into time/space explorations with other artists (Futurists, Cubists, Impressionists, and various photographic techniques).

One way to look at this wide variety of artists is in terms of subject movement, perspective movement, illumination movement, time scale, and representational method. I’ll also show how my various fits into this framework.

If you were wondering why I chose two seemingly different attributes under representation.  I took a cue from Mondrian, who reduced painting’s long-held “Disegno e Colore” to just lines and colors.  In the simplist terms we have two representation possiblities (line & color). Side note: Historically, Italians used “Disegno e Colore” to describe the act of painting. To them, Disegno meant both “design” and “drawing.” Colore to them meant both “color” and physically applying paint.

Above I mentioned that these are artists that explore time/space, that was a bit of an over statement. I think that cubists were much more interested in capturing the full extent or feeling of the subject and go beyond straight representation, so in that manner they are more about exploring space, subject, and the feeling of an object.

As I mentioned one of my favorites from the Muybridge show was, “Plate 765″ (1887). This is because we not only view each as an image but when standing back they all together from an combined image that is also interesting.

BTW, All of my work is created in film on camera without digital creation or manipulation.

In the day, I took enough psychology to minor in it. Courses, at all levels, would spend a couple of weeks talking about Freud and then spend the whole rest of the course showing how science-flimsy Freudian ideas didn’t bare out. I’ll freely admit I don’t have the chops to argue with Psychoanalysts or Psychologists on that side of the debate, I do think that too many artist just rely on simple Freudian descriptions in their art (maybe that they learned from an art prof when they got their MFA?).

Over the past several year, I’ve seen too many references to Freud or Freudian imagery in shows in both New York and Portland.  Freud isn’t the only well to go to, artists need to dig deeper and cast a wider net. It is like trying to only using the 4 Greek elements (Earth, water, Air, and Fiber) to provide the only vocabulary to talk about modern physics. … or only using Aristoliean art theories to create art.

…sure there are some classic ideas that are at the foundations of cultural thought, but my advice, don’t be lazy, read everything, there are some amazing new ideas in every field of study and thought.

The National Center for Science Education has a youtube video about the evolution of eye. This shows the key flaws with intelligent design’s irreducible complexity argument for the eye.

Two of my personal arguments against intelligent design are the relatively poor design of the human knee (should have been done better) and the poor design of the lower back (ask anyone with lower back pains).

Foreseeing the future – a tenth of a second at a time

Researchers have known for a while that it takes about one-tenth of a second between when light hits your retina and when the brain translates that signal into a perception of the world. While it seems like a small amount of time, lags of a tenth of a second can cause lots of errors in our movement in the world.

Mark Changizi (RPI) has show that to compensate our visual system projects images that will occur one-tenth of a second into the future. His research shows that this “1/10th second guess” is the source of many optical illusions.

…and of course some artists take advantage of this.

to read more, see Jeanna Bryner article on Live Science:
http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/080602-foresee-future.html

Below, one of these images is Umberto Boccioni’s “Dynamism of a Soccer Player” from 1913 and the other is a modern 3D representation of the Calabi-Yau manifold which is used in various String theories of fundamental physics.

Futurism

Umberto Boccioni and the other futurists tried to come up with universal models of movement. Boccioni said, “Dynamism is the lyrical approach to forms, which are interpreted in the endless phenonmenon of the reality of absolute and relative motions of surroundings and object, down to the formation of an overall phenomenon: surroundings + object. It is the creation of a new form, intended to represent the relativity of mass and extension. Between rotating and circling motion in other word, life itself is captured in the form which life engenders in its endless succession.”

String Theory

In various string theories of modern physics there are 10 or 11 dimensions with many of these extra 6-7 dimensions (beyond our 3 spatial and one time dimension) so small as to be undetectable in our experience. These special dimensions must have special properties to fit all of the intrinsic properties of elementary particles. These dimensions are described as Calabi-Yau spaces. These manifolds can be visualized in a 3D projection. Wikipedia entry for string theory.

I think the ties are even closer than some of the visual connections that you may have noticed in a quick and cursory glance. More at some point…

Image info: Calabi-Yau manifold (3D projection), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Calabi-Yau.png This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 License. In short: you are free to share and make derivative works of the file under the conditions that you appropriately attribute it, and that you distribute it only under a license identical to this one.

Portland’s Museum of Contemporary Craft has a huge space. While looking around I ran into a good friend of mine, Eric Franklin, who works there. I know Eric and the rest of the crew worked very hard to create & design this space. Eric is a wonderful artist who is now represented by Laura Russo (805 NW 21st, Portland OR).

The next image is a look at the back room at Blue Sky Gallery. As a reminder, I have
more images from the Blue Sky Gallery preview party here

The next two images are from Augen Gallery

Charles Froelick has, I think, my favorite space in the building. The next two images are from Froelick Gallery.

As part of the celebration, Portland’s Museum of Contemporary Craft raffled a car that Tom Cramer painted on site, but that story is for the next entry…

http://jezebel.com/gossip/photoshop-of-horrors/heres-our-winner-redbook-shatters-our-faith-in-well-not-publishing-but-maybe-god-278919.php

It is at the MFA in Boston from May 6 August 19th, 2007. I don’t know if I can make it there in time, but there is another option closer to my home town.

This Hopper exhibition is at the The Art Institute of Chicago from February 16–May 11, 2008. It would be fitting for me to see it there as that is where, as a kid, I fell in love with Nighthawks (1942).

Steve Martin is a long-time fan of Hopper and narrates a short about Hopper than can be seen at the exhibition. A film clip (3:26 min) of it may be streamed online at the National National Gallery of Art website, where the show runs from September 16, 2007 till January 21, 2008. Look on the right hand side for the
film clip.

Last month, at the Met, I spent far too much time in front of Hopper’s “House by the Railroad” (1925) that was part of the The Clark Brothers Collect Special Exhibition and Cezanne’s work (both this exhibit and the general collection).

Funny timing as I’ve been studying Hopper over the past week, feeling it,
analytically looking at his trapezoidal compositions, then back to feeling it. Sometimes agreeing or violently disagreeing. All of this informs a couple of early images and a jelled series title for this new series. Sorry, but right now I’ll only refer to now as “T.I.” Right now I’m looking back to work forward, more work to do…

Other background:
In the New York Times Sunday July 9, 2006 there was an article about “Office at Night” (1940). I don’t know if you can see this online, but the article is called “In Hoppers Realm, Ending a Long Day or Starting a Long Night.”

This past weekend, I stared at the above image and spent time looking at works by Matisse. Though I’ll admit it, I always quickly breeze through Henri’s cut-outs.

“You have to know how to preserve that freshness and innocence a
child has when it approaches things. You have to remain a child
you whole life long and yet be a man who draws his energy from
the things of the world.” – Henri Matisse

For the story about the est. 35,000 year old carving:
(in German) http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/0,1518,489660,00.html or ( transliterated by google)

But if colors were truly primary, I would not have been fighting with color adjustments late last night. Simply put, 3 or 4 primary pigments are not enough to represent what we can see — so they can’t be primary. Next time you hear a printer remind you that CMYK doesn’t have as much gamut as RGB on your screen you know that is a code phrase for “there aren’t primary colors, or secondary either”.

I went by Powell’s Books today to look for John Gage’s new book which they didn’t have, but I saw that the 3 copies of his previous color book had been sold. “Color and Meaning: Art, Science, and Symbolism” by John Gage (ISBN 0-520-22611-9). In a previous blog I recommended it for any art student really interested in color. Cool, hopefully some Portlanders took me up my recommendation.

Does anyone have any thoughts or a review of John Gage’s 2006 book “Color in Art” ? If so, post a comment, I’d appreciate it.

So let’s look at the western history of what color represents male and female:

• 18th century Gobineau: (female=black, male=white)
• 1809 Philipp Otto Runge: (female=blue/violet, male=yellow/orange)
• 1910 Franz Marc: (female=yellow, male=blue)
• 1914 The Sunday Sentinal [American woman's magazine/newspaper] (female=pink, male=blue)

Now, we all know the one color of sex is…