Heat Induced Mary, Mummy

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Just a few days of hot weather and my brain is already feeble enough to see again what I first saw in these photos from my Junk archive.  A cafe napkin suggests a weeping Virgin Mary.  Plastic shopping bags form The Mummy on the Mantle.

Google's 45° Los Angeles

Just noticed this nice 45° view of downtown LA in Google Maps satellite view. I'll be sad to see the day when global/Google surveillance shots are so perfectly stitched together that the crooked buildings disappear.

Google Maps Abstractions

It's tough to rationalize the work that goes into making a brand new abstract picture when the Google Maps fleet has already produced such good ones, like these images of New Jersey just across from New York City.

Google Earth Architecture

NW corner of Bryant Park, 42nd St. and Sixth Ave., New York, NY

Here are some of the distorted designs that emerge when individual Google Earth photos -- taken at different angles by Google's massive fleet of surveillance satellites -- are patched together for display.  I noticed these along 42nd St.

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Above: Trump World Tower (near the U.N.) near lower right corner, and around Rockefeller Center.  Below: 42nd St. and Fifth Ave.; building in lower left is the main branch of the New York Public Library

The World of Plastic

Here are a few plastic things I put together.

Hills of Mesh

I'd completely forgotten this.  The image is made up of three "wireframes" of the 3D model produced by running a "shape from shading" computer program over an image of one of my paintings.  Note that parts of the thick wireframe on top have been subtracted out.

I like the soft, hatched shading that's most dense at the top left, like shadow on the backside of a hill.

Illusionism 101

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I used a section of a failed painting in all kinds of digital experiments because, with a simple light-for-dark inversion, it looks even more like terrain than some of my other paintings.  See, left to right above, how it looks right side up, rotated 180 degrees, and then inverted in Photoshop.

I've noticed that not all eyes read the same 3D relief from shading in a picture.  At a certain distance the relief in the gold painting below flops inside out or looks flat to my eyes, but the relief emerges for other people I've had look at it from the same place.

This difference in the way people perceive illusion made me wonder if there were cases where I saw relief and others saw nothing.

Simplicity

It's one of the painful paradoxes of the creative process that you have to be ready to throw away what's most important to you.  You have to not care (about failure) to convey the confidence that lets you communicate in a convincing way.

I've also found that a lot of good things happen in the middle of doing something else, when intent and caution are not "in the way."

And that's what this picture is: something that happened while I was trying to do something else.

It's a cliché in other ways too: a figure on ground, a mystery material in a well lit space.  It's so simple it's nearly nothing.  That's probably why I like it.

Cups

It started with yogurt cups.  I would paper-clip a bunch of them together, so they made a curved shape like the surface of a sphere, with the open ends facing out, looking like a hive.

I got some clear (and tinted) plastic cups, clipped them together, and took pictures of them against the window, or throwing shadows on the wall.

Deserted

One of the churches pictured in stores turned into churches is in this shopping center.  Again, I expect others to see less here than I do, because even if I don't remember specific incidents, there are ghosts filling the deserted spaces of the photos.

A few impressions run through my mind now that hardly qualify as incidents: the parking lot on a hot, still day; going to buy a shirt; walking or driving by on the way somewhere else.  But then most of life is spent in the spaces in-between.

And maybe that's why these pictures, full of sky and pavement, appeal to me.  A place that was vital falls silent and becomes part of the background.  Because roads were re-routed away from it; "undesirable elements" (read: loitering teenagers) were attracted to it; the neighborhood around it went to seed; or a newer shopping center opened further down the freeway.

And all those things conspired to close Merv's (Mervyns?), the store pictured here.

I'm a big fan of wide open spaces like deserts, even though I know they're almost as unfriendly to life as outer space.  Deserted structures remind us that life is fleeting; and as uncomfortable as that thought can be, it can also lead to a longer-term view of life -- in general, and over human history -- that's as deep in its way as the most intense burst of living.

I'm always attracted to the stalwart light pole in the photo on top.  I think that combination of empty/abandoned space and isolated figure has something to do with "presence" in a picture.

And, being a fan of travel essays about Central Asia, the faded name of the store reminds me of the city of Mirv, on the Silk Road to Samarkand and Bukhara, that thrived for a while, then faded into the landscape.

Convincing Picture

I just found this picture under some old papers, undisturbed since I moved a few years ago.  I'm glad I found it -- and just scanned it in -- because I love this picture.  I cropped it from a magazine photo years ago, and stuck it to the wall of my studio.

I'm not sure why I like it so much, but I'd guess its ambiguity is a big part of the allure.  I like the color, the implied action, the partial objects.  It's like a fulcrum of forces (but better than that lumpy phrase).

It might be a letdown to tell you what it is, if you don't recognize it right off, so I won't.  Except to say that the splatters are from my sloppy painting projects.

Passion of the Torture

I watched Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ on DVD; I wanted to see if it was as bad as I'd heard.  I played it at 8x normal speed, so I could pick up its essence and avoid the boring dialog.

At any rate, even though the actor playing Jesus looks alright (see Ugly Jesus Test), the movie itself is ugly, with a sadistic palette.  And the movie goes nowhere: Jesus gets flogged and beaten until they nail him to the cross.  That's it.

Along the way, the Jewish religious types look squeamish and guilty; Pontius Pilate looks reasonable and sad, a colonial technocrat forced to carry out this torture-fest; all the women are the image of suffering when they're not mopping up blood -- it seems like 20% of the movie is of Mary's face, soaking up Jesus' pain like a beautiful sponge.

Mel is proud to be an old-school right-wing Catholic; everyone has their place, and anyone who disagrees can burn in hell.

Beyond that, the apparent message is: unlike the million other torturings inflicted across human history, Jesus' meant something. (For one thing, it meant Mel could torture him in a movie and make millions.)  I hate to think what happened to Mel in his formative years, and I hate the way he promotes such a brutally shallow vision of life.

I made a little video from samples of the movie, but didn't like its looks (or the fact that it, like its source, went nowhere but through the whip).  I might use some in another video, but will have to tint it so it doesn't poison the rest.

Update: The tinted video is here.

Wireframe Roll

This picture comes out of the shape from shading experiments I did, where I ran an image of one of my paintings through a program that turned it into a 3D model.

To get the picture here, I took the "wireframe" rendered from the model by a 3D program and rotated eight copies of it around an axis.

The "wire" is laid out in a grid that describes the surface of the 3D model.   Wireframes remind me of the metal grids used to reinforce poured concrete, or rolls of fencing.  I like them because you can see through them but still see their form, like a friendly ghost.

You can pick out the individual 3D models here at the sides, with their right-angle, deep-dish pizza corners.

Red Desert

I'm fond of this slightly modified image from 2006, and hope its simplicity helps it rise above its pedestrian source: looking up toward the boiling summer sky at a building on 57th St. near 8th Ave.

Shape from Shading

I wasted a huge amount of time before I figured out it was the mutability of digital pictures, not the pictures themselves, that really impressed me -- the idea that an image is (abstract) data that can be massaged in an infinite number of ways, and shift from 2D to 3D representation and back again.

Shape from shading (SFS) is a software technique that builds a 3D model from the shading in an image; it was used (early on) to create 3D "elevation maps" from photos taken by space probes sent to Mars, etc.  I used crude SFS programs I found on the web to translate some paintings to elevation maps.

The green picture up top is of a 1 by 4 foot section of a failed painting.

I took its right end and inverted it (swapped light for dark) for the top half of the black & white picture just above.  Then I scanned that image with a SFS program to produce the elevation map used to build the 3D model at the bottom of the picture.

Note how the model demonstrates SFS's inability to tell shadow from depth: darker just means "lower" and lighter "higher."  Newer space probes use more complex hardware and software to get accurate elevations.  But then I was scanning pictures, not 3D reality.

Also note that once you have the 3D model, you can feed it to a "rapid prototyping" machine that can carve or "print" a solid 3D sculpture shaped like the model.

That arc -- from solid illusionistic painting -to- digital elevation map -to- solid form -- felt like something really deep to me.  It's too bad I couldn't find a way to communicate the feeling.

How You Frame It

Frames went out of style long ago as paintings became not just pictures but objects.  The thin excuse for this post is the picture above.  It's of one of my (favorite) paintings, digitally installed in a frame just to see what it would look like.  I think the gilded frame and melting painting go together in a nice, molten way.