Month: September 2010
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Tilt-Shift Van Gogh
Actually, pseudo tilt-shift Van Gogh, but that’s a small quibble. Tilt-shift photography is a process in which depth of field and lens angle are manipulated to make a real scene look like a miniature. The effect can be simulated in Photoshop with judicious selections and applications of blur filters. The folks over at ArtCyclopedia, one…
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Dictaphone Parcel (Lauri Warsta)
Artist Lauri Warsta put a dictaphone (reel to reel audio recorder, anybody remember those?) in a parcel, turned it on and shipped it from London to Helsinki. He took the resultant recording of truck, warehouse and plane sounds, along with snippets of surreptitiously collected worker conversation, edited it down, and then animated his impressions of…
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Carlo Russo
Philadelphia artist Carlo Russo paints landscapes and figurative work, but his emphasis is on still life. Russo is one of those still life painters who manages to convey a feeling of stopped time in his paintings, a sensation of quiet focus and contemplative stillness. His portrayals of rough textured crockery, weathered wood, and tarnished copper…
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Line by Line, James McMullan
I have long been a proponent of the idea that drawing is as much of a natural potential ability for human beings as writing. I’ve often wondered about that odd demarcation somewhere around puberty where an unspoken law seems to take effect and “all children draw” becomes “only some teenagers and adults draw because they’re…
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I become a twit, er,… Tweeter
OK, after years of resisting, I’ve finally decided to start using Twitter. Despite the original intention that Twitter be used to be “sociable” and inform your friends and “followers” that you’re having 2% milk on your Cap’n Crunch this morning, I’ve always thought of Tweets as basically 140-character blog posts. I just couldn’t think of…
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Museum Day 2010
Museum admission, in case you hadn’t noticed, has kept pace with the rising cost of everything, if not outpacing it significantly in recent years. It can be daunting for some, and can discourage people from investigating museums they don’t already patronize. Smithsonian magazine, an offshoot of the venerable group of cultural institutions in the U.S.…