Masks Edit Reality

Image & Likeness?

Just outside of New York's Whitney Museum sat a table. You know, a street merchant parked a van and on this cold January day back in 2011 he'd unfolded an aluminum surface filled with African wood carvings. They weren't cheap.

Not In The Whitney

Perhaps it was the color, but this yellow guy grabbed my lens. You know how you collect images that whisper to you, but you can't quite hear their words? For years now, like a tune that worms through my brain but won't go away, I've wondered about this one. We live three houses down from The Lancaster Museum of Art and I wander through each new exhibit, frequently several times. This month the show is Masks Of Mexico. So, the other day in the shower it occurred to me that masks edit reality! Wow, an epiphany. But that's what those Mexican masks specifically did. The wearers assumed new identities and entered obscure feelings. They became a cast in stories, some ancient, others spontaneous.

Most Mexican and African mask-stories are deeply spiritual linked to legends of gods.  So I said to myself, "Self... If as the Western Holy Book claims that we are made in His image and likeness, then studying what we do must be a tipoff about what He does... Y'think?"

And since He rested on the seventh day... Well we sure know a lot about the night before Sunday, huh? And maybe why He really needed the rest. 

MoonStruck

(Click on image)

And when
He did
Music
She
Glowed.

Susquehanna Tree, Columbia, PA
Canon 40D: PS4 Topaz, AlienSkin: SnapArt, Colored Pencil – Custom brushes/textures/filters

Potter County #6: Gene Kelly?

<- Click here

Hey, that's pretty cool! Downtown Coudersport sitting in the August saturday sun. Looking like... like... Looking like this image here. The way it's looked for what? A century? More?


You know how people say, "New York City? Yeah, it's a wonderful place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there."??? Well to a whole lot of people who remember a time that they learned about in history class... Coudersport's the sort of very small town where they'd like to visit and live.

Thing is though, it's not real easy to find, which is why maybe it's been preserved. Wasn't there a vincent Miinelli movie once about Scottish village that disappears into the Highland mist and returns for a day every century? Hmmm... Not sure but odd how the woman dancing just off to that park on the left there... Just beyond the frame... Odd how much she looked like, what was her name? Cyd Charise? Pity, I thought I'd caught her... Wonder why you can't see her?

You don't think???
.
-
.
PreProcessing: As you probably realize by now, the only lens I took out in Potter County was the EFS 17-85mm (f4-5.6) I screwed onto my Canon 40D. Here I pointed it at Coudersport's main street and shot a series for a panoramic. PostProcessing: Stitched them together in CS4 and turned to Topaz to even out the dynamic range from the extreme light then AlienSkin's SnapArt's Impasto to build up paint into a three dimensional texture. And why... It's Almost Like Being In Love... eh?

Heart Flutter

<- Click here

Okay, given the financial news, howzabout some Jazz-Age romance? Huh? Huh? Time for escape...






***

For those who like to see the starting points, here are the virgin images from my FlashCards. The auto is from the gift shop at the Vanderbuilt Mansion in Hyde Park, NY. The blonde was in a glass case at an antique dealership in Adamstown, PA.

Furious Chance

<- Click here
The most intriguing images are mysteries. Um, well, to some degree every photo-based image is a mystery, since exposition is particularly difficult in the display of a frozen instant. But some are better at telling a story than others.

I enjoy the tack sharp images which make the subject crystal clear, but leave the meaning as elusive as Al Gore’s sex appeal, or as eloquence is to George Bush. I like the image which gives us a surface we can dive through… one which seems to be the sheen atop an ocean of meaning.

Photographic images seem to say,"Hey dummy, this is what reality must be like if it looked this way." But like this massive furious orange cement gorilla atop a five story building, you know that the image maker isn’t telling you everything. You know there’s a secret to this photograph… if it is a photograph... and if there ever was a monster beast high atop that ugly parapet on a day as clear as summer makes them.

But even if that image didn’t happen, we know that it is happening in that rectangle. So why? What reality is this image describing?

I tell you, the images we can make contain some puzzle piece each time we produce them. And there’s a satisfaction in solving those mysteries. That is if there are unique solutions. No… no… there are unique solutions, and each of us can create one.

There’s something predatory about image creation. We hunt for game, shoot it, then we do our own taxidermy. Images become trophies that represent something we accomplished: some thought or feeling which overwhelmed us. And we display them to tell what we concluded to others. To tell them of the possible fury which can lurk up above us, ready at any moment to smash down a massive fist, even in the brilliant sunlight of a perfect summer’s day.

Could it be that chance is a monster gorilla in an orange shirt?

Should's And Shouldn'ts

"Anything your heart desires will come to you..."

We play with stardust. Pixels are like that. We can puff and spatter clouds of glimmering points just exactly wherever they should be. "Should be."
<- Click here
Ah the strength of that word, should. It's not "must be", "can be", or even, "belong." Nope we artists deal in shoulds... Shoulds! And who is it that determines the "shoulds" in life?

Why there are rule books of course. Somewhere someone taught us the shoulds, right?

Shel Silverstien wrote:

Listen to the mustn'ts child,
Listen to the dont's,
Listen to the shouldn'ts,
The impossibles, the won'ts.
Listen to the never haves
Then listen close to me-
Anything can happen, child,
Anything can be.


GEEK STUFF: Canon EOS 20D, Canon EFS 17-85mm (f4-5.6),1/200@f/8, exposure Bias value: -1, ISO: 400, Focal Length: 79 mm, Date/time: 8/7/7: 4:18 pm, Metering Mode: Average, Camera RAW
Tonight the pixels should glow about and around a flying orange toy alligator because... because... "Anything can be."

Fuzzy Fred

<- Click here

We tell the rules in stories. They are how we pass along the stuff we learned that’s kept us from smashing our fists down upon red buttons that could ignite a hundred suns around the globe.

Our tales teach what we know about dealing with the things that go bump in the night. Our legends, allegories, whisperings… fill in the stuff that didn’t come packed into our genetic baggage.

Pity the child who grows up without stories.

GEEK STUFF: Canon EOS 20D, Canon EFS 17-85mm (f4-5.6),1/60@f/10 exposure Bias value: -1, ISO: 400, Focal Length: 28 mm, Date/time: 8/7/7: 4:22 pm, Metering Mode: Average, Camera RAW

Rowling In The Right Direction

To the marketer, there is a similarity between imagination and contention. Both are resources that can be mined, and they are boundless. Often they attempt to get us to buy as a reaction to hating something else – that’s called negative advertising. Or they attempt to get us to buy with an offer that’s too good to be true. That’s frequently called bait and switch.

And sometimes they’re combined. That’s called political advertising. Here in the United States for example we’re in the middle of a never ending Presidential campaign and a score of contenders are trying to entice with enchanted dreams of perfection while simultaneously characterizing their opponents dreams as nightmares. My guess it that most people are either turned into rabid zealots, ignore the racket completely or find the whole thing entertaining on the level of a contact blood sport. In fact the shrillest political junkies often seem indistinguishable from dog fight aficionados.

Meantime we have Harry Potter. What a wonderful parallel world of laws that defy science, yet can be tamed for good and evil purposes. Where children are trained in citizenship by stories which conclude that hard work, common action, inherent nobility, mysticism, and aristocratic privilege can combine with skill training to enlighten … or at least potentially enlighten… darkness.

Don’t you long for a secret path to an ancient Hogwarts learning how to control powers that will open dreams of perfection? Where enemies are Volemortian black while good exists and can be identified. Sweet. Meantime in our land of perpetual Presidential pursuit pollution… how appropriate that our youth prefers Harry Potter’s world, where Albus will eventually reveal the meaning of life’s lessons, eh?

Oh the image tonight? I have NO GEEK STUFF at all on it. I took it with a point and shoot late on a very bright Spring afternoon on the campus of Franklin & Marshall College. It was before either I or the camera understood white balance. And the noise level was deafening. So it was with this evening’s news still resounding in my mind, that I pulled the awful lemon of an image up… to turn it into a magical destination a thestral coach ride from the express to Hogsmeade. Walk along the grounds and up this little path… see it there, beyond the darkness? I sense that they’ll serve us lemonade?

Hyperreal

<- Click here
Okay, many of you have read Jean Baudrillard’s, Simulacra and Simulations so you have begun to get onto what I am doing here, right? That my images are my interpretations of his theories about maps and territory? Um, you know where he points out that if you make a sufficiently and perfectly detailed map, well it will have to become the size of the territory itself. And should that happen, eventually usage will wear out the map in the busiest places leaving only the perfect representation to cover (and preserve) the least traveled spots.

Perfection then is preserved only in the out-or-the-way. The places we consider least. The final places we look.

Now suppose that the tales of these hidden perfect spots fill our legends until only the fable of a preserved past perfection remains with us here in our civilized and busy places. If so, then it’s the artist who reconnects with those fables, and all that really was perfectly rendered coincides with the artist’s image. The image then is poetry, while the real is charm… and the fascination is the melding so that the result becomes hyperreal.

Or maybe it’s not about any of that at all? Hmmmm? Heh heh heh…. And here, as you look at the spire of Lancaster’s First Presbyterian Church painted with sunset as if by an artist, take a moment to recall the title of my blogsite, K?

GEEK STUFF: Canon EOS 20D, Canon EFS 17-85mm (f4-5.6),1/320 @ f/11 exposure Bias value: -0.67, ISO: 400, Focal Length: 56 mm, Date/time: 5/30/07: 7:05pm pm, Metering Mode: Partial, Camera RAW

Um... Maybe this is better?

<- click here
At a semi formal dinner this evening, the person who was sat next to me mentioned that she found the hisorical preservations at Landis Valley Museum, "mysterious."
"It is as if you can sense the builders moving about them. And the lighting there," she poised between bitefuls to think for a moment. "It's as if it glows. My memory always plays Landis back to me in twilight. It's all very intriguing, if a tad scary."
So, with that lingering in mind, I revisited last night's orange farmhouse to see if I could find a ghostly presence at the place. Hmmmmm.... perhaps, if you squinch you eyes down... You can see it?

The 13th

<- Click here
A friend quit today. Oh, and it snowed. A dirty, icy, sniveling snow. The sort that coats things in hard pebbles. Kid useless snow. It makes things drab, bitter... grey. Today's the thirteenth of the month. I suffer from triskaidekaphobia.

For a rational guy, it's an irrational thing. But sad, or bad, or ugly things have too often happened around the number 13 for me to dismiss it as mere chance.

My Rita says it's a self fulfilling prophecy thing. But did I make my colleague quit today? Did I will my wife to fall in a hospital room numbered 13? And... and... Nope... no need to belabor the grimness of 13th days like this. 13th days that snow dirty, and mark the quitting of a good friend to go otherwhere and leave us missing her.

Damn 13s.

Snapshot

<- Click here
Point and shoot at a Summer day? You decide if this snatch of nostalgia feels like more fantasy than reality... particularly when the February wind-chills are 3 and 4 BELOW zero.
BTW - this scene sort of happened last July 4th along the Susquehanna River across from Columbia Borough - looking South toward the "New" Memorial Bridge. The pilings in the foreground are remains of an older covered bridge that was torched to delay General Lee's soldiers arrival at Gettysburg to the West.

Weary

<- Click here
Baffled
The warrior
Dreamt of home.
Older

Lock Boxes

<- Click here
It's said that it was Bobby Coyle that built them to house he and Cassie's wedding gifts until they returned from their European honeymoon.
On the Titanic.
It's said that it was Cassie Costello who wanted the metal strong boxes built with opaque glass doors so her things would smile in the sun until she came home.
It's said that since that long ago time - no one has seen them smiling.

Life? Down There?

<-Click here
In the late 19th century all applicants for a civil service job had to submit to a phrenology examination. A phrenologist searches among the bumps on your head for information about personality. Now there are new designer proceduress for making strangers less strange. Are they similarly bogus? The only thing between us and the bogus is the scientific method... yet still we feel an irrational tug down alleyways where glimmering things seem to swirl.

Can you tell that my brain feels itchy today?