Prince Edward Island Crab

I had a drawing from our trip to P.E.I. last summer, and it needed "finishing", so I got our my pencils and went to work on it. I obviously had a particular idea in mind as I created the image, but when I take out ink to detail and pencils to color, the work often transposes in some sort of way. In this case, I found a figure and embellished it, kept the palette limited with some highlights, and attempted to give a sense of movement to the "crab".

"Red" Auerbach

This portrait of a sculpture of a well-known Celtics coach was taken in Boston at Haymarket Square and I felt that some of the same problems with shooting portraits existed with this image. I did go into the background of this shot with Acorn and blur it considerably so as to divert attention from background.

Rearranging the Manger

It was sort of funny that when the kids got to the house for Christmas vacation, that Jackson went to the manger scene that we always put up in the house for the holidays and changed all the characters around. He was sort of funny about putting the animals around the baby Jesus to protect him and having the people stepped back a bit. I guess he just didn't trust the "Wise Men" completely.

Emma on The Train

We had a wonderful last two days on our Art/Music Boston trip, and the students were amazing. Giving them the opportunity to make choices, plan ahead, and develop their own solutions to various dynamics and logistics allowed them to step up and accomplish things while enjoying themselves.

This is a shot of one of the students on the AmTrax ride down to Boston!

Holiday Colors

A late fall picture converted to holiday colors in Acorn. With a bit if a saturation "bump". Just playin' around, and this took about 30 seconds. I think the power of the digital age is that as an artist, you can make almost anything into almost anything else. I still find color fascinating.

Awww, Nuts!

I took about 10 minutes during lunch today to express my joy for a favorite food... peanuts! I thought it would be a good challenge to shoot a food that is as simple and narrow in form as the lowly peanut, and to try and do something unusual or "artistic" with it, so I started with "macro" shots, found one I liked and moved on from there.

My criteria was to get a point of view that is different, to light images in an interesting manner, and to use filters or adjustments to alter/enhance the imagery somewhat. All of these shots have been "tweaked" slightly. My favorite, based on the above criteria, is the last one!

Fresh Film

My Black & White photo class has started to work with 35mm film, and I am so excited about the possibilities for them and their work. This has been an excellent class and I am so delighted that they are energetic and enthused about this work. They have gotten better and better as the semester has progressed, and I fully expect to see some great work from them!

State Theater with Nora Jones

Jen and I attended the Nora Jones concert in Portland last night and found it fascinating visually and musically. She has a very subtle and moving voice as well as a tremendous talent for writing music that does not conform to any particular genre. The lighting was intricate and not particularly distracting, although I did find myself at times immersed in the moving effects of light rather than the visual performances of the musicians.

I'm creating food photography with my digital class right now, and I am asking them to pursue several choices for the type of food photo they present. While attractive food photos work well to increase your visual pleasure with food, they may not offer everything they could.

For me, this image tells a story of food already savored, mixed into a combination of textures and flavors that are meant to enhance one another. It isn't a particularly difficult task to metaphor that statement into a visual interpretation, where the mixture and variety of color, variety of directions of movement of the shapes both small and larger,  the linear etched areas in the background, and even the large shape of the fork, tied to the rest of the image through the debris on its surface all adding to that metaphor for taste.

Finally, the division of the image diagonally, with the almost entirely devoured upper left side and the not quite completely consumed lower right side, offer a slight leap in time to two different points in the consumption of a meal.

I haven't posted any drawings for a while, so here's one. As most of my journal work, it came to me slowly in a time released mood of temporal flux. As I lie in bed, preparing to sleep or read or draw or sing or something other that I can't foresee, I often find the sketchbook to be the most cathartic object I own. I have twenty or so of them, full of drawings... and I will always treasure them.

White Stripes

This morning, as most mornings, there were a number of gorgeous sights to behold as I drive to school. Of course, this time of year puts the sunrises and sunsets in my grasp, so a lot of the spectacular images I see are of that type.

As I pulled over to take a couple of pictures, I noticed that the clouds actually were rising as the sun was, so it took quite a while for the sun to get up over these rising clouds. This certainly qualified as a unique situation, so I had to take numerous shots. From my vantage point, this is the one I like most because of it color saturation and the light line visible from the sun horizontally in both directions.

Research as an educator is an important element for me on an almost every day basis, and recently while I was digging for some new perspectives I discovered an artist who was innovating some new ideas around pinhole cameras. With some further investigation I found a way to produce a new type of pinhole camera, so I made one. The image I've posted here is the fourth I made with the new camera. I like the "pattern" effect.