|
|---|
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
"Penny" ( see all proofs)
© rebecca collins/ artpaw.com
When clients order a custom pet portrait with me they usually expect to see their entire pet on the canvas, and so I am always sure to provide a few proofs that show at least full head and shoulders. Every now and then I get a breed in or a specific pet that is begging to have some unusual cropping attempted. Because Jack Russell's are so high energy, smart and tricky I thought it might be fun to show this girl coming into or maybe about to leave the canvas frame. I recall a Great Pyrenees named Max that I cropped because in my opinion that breed was just too darn large to be contained within the confines of a square canvas.
Anyway, this pretty girl is Penny and this is a follow up post to Zeb below. It makes me very sad to think about her dealing with the loss of her pal. Often times when we loose an animal family member we can get so caught up in dealing with our own grief that we can loose sight of how it can effect the other animals in the house. We ended up adopting Ajax before we were emotionally ready after loosing our Atticus . With the arrival of Ajax we saw an immediate change in Nessie who had been grieving pretty hard, she needed that puppy so bad and it made her final year with us a joyful one. Our heart goes out to Penny and her family. Her Dad tells me she found them when they weren't looking and it is our hope that Zeb or Vanity will send them another great pup when the time is right.
The pencil test.
Keywords: concept spaceship art illustration design work by concept artist richard smitheman los angeles california images from the pencil test website thepenciltest.com
About this artwork:
The client asked for a green ground that would blend well with Vanity's artwork. I have sampled the client with many shades of olive green and a few surprises as well. The pattern sample above is brand new and I love that background however I do not like it at all with Zeb, because it is a bit busy and Zeb looks like he is meditating here ... the crazy zig-zag pattern sort of spoils the peaceful mood. I went ahead and kept it in the mix because it may actually be fun for a 2nd project we have going for Zeb's sister Penny ... a high energy Jack Russell.
Monday, March 29, 2010
Over the years we have created custom pet portraits of many pups in shades. This cute little pup is Negillta. This snapshot and artwork makes me ready for summer!
Busy busy day, busy week ahead. Getting caught up on organizing new commissions that have come in and I am eager to finish out March. My apologies to Mosaic Monday fans ... I'll get back to my regular blogging schedule next week.
Busy busy day, busy week ahead. Getting caught up on organizing new commissions that have come in and I am eager to finish out March. My apologies to Mosaic Monday fans ... I'll get back to my regular blogging schedule next week.
Andrew Glazebrook's blog.
Keywords: 3d three dimensional star wars imperial battle station death star type model lit composite by andrew glazebrook glazy concept ships blog website
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Every writer will approach blogging differently. For some writers, a blog is mainly a marketing apparatus to promote their published (or unpublished) books. Others treat a blog more like a daily journal, in which they record their development as a writer. And still others will transform their blog into a creative vehicle, often based on a theme or an idea, with lots of experimentation along the way. None of these are better or worse than the other, and there are quite a few I've left out, such as the collaborative blog, which is a kind of publishing outlet for a group of writers.
If I'd been born ten years earlier, I imagine I'd be submitting work to literary journals, and attempting to wedge myself into the cut-throat publishing industry. But the precise timing of my development as a writer coincided with the technology boom for online publishing. It was at this moment that I decided to eschew sending my work to journals and agents (as the publishing world was on its way down anyways), and throw myself into this new territory and see what would come of it.
With the rise of social media in the last five years, writers like myself are inundated with an abundance of micro-technologies that could in some way advance their careers/vocations as writers. To name just a few examples, Scribd introduced a technology that allows writers to turn any file into a web document and share it; and now you can sell e-copies of your work on the same platform. Amazon Kindle Publishing for Blogs will include your blog in the Kindle directory, and pay you for the subscriptions you receive. Lulu prints books for independent authors, with a host of design and editorial services.
In my first year of blogging, I felt that I had to register on every social bookmarking site and have every newfangled feature on my blog. I also spread myself thin by putting content on over ten different blogs. You could say that I was so excited with these tools that I lost sight of my original purpose, which is to write. While I look back at this period and see a lot of foolishness in my frenzied embrace of new technology, I also understand that, for me, this was a period of experimentation. The technologies that web startups were providing me with as a writer gave me an education in a different field, that of social media.
At the heart of social media is the word "social." Too often, I forgot that early on. I was obsessed with setting up blogs here and there, and registering on new sites, but forgetting that I needed to cultivate a community around my blogs. Later I learned that community thrives on mutual interest, reading and commenting on the work of others. It is easy to use these technologies to create a solipsistic bubble, and even easier to allow the technologies to distract you.
Today I focus on this blog and the web journal I founded, Escape into Life. When online technologies are harnessed in the proper way, they can serve us rather than distract us. We are very clever as writers, and social media can make us even more clever at avoiding writing. However, it can also do just the opposite. Blogging can in fact promote discipline by giving a writer a simple outlet for writing on a regular basis. As your audience grows, and your contacts become greater, you will find a real inspiration to continue writing.
My voice has developed through blogging versus writing drafts of essays and chapters of novels that only I will read. When you are blogging, you are speaking to someone, there is a tangible audience that appears in the comments or your number of page views. The blogging platform is fertile ground for the development of a writer's voice. It is the conversational quality of blogging that improves voice. Laurence Stern once said, "Writing, when properly managed . . . is but a different name for conversation," and blogging is an ideal exercise for that kind of writing.
The blogosphere is also a conversation among many blogs, and web technology with hyper-linking at the center of it, informs a structure of communication that is essentially a forum. Blogs quickly develop into networks of blogs, with writers referencing each other in their posts and suggesting new blogs to their audiences. This social aspect of contemporary writing reflects a departure from older forms in that community is built into the writing itself.
Micro-blogging, such as Twitter, eventually became the social media technology I embraced the most. I struggled with traditional blogging for a long time; I lamented my lack of readers, I disliked the delay involved in communicating through blogs, I also had trouble finding blogs that interested me and developing connections to writers. Ultimately, Twitter enabled me to make the connections with writers that I was failing to do through blogging.
For the first time, I wanted to visit people's blogs and learn about them. Perhaps this was because Twitter opened up the channel for real-time conversation. Just as I was visiting more blogs through Twitter, I was also finding that more people were visiting my blog. My traffic increased dramatically, and this gave me encouragement as a writer. Twitter allowed me to announce new posts immediately after they were written, or direct message my close circle of friends whenever I was excited about a new essay and wanted feedback.
Some readers would leave essay-long responses, adding new perspectives and arguments to the questions I was raising. My essay, "How many of us are self-medicating?" elicited so many interesting responses that I now looked upon my essays on the Blog of Innocence as having a dimension which included the comments. The comments were a significant part of the essays themselves, and this gave me insight into the form of the writing.
But perhaps, most importantly, blogging has helped me to peel away the layers of self-deception. Every artist must look within in order to create. Otherwise what we create are our own shadows, the preoccupations and anxieties surrounding the ego, rather than something closer to the mystery of the human condition.
It seemed the very garments that I wore/ Preyed on my strength, and stopped the quiet stream/ Of self-forgetfulness. --WordsworthWriting essays for two years and sharing them on the web with thousands of people has changed the way I write. I feel that I've had to probe deeper into my soul as a writer, and figure out exactly what it is that prompts me to write in the first place. For a long time, I believed that fiction was my calling, but recently I've made the realization that fiction does not give me pleasure. Quite simply, I'm not enthusiastic about it. What gives me life and what gives me energy is writing essays and meditations on the Blog of Innocence. A much more humble project than I anticipated for myself, but also one better suited to my interests and talents.
For whatever the reason, Lord of the Rings papercraft is a rare thing. This Shelob paper model is one of the few examples around. Shelob is described by author J. R. R. Tolkien as being an "evil thing in spider form" whose food was "all living things". In the books, Shelob first appears in the second book in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Two Towers, however in the movie trilogy her appearance is delayed until the The Return of the King, the third book in the series. This papercraft was created by "Kangu" and the Pepakura PDO template is available here. When building this model it should be noted that the gluing tabs for the legs may need to be trimmed down some in order to get the legs to fit together properly. [via Bongo Papercraft]
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Mosaic Octopus Wip
Originally uploaded by artpaw
Friday, March 26, 2010
Michiko Kakutani's New York Times article, "Texts Without Context," attempts to pull together a number of loose strands about contemporary culture and technology. Her basic premise is that culture is feeding on its own tail; without creating anything new, we are depending heavily on the materials of the past, using new technologies to copy, paste, and mash together anything and everything for our creative or intellectual purposes.
She also emphasizes that a culture based on "immediacy and real-time responses" means that people are less interested in reading entire books or articles, and more interested in "cutting to the chase." We want the summary, the anecdote, the biased review that appeals to our emotions but pays little attention to context and nuance. Personalized media feeds you the content that matters to you, but this emphasis on the subjective also contributes to the polarization of political views on the web. Everyone is reading what they want to hear.
Kakutani quotes the scholar Susan Jacoby:
Reading in the traditional open-ended sense is not what most of us, whatever our age and level of computer literacy, do on the Internet. What we are engaged in--like birds of prey looking for their next meal--is a process of swooping around with an eye out for certain kinds of information.If readers have become birds of prey, media outlets have become even worse by pandering to the whims of impulse-driven audiences. In an effort to get more clicks, websites dole out mindless cat videos to their millions of viewers, or "gossip, rumors and the sort of amusing-entertaining-weird anecdotes." Editors, writers, and artists have the benefit of mass feedback provided by interactive media, polls, and fan bulletin boards, and are therefore more likely to give their audiences what they "want or expect."
Cyberculture has a decidedly adolescent character in Kakutani's view, perpetuating "a Peter Pan fantasy of being an entitled child forever, without the responsibilities of adulthood."
Her main attack, however, deals with what she sees as vapid cultural production in the form of "parodies, homages, variations, pastiches, collages and others forms of appropriation art." The vast majority of this user-created media, according to Kakutani, is lazy, mediocre, and suffering from what Jaron Lanier, author of the book, You Are Not a Gadget, calls "nostalgic malaise."
Lanier writes:
Online culture is dominated by trivial mash-ups of the culture that existed before the onset of mash-ups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action . . . Comments about TV shows, major movies, commercial music releases and video games must be responsible for almost as much bit traffic as porn. There is certainly nothing wrong with that, but since the Web is killing the old media, we face a situation in which culture is effectively eating its own seed stock.In essence, the mash-ups, remixes, parodies, and re-appropriations are more valued than the original sources, and so we face a culture of texts without contexts, a sort of floating, pseudo-world, where beliefs are privileged over facts, subjective reactions over objective research, and online collectivisim over measured criticism.
I'm summarizing these viewpoints because I believe they are valid and persuasive. The metrics of the web are the second and the minute, and not the hour and the half hour, as it once was for television. The majority of content on the web, unfortunately, reflects this new metric. The superabundance of content, along with the many non-linear pathways to accessing content, removes the notion of the passive subject in relation to culture. Now we must actively forage for our reading material, design the ways in which we want to receive our content, and even respond to the news that is served. We are all filters to the hundreds of webpages that are put in front of our faces every day.
On the one hand, it may be argued (as Kakutani argues), that the democratization of cultural production leads to a diminishment in quality. The mass section of the web that Kakutani criticizes is much like the majority of television programming: it appeals to the lowest common denominator. This is only to be expected when websites and media outlets are trying to raise advertising dollars by higher and higher numbers.
Similarly, it may be argued, that where more people are creating content, as on the web, a vast amount of that content will naively reflect trends in popular culture, appear superficial or juvenile, and lack critical or artistic merit.
I believe that Lanier and Kakutani are focused on a certain part of the vast topography of the web. If they were immersed in the content production side of the web, they would see it from a different angle entirely. As Clay Shirky notes in his book, Here Comes Everybody, users play different roles in online culture. Some users read blog posts and don't comment on them, some users comment on blogs but don't have blogs themselves, and yet others actively maintain blogs and produce content.
There is not only re-action on the web. In truth, the web is driven by the very opposite. Internet startups, online publishing hubs, and countless websites are all actively architecting the virtual world. Every person who creates a blog and publishes their own content is actively creating something on the web.
In my view, the proliferation of mashups and re-appropriated art is culture's response to superabundance. While it's true that many pop-culture mashups re-use materials from only a decade ago, the bigger picture is that our culture is swimming in the materials of over 2000 years of history.
This is not merely a case of "nostalgic malaise." Digital culture inundates us with what is essentially our past, and not only the past, but many versions of the past, stretching from yesterday's news, to the beginning of time.
Technology also puts us in the paradoxical position of looking forward, anticipating what's next, while we are faced with a flood of what came before. The cultural production that arises from this unique combination is forever at the helm of re-interpretation. All you will find now are "translations," without the original source, or perhaps a slim, watered-down version of the original source.
Self-publishing heralds a culture of active culture-producers. Everyone can produce culture, and that implies that each of us must interpret, and actively understand the world around us. The world is no longer a fixed place, held up by the artificial supports of newspapers and magazines. We are actively cobbling together the world now, from endless fragments, webpages, points of view, and utterances.
In one month, I am exposed to more aspects of culture on the web than I was exposed to in four years of college. The confluence of social networking and exchange, active content production, and research using search engines, makes what I learned in college look parochial.
I'm the editor of an online journal. I'm constantly reading articles that discuss wide-ranging aspects of art and culture, and then I make editorial judgments about the material, and prepare it for a large readership. In short, I'm doing something with the information on the web, and so is nearly everyone else, for the first time in history. We are not just "readers" anymore. We must act, interpret, judge, and discriminate.
Art has always relied on inter-textuality, but in our era we see something else, something more extreme. The individual is primarily relating to texts by showing ownership of them. User-generated media facilitates this process of ownership. By taking images that seem beautiful or funny, passages from books that stimulate the mind, or holding discussions about the issues that matter to a person, each individual is actively working to produce his or her own cultural landscape.
If the result of this kind of cultural production seems to only involve the self as it relates to the world, rather than the other way around, then I see this new culture as a boon, even with all of the drawbacks associated.
Danny G's portfolio... Weekly header on conceptships.
Keywords: concept spaceship art design illustrated drawings by danny gardner looking for a summer internship
"Jake ( see all proofs)
© rebecca collins /artpaw.com
I seem to be pretty busy and it has been a rough week. That is ok though. The one thing that has remained constant in my 12 years in business is change. When I first started I was doing more Master Paw Prints and Warhols, it took me years to develop my painterly style of working and it is still evolving. For many years I provided 4 proofs for review, in fact I think it still states that on our faq section. Today clients get a minimum of 10 proofs to choose from and often even more than that. I have had years where I worked totally alone and then years where I had a staff of 4 or 5 part time artists, today I am getting by with one very talented assistant. So yes lots of change. One thing has not changed though, and that is how great my clients are ... yes ... even the fussy ones that run me totally ragged. I am really fortunate to have a terrific group of clients that return year after year for more portraits, and they spread the word about Art Paw. So when I get stressed out or bogged down with half a dozen projects needing revisions, I just have to remind myself that I do have the best job on the planet and the best clients ever. After all, Art Paw is all about celebrating our love for our pets, and what can be better than that?
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Charles (Wook Hyung) Lee's blog.
Keywords: concept environment spaceship dock hangar digital illustration painting designs by charles wook hyung lee concept artist los angeles california
I am over at Flickr this afternoon studying Totem poles. I have a client and friend that has asked me to take 3 cats, a horse & a rooster and create a work of art with them stacked in totem pole fashion. This should be fun and challenging. I love the colors on the totem face shown here.
This papercraft cow buggy may represent some real festival or it may just be a fanciful creation by the artist, but either way it sure is cute. ^^ Japanese artist Geco Hirasawa calls her work a "moo moo buggy". A template is available on Geco's DeviantART page here. Be sure to check out her collection of excellent paintings while you are there.
My main passion with drawing is that I want to tell a story. You can easily lose yourself in creating just a simple scene or character design, letting your imagination run wild as you start to form ideas around the people or objects in your image. Where have they come from? What is going on in their world? That sort of thing.
However, to expand on those ideas and to form an insight into the characters' world...to basically tell their story (or one of them)...that, to me, is the ultimate project.
So, this idea of a "big project". What's it all about?
Well, I want to approach this project as an illustrator who has obtained a commission from a publisher. They have provided you with the book and they want you to enhance that story and bring it to life.
I haven't been approached by a publisher to illustrate a story as of yet, and that will only happen if I get my portfolio out there and start fishing. So, one of the things I want this project to serve as is a demonstration of my artistic skill (subjective, I know) aswell as my storytelling abilities, such that a future publisher may be interested. Sort of like an extra "add-on" to my portfolio.
So...what to illustrate? There are so many fantastic stories out there, and it would be a thrill to pick a favourite and illustrate it...but there's the problem of copyright. I have no right to pick a book off the shelf and put my own spin on it.
But what about those stories that are now in the public domain? That have no copyright because they have been passed down the generations, their authors long since gone or anonymous?
Aha...now we have the beginnings of a thread of an idea. The start of something that could be really fun.
(To be continued...)
Once again a collection of some tattoo visuals.
Authors unknown. Only for personal use.
1 AI : 700 KB
Download
A nice little collection of school and office boards.
Authors unknown. Only for personal use.
1 AI : 3 MB
Download
Silhouettes of some posing Bodybuilders.
1 AI : 200 KB
Download
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
When I first saw the trailer to We Live in Public several months ago, I was anxious to see the film. It had all the ingredients, a documentary, about the Internet, about a pioneer of the Internet, a madman, perhaps a genius, or just someone exceptionally bright with a leaning toward experimentation, psychology and human behavior.
The documentary is fairly straightforward. It is about the life of Josh Harris, dubbed the "Warhol of the Web," who in the early nineties founded a company called Jupiter. Jupiter turned out to be a cash cow precisely because it was an early adopter of using Internet technology to collect personal data. Harris was also involved in selling online chat software to Prodigy, the early competitor of AOL. With his millions of dot com dollars, Harris founded another company called Pseudo.com, which marketed itself as an Internet television network.
I don't remember Pseudo.com, but according to the documentary it was a promising startup. Think MTV for the web. With dozens of web channels, catering to young audiences, Pseudo attempted to leverage itself against major television networks. Harris believed that this type of technology, TV on the web, would overtake ABC, NBC, CBS. He was an ardent believer, almost to the point of delusion, in any project he started.
Pseudo did fairly well for a time, and its stock market value increased. But Harris's public persona was giving the company a bad name. Harris was what you call an eccentric (he dressed up in a clown suit as his alter ego Luuvy).
After Harris split with Pseudo, he went on to conduct two big experiments with surveillance technology and the Internet, funded by his millions of dollars. He was estimated at having over 80 million dollars during the dot com era.
Harris's business acumen is questionable, and an interesting subject in relation to this documentary. He had visionary insight into the future of the web. He was obsessed with video technology, and perhaps the only snag was that the development of video technology for the web had not matured to point where it's at today. But he staged his projects after Pseudo.com, not as businesses, but as social experiments. He was fascinated with the effects of technology on people, and that's why this documentary offers a provocative reflection of our times.
In his first experiment, he funded and architected the "Quiet" project, a social experiment of Orwellian proportions that involved over a hundred people living together in an underground bunker in New York City. Harris fed them, entertained them, gave them free drinks and created a 24 hour party atmosphere. The only tradeoff was their privacy--Harris recorded his subjects with hundreds of video cameras. Each person had a pod where they slept, with a television attached to their bunk bed that allowed them to watch each other, eating, sleeping, shitting, having sex, etc.
At one point in the movie, Harris says that Andy Warhol was wrong about his statement, "In the future, everyone will have 15 minutes of fame." Harris says, "Everyone will have 15 minutes of fame every day."
Harris's second experiment was on himself and his new girlfriend. His obsession with surveillance is taken to the obvious extreme when he decides to record every minute of his life by rigging his apartment with 70 surveillance cameras. The video was streamed to the web where users could comment in a chat box beside the video in real-time. Often Harris and his girlfriend communicated with the chat room, and they developed bonds to the anonymous users who watched their most intimate activities.
I couldn't help but think of how Harris's experiments with web technology have actually become very similar to how we live now. While it's obvious we're not being filmed in our bedrooms, with our every action streamed to the web, the immense growth of social media in the last five years has ushered in a way of life that carries the same implications as Harris's experiments.
Twitter is basically a technology that effects Harris's experiments on a realistic, practical level. Real-time communication through Twitter implicates us in a public virtual life. We may be anonymous on Twitter, but on Facebook people know our names, and often much more than that. Increasingly, our lives are being uploaded on the web in one form or another. We begin to feel attached to the manufacturing and sustaining of our web identities and personas. This often comes at the cost of creating a life for ourselves offline, taking walks, having conversations, riding the bike, or just being away from a laptop or smartphone.
Suffice it to say that the results of Harris's two experiments were not happy endings. The "Quiet" project eventually got raided by the police, not to mention the tensions that were building inside previous to the raid. And his relationship with his girlfriend ended in bitterness and loathing, on the web for all to see. Shortly after he stopped the project entirely.
I am the poster child for the Internet's obsession with social media. My life has changed dramatically since I began using social media . . .
I can tell you, it hasn't always been this way. I remember when I didn't even have Internet at home. I did everything from a computer at my job. But since then I've quit my job and invested in the website Escape into Life. I'm constantly promoting the site on Twitter and the production behind the site, and the development planning and coordination, requires me to be on the Internet all the time. Or does it?
I can't imagine waking up in the morning and not immediately checking my email. The web has so absorbed my daily life that I must break routinely during the day to leave the house. But when I come back, I return to the online world, tweeting, emailing, blogging. It's scary how narrow my life has become as a result of my regular use of the web.
The Blog of Innocence will tell you many private things about myself. My last post is especially revealing. I am living in public through my blog. Certain things about this worries me, such as future sponsors for Escape into Life. If they see my life laid out here, then maybe they won't want to sponsor me. My past is ugly, and I don't shy away from talking about it.
I exult in the freedom to publish my thoughts. Technology has given me one of the greatest gifts as a writer, a platform to stage my writings. Audiences on the web are fickle, which means we become obsessed with our standing, how many views we receive per day, how much traffic, how many fans or followers. As we upload, post, and publish more of our lives on the web, we become more attached to the medium we're using to advertise ourselves.
In a short article in the latest issue of Wired that talks about the relationship between humans and technology, Clive Thompson writes:
These days, though, there's a big debate between folks who love our modern, digitally enhanced lifestyle and those who are unsettled by it . . . People who are thrilled by personal technology are the ones who have optimized their process--they know how and when to rely on machine intelligence. They've tweaked their Facebook settings, micro-configured their RSS feeds, trained up the AI recommendations they get from Apple's Genius or TiVo.And crucially, they also know when to step away from the screen and ignore the clamor of online distractions. The upshot is that they feel smarter, more focused, and more capable. In contrast, those who feel intimidated by online life haven't hit that sweet spot. They feel the Internet is making them harried and--as Nicholas Carr suggested in The Atlantic--"stupid."
Thompson reduces our relationship to technology to an "optimization" process, but I feel it's fairly more complicated than that. There are staggering numbers that show how much our online lives have increased in the last five years.
Just to give you an idea of how many people are on the web, here are a some statistics I picked up from "The State of the Internet":
1.73 billion Internet users worldwide (Sept. 2009)234 million websites (Dec. 2009)126 million blogs27.3 million tweets per day (Nov. 2009)400 million people on Facebook4 billion photos hosted on Flickr1 billion videos served by YouTube in one day182 videos per month that the average Internet user watches in a month (USA)
Optimization is not going to change the fact that we are living larger chunks of our lives on the web. After awhile, virtual life begins to replace lived life, and at the younger ages, you can already see this happening. My younger sister, for example, keeps her iPhone at her side at all times and she's constantly checking it.
I truly enjoy the networks I participate in and the networks I support. I believe Escape into Life is doing a good thing for artists and writers. But my online life and my offline life are virtually indistinguishable at this point.
We may lament over these losses of freedom, but what is the alternative? On a basic level, I can restructure my life so that it incorporates more aspects of living beside online communication and work. But here is what I'm afraid has happened. When I turn away from the online world, and look to what is left for me, I see a person who is isolated, with few ties to his family, no girlfriend, and little social interaction. This is the plight of the modern individual.
There is a gulf of emptiness waiting for us on the other side. Perhaps that's why we cling to technology and unconsciously allow ourselves to become so wrapped up in it. We're alone. Living online has temporarily made us forget that we're alone, and therein lies its elusive promise, to be connected, to be influential, to be heard.
Justin Oaksford's website and blog.
Keywords: concept spaceship art design digital illustration by from justin oaksford 4th term entertainment design student at art center college of design looking for a summer internship concept ships
Monday, March 22, 2010
A late night and I am sketching robots, Cohen playing on Rhapsody player .Tomorrow I will get some art updates done for a few patient clients.
"Let me come home," I said. But she was too worried about what I might do in Chicago.
"Go back to rehab," she said in her brittle voice. My father had recently divorced her and she was living with a caretaker, who I could hear in the background.
I knew I couldn't stay in Vegas anymore. I was making too many enemies and I didn't have any money. They allowed me to stay at the Backpacker's Inn each night because I cleaned the rooms during the day.
My mother paid for my plane ticket and I flew out to Tucson, Arizona, where I had already been to rehab but was kicked out the 28th day when I refused to do an after-care program. I was going back there because I had nowhere else to go.
The thing about Cottonwood de Tucson is that it's filled with lots of rich people and celebrities. It's in the middle of the desert and has a gigantic swimming pool, palm trees, and ten or fifteen resort-style bungalows. The food is gourmet and healthy, and the chef greets you as you enter the dining hall.
My roommate was the drummer of a famous musician, who was there for a pot addiction. He was fifteen years old. To me, however, it appeared like he had an addiction to drawing penises. He would draw them everywhere with a black sharpie, benches, sheets of paper, his arm.
There were others too. This one lanky man, about six feet tall, wore a cowboy hat and yodeled at night. He strummed on his guitar and made up songs on the smoking bench. He said he was a television writer in LA and wrote the first season for NYPD Blue. He left the center a couple times in a cab, but was brought back by his wife.
But when I returned to Cottonwood after Vegas, it wasn't the same. I didn't recognize anyone, other than some of the staff members. The first day I guess you could say I got off to a bad start. We were only allowed to smoke at the smoking bench, and I was lighting up wherever I wanted. They yelled at me, told me to put out my cigarette.
I was already getting sick of the daily mantras and routines. I pretended to be involved but my mind kept wandering back to the places I'd been on my own, without any adults telling me what to do.
On the second night, the leaders called us to the rotunda for a medallion ceremony. You always have new people coming in and out of these places. We were expected to say goodbye to the ones who completed the program, and there was a circle where you passed around the medallion and made a wish for them.
On my way to the rotunda, the thought crossed my mind, "What if I just ran away?" It was an impulsive thought, but when an impulse takes hold of me, it's like I've been abducted by an alien race. The voice of reason never comes through in these moments. It's only the urge that speaks to me. A whole new reality can be made in that moment, and I feel alive.
Everyone was far ahead of me, most of them had already entered the rotunda for the medallion ceremony. I turned around and walked back to my room. I gathered my things and threw what I could fit into my backpack. Then I started to creep along the outskirts of the compound toward the highway.
There were no security guards, no high walls to scale. The rehab center proudly called itself an "open" treatment facility, where you were "free to leave at any time."
And so I left.
I'm not going to lie here. It really thrilled me to do outrageous things when I was younger. I'm not the type to go speeding in cars or jumping off cliffs, but a singular rebellious act filled me with extreme self-gratification. And it still does sometimes, although I've learned to choose my rebellious acts carefully.
But that doesn't mean that I wasn't nervous when this happened. I didn't want to get caught, and my heart was beating violently in my chest. I really wanted to make it out of there without anyone seeing me.
I followed a long driveway which begins at the admission office and extends about a quarter of a mile to the highway. The driveway was pitch black and strewn with rocks. To the side, there was a thick barrier of trees and some houses with their lights on.
The highway curved around the head of the Cottonwood entrance, and a car passed me at breakneck speed. I realized I had to clear from this area as soon as possible or risk being dragged back into the Garden of Eden. So I ran along the shoulder under a canopy of trees for a hundred paces and then sprinted across the highway.
The highway was an elevated pavement running between two large ditches on either side. The shoulder was thin and I had to balance myself on the edge of it while watching for oncoming cars. I figured I was better off in the ditch than making this tight-rope walk in the dark. So I slid my body down into the trench, where some debris and empty beer bottles were scattered at the base.
Unfortunately, I couldn't just walk straight through the ditch. In some places, the ditch stopped completely at a wall of dirt and sand. I waited in the ditch for a couple minutes and then tried to see what the desert looked like on the other side. If I could pull myself up somehow, I would be at the foot of the desert.
I was born in Illinois and I'd never trekked across a desert before. What you don't think about the desert at night is how different the landscape is, really severe, stark territory. When I climbed onto the other side of the ditch, I felt watched by the vegetation. There were vast open tracts of land and then clumps of knee-high prickly bushes. You couldn't walk in a straight line. You had to zigzag around the plants and cacti. I kept shielding my legs from the snags of bushes. Thorns everywhere. My shins were bleeding.
In the distance, I heard a car coming and so I dropped down on my stomach next to a prickly brush. Through the brush, I could see a white van, the same white van they had at Cottonwood to haul the patients from one place to another, and I knew it was Cowboy Bill driving that night because he was the only one on transportation duty. In fact, before the medallion ceremony, he had just taken us to an AA meeting in Tucson. He told jokes on the way and everyone laughed.
I waited in the desert for a long time, keeping myself hidden. The moon shed a little light over the area where I was sitting, and I took out my journal to scrawl a couple sentences. Throughout my drug addiction, I carried a journal everywhere I went, and I felt compelled to report on my state of mind during these climactic moments.
As some of you may know, I began writing these stories as a novel. One of the reasons for this is it felt like a novel as I was going through it. The divorce between my parents, my mother's illness, and the numerous psych wards, rehabilitation centers, and halfway houses I encountered, made up a chain of surreal events. But the strangest thing of all was my delusion, my magical thinking, that I could alter the course of events by actions such as this one. I imagined myself as a heroic figure, rebelling against the dictates of my father, and all authority by extension, in order to reclaim a sense of my own free will, however twisted, and not give in to a ready-made script handed to me by someone else.
After about forty-five minutes, I was becoming more aware of the sounds and movements around me. A pack of coyotes howled somewhere in the distance. An owl appeared in the crook of a cactus and turned its head 180 degrees. I imagined snakes slithering across the desert floor when I heard the bushes shaking. So I threw my backpack over my shoulder and in a hurry to get out of there, I climbed over several dozen thorn bushes, which ripped the skin under my thighs.
Once I got to the edge of the desert, I gladly jumped into the ditch, which to me was a far better place than the eerie desert. It was probably two or three in the morning when I stepped onto the shoulder of the highway, with not a soul in sight.
A car passed along the highway every twenty minutes or so. I stuck out my thumb each time, but nobody stopped. It was hard to believe that I was actually hitchhiking like this. At first I exulted in the sheer fact that I was out there, on my own, giving myself up to perfect chance. But as each car passed, I started to feel less and less hopeful that someone would pick me up. The stretch of highway ran on to infinity, it seemed, with only the ridge of the desert and some occasional towering cacti to provide me a sense of direction.
Every time a car passed me, I thought it would be the last. Then I saw a pickup truck slow down ahead. The red, rust-bitten pickup went in reverse until it was right where I was standing. A man in his late thirties leaned over and pushed open the door. He had on a nice pair of jeans, which I noticed for some reason. I think I was looking for clues as to whether I should get in his truck. I got in the vehicle anyways.
Our friend Vaughan.
Keywords: vaughan ling concept spaceship artwork egg ship in hangar ready for launch vaughan ling car design blog concept ships
Check out this fun collection of mosaic felines by Christine Brallier. Christine is a talented artist that creates stunning mosaics that include all sorts of subject matter. I think her cat mosaics are hands down some of her most playful works. She has a terrific ability to create balanced compositions that flow and keep your eye moving.
Christine is a flickr pal and she is very supportive in that on-line community, always eager to help and encourage other people working in mosaics. Click through on the image above and visit her flickr stream to see more of her artwork. Or you can also find her at cbmosaics.com
Christine is a flickr pal and she is very supportive in that on-line community, always eager to help and encourage other people working in mosaics. Click through on the image above and visit her flickr stream to see more of her artwork. Or you can also find her at cbmosaics.com
I also met with a new development team in Chicago. Our goal is to integrate the thriving publication with a marketplace for original drawings and prints. The store and auction on Escape into Life will be curated, and there will be a place for reviews and ratings of the work.
The Art Museum and its Origins . . . Tony Thomas shares a wealth of information about the beginnings of the art museum and its evolution into what we know today.
Everything is Changing. . . Simon Karter is an excellent fiction writer. This story demonstrates his enormous talents.
Poetry by Nicelle Davis . . . Nicelle Davis's work is very powerful. She also runs a free online poetry workshop.
Knud Merrild: An Introduction . . . Stephen Pain discusses the life and work of Danish artist Knud Merrild who is known for his "flux" technique.
Beyond the Doodle . . . David Maclagan tells us that the "doodle is in fact an invention." A thought-provoking study of the doodle and its origins.
Celebrating the Art of the Doodle: 20 Awesome Doodles . . . This is a companion piece to David's essay. I've collected some of the most interesting doodles I could find.
25 Spellbinding Collages . . . Part of the "showcase" series that displays remarkable art from around the internet.
What is Escape into Life?
EIL is a publication based on the concept of citizen journalism. The goal is to create a journal of poetry, essays, and art from writers who are already publishing on the Web and who would like to gain more exposure to their blogs. The artists we feature are the very best we can find, and the writers have a background in writing and a passion for the arts.
More information here
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
