Art in the environment

A few years ago I was walking in Venice, California with my daughter and her boyfriend. I looked across the street and saw a building in the shape of binoculars. I asked my daughter’s boyfriend to go do me a favor and run flat out on the other side of the street because I wanted to take a photograph of the building with him running in front of it for a piece of art I was planning to make out of it.

This is it…..

No Distance is Too Great.

Garbage Bags that turn into Fine Art? See for yourself.

Having been a New Yorker I can appreciate this level of creativity. If you can think of it you can do it there in the street. New Yorkers have nothing on using their environment as their canvas and the general population truly do enjoy fresh ideas that capture the imagination.

Sit back and watch this video. It’s very inspiring.

The Fine Art of a Lifestyle – last year, this year or any year.

So, it’s 2010 and I’m sure many of you out there have been asked about your New Year’s resolutions. Right? I have been asked many times over the past month what will I do this coming year and I usually respond with something like “I’m going to really blow it out this year!”
I find it interesting how the start of a new year acts as a starting point for all new adventures and a time to just change as much as you can to get that much closer to your life’s goals. Why not just make sure you’re still on track from the previous years and add to your already winning abilities and daily functions and activities?
I know some people who just keep doing what there doing and just do it better and better and bigger and bigger and more of what’s been working for them.
There’s a friend of mine I can’t imagine really changing anything because he’s so prolific and busy he doesn’t even bother sitting done to reflect over the past year and start a new with drastic changes. He just continues to expand as a lifestyle.
The only this that I am doing more of this new year is living life as if it was my last moment and never looking back. Making every day count as much as I can. Just getting it done and getting it done as if my every breath depended on it. It’s a very intense time for me now and I’m enjoying it very much.
A lifestyle can be lived as though it is art can be a lot of fun and the outcome is usually very colorful and dynamic.
Try it!
My Best.

A good looking couple

The technique continues with more of the 16 portraits commissioned by Norman Taylor & Associates. This is one of my favorite. What do you think?

The Color of a Beautiful Woman.

Here’s another portrait just completed of an attractive woman. The color just intensifies her attributes.

If you ever need to go to India but live in Topanga in Los Angeles.

A few weeks ago my friend Marshal and I went on a photo expedition (fancy works for just driving around with our cameras) and he suggested we go to a site where there was this fantastic Indian temple. He said, “you feel liek you’re in another country and not in LA anymore.
The afternoon light was going quickly so we needed to get there before it would be too dim for any good exposures. As it turned out the late light actually made the environment feel even more serene and it had an extreme calming affect on me.

Here are a few photos that were taken within a half hour that afternoon.

Where Does All The Art Go?

I was driving down the street last week and kept noticing the billboards as I past them and at one point wondered where do all these billboard messages and artwork go when their time is up?
I know from some experience that a lot of them just get covered over by the new messages and artwork but there’s so much stuff out there everywhere we look.

I wonder how much is destroyed and how much is taken down and winds up at someones house?

When I lived in New York City in the late 60′s one of my roomates worked for a billboard company and offered to bring home a billboard to put up in our hallway. We agreed it would be a terrific idea so the next day he unrolled a billboard of a giant womans face for something or other and we pasted it up. It was really interesting how most people loved the idea and the creativeness of the whole thing when they saw it.

After working in the motion picture industry I always wondered where those great giant movie billboards went after the film came and went. While working at Warner Bros. I saw most of the large prints just put in the trash.

Illustrator friends of mine told me that the artwork they had done for the motion picture company executives usually wound up eventually on their walls in their homes, framed!

I imagine these days we lose most of our creative billboards to the elements and trash which is a shame. Maybe someone should put together an art show of some of the billboards from the past as a project. Hmmmm, might be interesting as an outdoor event.

Here are a few examples of outdoor art in our daily lives:

The Fine Art of Selling

I may have a breakthrough in my career! For years I’ve been trying to figure out how to market my fine art in a primarily commercial art world. It seems most businesses need marketing materials such as logos, brochures, websites, ads and anything else they can use to market their products or services…right?
Well, what if you could design all those materials and then also create fine art that utilized some primary image from them to more or less complete the circle of commerce to fine art. That could work.
As it turns out I’ve just done exactly that with a new client of mine. It didn’t dawn on me until I realized I was painting a series of “leaf” paintings with the same image I used for my client’s logo.
You say “which came first, the leaf or the logo?” Good question. The leaf came first and then everything else evolved.
For example, below is the first painting I made with the particular leaf in question.

Then, my client needed a logo….see the logo utilizing the leaf in the painting.

But wait….The client needed their website redone….and the logo was encorporated into the banner. See below.

And…still more materials…like a brochure and business cards. (see below).

Then it dawned on me to complete the “picture” for my client would be for their office to have a painting with the same image to complement and strengthen the message. (see below mock up of painting on wall and then actual painting below that.)

When the client saw the above photo she was sold and ordered the painting below.

So, that’s the story of how to market Fine Art with commercial art. Everyone wins!!!

Top ten conceptual art ideas.

Every fine artist has an inner voice. Some speak in landscapes, others tell their story through portraits and others may use abstract shapes to convey their ideas.

For some time now I ‘ve been wrestling with ideas that make me want to actually create art. Usually, I think about different series to create about famous people or places but none to date have stirred me into action.

There are many “top ten” concepts that come to mind; the top ten events of teh twentieth century; top ten events of our era; top ten things to say visually about our monetary system; top ten events of the middle class in America; top ten best places to visit. This list can go on and on and on.

What’s a top ten for you as a fine art series.

For me, it has to say something about life as we live it now in our time. A series that a generation can look at and understand what life was all about during our time period.

The great recession of 2009? Portrait of Bernard Maydoff made out of burn bills or perhaps a split face of him with the word THIEF over it. How about a dollar bill with wings seemingly flying away from a held up hand. A portrait of Benjamin Franklin with graffiti all over it.  Two giant airplane wings standing upright where the twin towers were in the New York skyline.

I’m looking for ideas worth creating that make a statement. I welcome your input. After all, it should be something that rings true to you the visitor of the art and says, “it happened”.

As I was writing this post a friend of mine emailed me an interesting piece about art in the rice paddies of Japan. This is an idea;

The email explains; Stunning crop art has sprung up across rice fields in Japan. But this is no alien creation – the designs have been cleverly planted. Farmers creating the huge displays use no ink or dye. Instead, different colours of rice plants have been precisely and strategically arranged and grown in the paddy fields. As summer progresses and the plants shoot up, the detailed artwork begins to emerge.

A Sengoku warrior on horseback has been created from hundreds of thousands of rice plants, the colours created by using different varieties, in Inakadate in Japan The largest and finest work is grown in the Aomori village of Inakadate, 600 miles north of Toyko, where the tradition began in 1993. The village has now earned a reputation for its agricultural artistry and this year the enormous pictures of Napoleon and a Sengoku-period warrior, both on horseback, are visible in a pair of fields adjacent to the town hall.

More than 150,000 vistors come to Inakadate, where just 8,700 people live, every summer to see the extraordinary murals. Each year hundreds of volunteers and villagers plant four different varieties of rice in late May across huge swathes of paddy fields.

What can I say, concepts communicate ideas when they’re done like this in a big way.

I can’t wait to see the other nine ideas.

Out-of-this-world ART!

Do you remember when NASA landed a ship on the moon and sent out the “LEM”? That was a really big deal for all of us. As an artist it seemed like a perfect subject to comment on through a creation of art. There were pictures all over the web at that time which happened to be public domain (’cause we all spent millions of dollars of our tax money gassing the little robot around the lunar dust!) so I grabbed one and began experimenting in photoshop.

Sometimes I imagine what it must have been to be in a control room on Earth watching through a camera lens where the little robot was going and how strange that must have been because of the extreme “game-like” format it must have took on for the operator yet he was playing a multi-million dollar game not so much for fun but for gathering information for future expeditions. Really, could you imagine a new game called “LEM” and just copy the scenario from real life except insert a few “Moon-Monsters” running across the lens looking rather dangerously at the little LEM-Bot. OOOOhhh…good name: “LEM-Bot”!

Sometimes art comes from the strangest and most unusual situations…why not from out of this world?