Pocket Objects

Objects in our pockets always tell a tale.  A quick inventory of the contents from someone's coat or pants pocket reveals more than just a collection of sometimes disjointed objects.  Often they provide a little snippet of life, a glimpse into what makes that person get up in the morning.  I am hoping that this initial set of seven photographs can be the catalyst for a new photographic series.

 Objects In The Pocket Of A Camera Bag

 Objects In The Pocket Of A Guitar Case

 Objects In The Left Pocket Of A Backpack

 Objects In The Center Pocket Of A Backpack

 Objects In The Right Pocket Of A Backpack

 Objects In The Seat Pack Of A Road Bicycle

Objects In The Pocket Of A Sport Jacket

Ideas On A Card

January is over and so far, this is only the first drawing I've done this year.  Gel pen on 6-panel 3x5 index cards.  I wanted to explore different drawing canvases this year and while I've done a few on 3x5 cards in the past, I want to see how far I can take some ideas I had written down last year.  (Ironically, those art ideas were written on 3x5 index cards.) Maybe this is what concept art is all about right?  The concept alone is sufficient and the artist gets bored or unmotivated.  Execution has a finite probability of anywhere between zero and one of actually happening.  Of course, all my art ideas have a better chance of realization if only I can put away my guitars for a while.

New Year's Resolution

I had been frustrated with boring results when I attempt to do these photo collages like this one above I did of a meadow in Mineral King, deep inside Sequoia National Park.  For starters, I think I'm approaching this photo collage business a little too conventional.  I try to capture the beauty and openness of a place like a meadow at 9000 ft elevation using a panoramic approach which is fine if I want to get uninteresting results.  At some point around 2009, I had completely gave up on photo collages.  Then I go see a couple David Hockney collages at museums over the past couple years and I know deep in the back of my mind, there is a lot of untapped potential in photo collages.  Because when I saw Hockney's Pearlblossom (below) at the Getty Center in 2010, it just completely blew my mind away.

So this year, I plan to revisit the subject of photo collages with a completely different mindset.  I think photography needs to be become drawing in order to produce an alternate reality that would not have existed otherwise if it weren't for the vision of the artist.  With digital cameras, it's also more forgiving since errors and bad shots literally don't cost me a single dime.

Tar Mosaics of Moonstone Beach

Oil and water do not mix.  But one thing water does is facilitate the mixture of oil (or some form of it like tar) and some other substance available in the near vicinity.  Anywhere in the coast of Central California, one will see patches of tar was ashore.  Yes, there is oil off the California coast and all one needs to do is look out in the water and count the offshore oil rigs that dot the western horizon.  There's tar as far south as the beaches of Ventura but I took these photos at Moonstone Beach in Cambria.  I found these mosaics very interesting and what I was looking at are works of art created by random processes of nature.  These are in the truest sense, very temporary installation that will soon wash away at the next high tide.  At which point, it's time to make new one.

Untitled Linocut

I had this 8"x10" linocut print stashed away for the past 5 years in a blanket chest along with some -- well, blankets.  I only tried linocuts for a year in 2007 and I'd like to do a few more at some point.  The image is inspired by a small photograph I found inside a used copy of Sontag's "On Photography" from some yard sale in Altadena.

Windsurfer In The Bay (2012)

Language...has created the word "loneliness" to express the pain of being alone.  And it has created the word "solitude" to express the glory of being alone.

-Paul Tillich

I  took this photograph earlier this year of a lone windsurfer in the San Francisco bay.  Late May, overcast, and I was comfortably sitting inside a boat that traveled across the bay to the Golden Gate bridge and back to Pier 39 when out of the corner of my eye, I caught this white sliver of a sail over to the north.  The wind was as cold as late spring gets and I can't help but think how liberating it must be to hear only your heartbeat, your breath and the wind.

Good Enough To Frame?

As soon as I finish a drawing, trying to decide what to do with it is usually not that simple of a process. Since most of my art is drawing nowadays, putting a piece of paper away is a lot easier than stashing canvas.  I finished a 4-panel drawing recently and a friend asked if I was going to frame it and only then did I really think about the question as to what is good enough to frame.  For the most part, I think it's a subjective filter that gets applied, one that I admit could be as arbitrary as how I'm feeling that day when I make the decision.  The good thing about framing drawings is the fact that it's not permanent.  Should I change my mind at some point, it's easy enough to replace.  So I went through my storage closet and pulled all the drawings that I had framed over the years but haven't had enough courage to hang on my walls.  As typical with my indecision, good enough to frame doesn't necessarily mean good enough to hang.

8-Yr Old Print

Photograph of Santa Barbara Harbor taken in December 2004.  Printed and framed and sat in my closet for 8 years.

Monomorphs (2012)

What seems like shapeless blobs are actually monomorphic in nature.  There is a certain invariance between every figure in this 4-panel drawing.  Each panel is actually the inside of blank Thank You cards I have sitting around.  What I want the viewer to see at the macro level is distinctly different than upon closer examination.  I represent the inner structure in terms of movement of the monomorphs, inspired by the dynamic interplay of the molecules that make up life at the cellular level.

Quick, Find Some Paper!

I don't get bored easily with work-related discussions.  But on rare occasions, an all-day meeting is enough to push me over the edge.  By noon, I would have sat through at least 4 hours of discussions and I'm either looking for an excuse to get out of there or find a way to entertain myself while listening to all dialogue.  So I scrambled to my office during a break and looked for something to doodle on.  

Fortunately, I found these unused Thank You cards by Papyrus made of some textured card stock (and of course, I had my ever trusted gel pens).

Unfortunately, the meeting extends for another 8 hours tomorrow.

Fortunately, I have a stack of another dozen or so of these unused cards.

Have Pen, Will Doodle

Spent Thanksgiving weekend in Vegas with family and for the first time in a while, I forgot to bring a camera.  On previous trips, I would spend evenings in the hotel editing some photos taken during the day.  It's hard to suppress creative output for 3 full days so I had to make do with what I had in the hotel room -- a 4"x6" pad of paper.  As the kids were winding down Thursday evening, I started drawing and by Saturday, I've done about six of these doodles.  Thank goodness, I have several gel pens in my backpack.

Can We All Just Get Along?

I did this collage back in 2006 after finding an old LA County Thomas Bros. map for $1 at a yard sale.  I thought that despite our claim of a diverse Los Angeles, we, as a whole are still segregated demographically and economically who live in neighboring cities.  This completed collage (shown above) was about 3 ft x 10 ft but over time, the glue I ended up using didn't last too long and soon enough, my notional neighborhoods fell apart.  In general, only a true Angeleno will fully understand the pairings I did.  I titled the piece "Lost Angeles (Can We All Just Get Along?)"

 The neighborhoods of Bel Air, Temple City and some unincorporated parts of LA County.

 The neighborhoods of Bradbury, Baldwin Hills, San Pedro and El Monte.

 The neighborhoods of Montebello, Brentwood, La Habra and Inglewood.

Since El Segundo always had this long-standing issues with LAX, I thought it might be fun to put more airport (add Palmdale Airport) around them and replace the their coastal access with the city of Rosemead.

 The neighborhoods of Sierra Madre, Hawthorne and Hollywood.

 The neighborhoods of North Hollywood, La Canada Flintridge and East LA (Boyle Heights).

 The neighborhoods of Manhattan Beach, just west of Northridge and north of Lynwood.

The city of San Marino bordered by the cities of Maywood and Huntington Park.

Going West

I took this photo back in 2008 when I last lived in Pasadena.  As I left work around 5:20pm, I did notice the sky was just bright orange and luckily enough, I had my camera with me as I got on the 210 West from Vernon Ave.  I got even luckier when the highway sign told me how far away I was from home.  I thought it made for a decent photograph. With each passing day, I want to return more and more especially now that my brother and his family had move there as well, just above the Rose Bowl.  As soon as both kids are done with high school, I'm definitely headed back west.

No Harm, No Foul

A friend from New York visited last weekend and showed him around the studio including some of the drawing concepts I have started just a couple days prior.  I was explaining to him how some of these images come into being, how to interpret each piece in the eyes of the creator.  What he said next, I'm not sure whether to take as a complement or not but it did come through clearly.  He said that he enjoys hearing artists at gallery openings explain their work, the inspiration, the process and the product -- in spite of whether the work sucked or not.  O-kay.  Thankfully, he's a really good friend and we go way back and besides, I don't get offended by people not liking my art.  I think that's what differentiates people who do art because they like it from those who are more interested in self-promotion because they have to sell.  One seems to take criticism better than the other.

Above is an untitled sketch using gel pen on wide-ruled composition notebook I did during the weekly staff meeting at work.  I've evolved some of the structures primarily inspired by the process of cell mitosis -- which I learned about while helping the kids study for their science quizzes.  Isn't that how art is supposed to be anyway, taking inspiration from everyday life?

Last Oil

This is the last oil painting I ever remember doing. Maybe sometime 2006 or 2007.  I never dated my oils because they're never finished, right?  30"x48" and untitled.  Since then, I've focused mostly on drawing although I do miss the action of applying the consistency of oil on a fresh, empty canvas.  Nothing quite like it.

Untitled Drawing (2012)

Finally got some artwork going again.  Sometimes, I just need to grab my pen and start drawing anything.  Like they tell writers to just type a letter, a word, a sentence -- all I had to do was draw a line, two lines, fill in the space.  This is my second drawing this week.  So far.  Completed in 1 hour while listening to Miles Davis' Bitches Brew, disc 2.  Miles always facilitates access to areas of creativity that are difficult to reach.

My Type of Doodling

I had been maintaining engineering notebooks for as long as I can remember.  The habit started in college and I just carried the practice through my professional career.  However, I alway keep it a point to only write on the right side and leave the left pages for doodles and various notes.  I can almost recall what work meeting I was attending for every doodle I put down on paper.  The first drawing is from last week's program staff meeting followed by a teleconference with the customer.  The bottom two are from some boring training class I was sitting in on -- doodling ornate types was the only thing that kept me awake.

The Photographer and the Subject

It started as an attempt to jump start my art for the fall.  After taking most of the summer off from any serious art projects or series, I figured it was time to find new inspiration in art.  Photography seemed like an easy enough medium to see what direction I might want to go.  I've always been interested in the physics of smoke and the art of photography.  The source was simple enough -- some Japanese incense I bought at a tea shop in Claremont.  But the problem of illuminating the smoke against a dark background was a little bit harder but for the most part, solvable with an LED handheld flashlight positioned just below the incense holder.  What was totally unexpected is that smoke is a very unpredictable object as it rises in an updraft that is anything but stable.  It just wouldn't go where I wanted it to go so I was basically in this get-lucky capturing the moment mode.  Just get the finger on the trigger in the hopes of something interesting forms.  The smallest perturbation in the room from me moving my arm affected its shape, movement, dispersion and just about every attribute. With the lack of control, of course, came lack of focus.  I tried a couple lenses just to see what works best a different distances from the subject.  The majority of my shots were way out of focus and the few that came in focus were against the non-interesting features of the smoke.  Needless to say, my yield of decent shots was around the 10% mark -- frustrating since this was a full 2-hr effort.  My final thoughts on this is the concept of detachment -- where a photographer is an external observer of an event or a subject does not apply to photographing smoke.  Much like the concept in modern physics where the scientist cannot measure a physical property without altering that which he is measuring, the theory that there is a separation between photographer and subject is patently false.  The fragility of the subject almost require that I understand it before it will let me capture its image.

European Classic

Bicycles are meant to be simple.  The derailleur was introduced in the late 1800s to allow for multiple gear changes without dismounting.  I think the 1980s were the golden era of European bicycles -- basically, before index shifting, clipless pedals, carbon fiber and aerodynamics dominate product design.  It was also the decade I got introduced to serious cycling when I bought my first Italian bike, an Atala Campione del Mondo with Campagnolo C-Record components.  Since I bought that bike from Helen's Cycles in Westwood, I've had several road bikes of the "modern" designs I mentioned above.  Last week, I did find my Holy Grail of classic European bikes, a 1983 Eddy Merckx and above is a photo of the drive system.

Inside CK-Space (2012)