It was a family extravaganza!
Left to right that’s Aaron’s best friend Kyle, Adam (my brother!), Aaron (my brother!), Aaron’s girlfriend Ashley, Adam’s wife Jenna, and me.
It was also apparently very exhausting for Adam. Somehow I really like this photo.
A few weeks ago in Vegas, I saw the glass flowers at the Bellagio. I walked by, but then came back to take a couple of photos, because as I thought of it I realized that the glass colors really looked a lot like my number-colors. (On a side note, I just read that synesthetes often have trouble representing their perceived colors with paint because they’re thought of as colored light rather than colored pigment. SO TRUE. Though obviously there are ways around this. But, I think this is why the colored glass was so compelling–it’s much closer to light than pigment.)
So, at Christmas this year, my mom gave me an old tape I recorded when I was in high school. I used to make these albums all the time, complete with covers I’d print out on the dot matrix printer. Look at this closeup of the cover!
What’s extra weird about this is that 1) I didn’t take photos of anything other than people, except for those flowers, and 2) when I showed the photo and the tape cover side-by-side to my family, every person thought they were seeing a photo of the album. So weird!
I did this yesterday evening when I should have been working on Christmas gifts.
I feel sort of okay about painting when I should have been sewing just because these are the Christmasy numbers…I could have done 6.3 or 63 or something of the sort, but apparently this is the Christmasiest combination of all. Why there are no carols about it, I’ll never know.
I doodled these in my work notebook the other day–you’ll be seeing “021″ and “3.6″ in the very near future…
And…it’s done.
It would be difficult for me to love the texture more.
We have ways of making you talk. Like wearing this surprisingly warm hat indoors. In other news, I think I’ve found a way to work skinny pants into my wardrobe. Included:
Tonight is the Extractable holiday party, so it’s time for the party dress. But…we’re going straight from work to the party, so I’m wearing the dress to work. This party-ready look includes:
What’s the thing on my head? It’s a glittery, feathery bird. I saw the ornament in a craft store and immediately wanted to wear it on my head. So I ripped the ornament-mounting off of it and hot-glued it to a headband. Bam! Bird on my head.
The thing about it is, I just love the look in the little bird’s eye.
I had a request for a guest “What I’m wearing today” from Gabe, and I gotta say, he is looking sharp indeed. See the comments for Gabe’s description of the look.
P.S., Gabe, super-classy ladies room sign.
I fixed the blues on the 7 and 8 (the original colors were just base coats–I added coats to all of the numbers, but the 7 and 8 are most noticable), and now it’s starting to come to life.
Yesterday I awoke with a dream half stuck in my brain, and I had one of those moments when you realize that your brain is working out one problem by talking to you about another. I thought about attempting to study a stationary object while you’re in motion…imagine looking at a star from a satellite traveling in a straight line through the universe. You’d take a looooooong time getting there, be in the star’s proximity for a very short time, and then take forever moving away from it. To study any more, you’d need to get a new satellite. To avoid that you’d need to get into orbit around the star. But to do so you’d a) be following a non-linear equation, which easy math isn’t too pleased about and b) need to get into balance with the star’s gravitational pull (to stay close enough without crashing into it).
The point is: the forces in life that act as those kinds of gravitational pull are tremendously valuable, in any medium. For example: I find it challenging to think about higher dimensions. I can get it for a second, but then it slips away. I need to learn the gravity around that. Or music–sometimes I can feel the chord that needs to come next in a progression, but I can only find it by going through the previous 4 bars and leading up to it. I can only hold it in my mind in the context of the approach. But then when I learn the song to a higher degree, I find the gravity in it.
In summary: this is making me think of study not as learning the topics themselves, but as learning how to get myself into (and hold myself in) orbit around a topic for long enough to observe what needs to be seen.
In that vein, here are two closeup shots of my current painting.
There’s more to be done on the numbers themselves, but here’s what I did this weekend.
I worked on this until 3 a.m. last night and was back up at 7, at which point I went into the living room and stared at it for a solid two hours. At the end of that, I knew what I needed to do.
Why didn’t I know about this sooner? Number spirals are beautiful and fascinating.
I love it that there is still so much to discover these ancient concepts called numbers. I mean–there’s no higher math required for number spirals whatsoever, just simple arithmetic, drawing, and spatial thinking. I keep coming back to something from the end of Chaos: Making a New Science: the idea that patterns are so eager to express themselves that they’ll do so even if you don’t know what you’re looking for, or don’t even really know where to look. I mean, look at that thing…it’s beautiful…
It does make me wonder–what could be done with concepts like this in 3-dimensional, or more-dimensional, space rather than just on a plane? (I really need to read the library book I just got about understanding higher dimensions.) This guy seems to have some ideas…
Granted that I’m more of a knitter, but still. Katie was right: this pretty much captures me to a T…
Yes…sneakers.
Included herein:
Step 2 (3?): Tape off the numbers so that I can begin work on the background. Tape imprecisely because I’ll be working over the borders a bit.
And yes, that’s tinsel peeking out at the bottom, of course.
Ahhhh. What’s better than a jersey dress?
A JERSEY DRESS WITH BOOTIES AND SOCKS, THAT’S WHAT.
Specifically, what’s included here includes the following, including:
Transferring the sketch onto this big canvas (36″x48″) was a fun little project…mostly because I realized that the best way to do it would be with a projector, and where do I have access to a projector? At work, that’s where. And a 3′ x 4′ canvas is not exactly inconspicuous.
I traced it on lightly in pencil, then outlined it when I got home. Thus begins what I think is going to be a really great painting.
Long before Numb3rs, there was Mathnet–a recurring skit that was a part of Square One TV, my absolute positive favorite thing on TV when I was a kid. (Though it might have been #2 if my parents had allowed me to watch You Can’t Do That on Television.) Square One was sort of like a shorter Sesame Street–with the skits and songs and everything–that was all about math.
Honestly–I’m longing to make myself a calculator holster. And don’t think I won’t do it…
I feel that my poses have been getting a bit pedestrian lately (remember the glory days?), so this represents the beginning of my commitment to RAMP IT UP. Today, on which I had a client meeting so had to keep it relatively tame but still had some fun with it, I wore:
I absolutely love dressing up summer dresses to wear them in the fall. This look, which will forthwith be known as “a tough autumn flower from the future”, includes the following:
Filmy floral dress
Grey tights with the ends cut off (because they hurt my toes) (?)
Nike Air heels, inherited from Katie
Hoodie sweater, which is way too big for me but stays in the rotation because it’s my definition of autumn
Black fabric belt from a dress I got this weekend
Baseball championship ring
Glass flower bead necklace
Teeny tiny earrings
Sadly, it’s a faux fireplace. However, the mantle still begs to have something hanging above it. In this case it’s a textured painting I did several years ago. This painting has followed me from place to place, and has therefore been reworked several times…it started out orange, then I changed it to red and pink (see below!), and now it’s midnight blue and black.
Seen up close (and even closer, on the right):
…a couple of other angles, which do a good job of illustrating the true colors. The blue is so dark that, depending on the light, it just looks black. I love the way you can’t see where one color begins and another ends. By the way, the whole thing makes me think of being deep underwater and looking up at what’s left of the light.
Continue Reading…
After showing a friend my number paintings, we decided to Google the numbers just to see what would come up. The others didn’t immediately turn up anything remarkable, but I can hardly believe what I found for 33103. Here’s the image (by Rich Panse on nycsubway.com), which I didn’t see until today, and the painting, which I did a couple of months back:
I’m serious…HOW WEIRD IS THAT??
I’ve been slacking on the fashion this week. I got a late start after taking the first couple of days off and since then I’ve been obsessed with this painting, which means it’s been a steady diet of jeans and t-shirts. But, I kinda enjoyed today’s combination, which includes:
Grey jeans
Blue Old Navy men’s t-shirt with trees
Black vintage men’s fedora from Bozeman, MT
Two old iron keys on a leather lanyard
My usual ring from the antique store in Half Moon Bay
Iridescent leather cuff bracelet that I made
Shiny metallic floral wedge heels
Well, that was fast.
This is gloss latex paint on canvas, with ink on gaffer’s tape over it. I chose the gloss latex because I’ve worked with it on some other paintings (which, now that I think about it, I should post here), it blends well, and it has the sheen I was looking for. The gaff tape and white ink were what I originally conceived of, but I went through some other tape attempts and ink colors before finalizing.
The 1s and 0s do actually contain a message, but I’ve decided that this is where I’m going to hide my secrets.
This will be turning into a giant painting soon. And I think the number-layering technique is going to come back again and again because it really represents how I experience numbers.
While reading Uncommon Genius on a plane the other day, I had a flash of a complete painting in my mind. I painted this the day I got back from that trip, but have been waiting to get some more materials to complete it. I got them today so should be finishing this up tonight…
Uncommon Genius: How Great Ideas are Born by Denise Shekerjian: I cannot recommend this book enough. It’s a study of creativity based on interviews with 40 MacArthur Fellows. If you’re not familiar with the MacArthur Foundation’s Fellowship program, here’s what Wikipedia has to say about how it works:
The MacArthur Fellows Program or MacArthur Fellowship (nicknamed the Genius Award) is an award given by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation each year to typically 20 to 40 United States citizens or residents, of any age and working in any field, who “show exceptional merit and promise for continued and enhanced creative work.”
According to the Foundation website, “the fellowship is not a reward for past accomplishment, but rather an investment in a person’s originality, insight, and potential.” The current amount of the award is $500,000, paid in quarterly installments over five years. As of 2007[update], there have been 756 recipients who have received a total of more than $350 million.
The Fellowship has no application. People are nominated anonymously by a body of nominators who submit recommendations to a small selection committee of about a dozen people, also anonymous. The committee then reviews every nominee and passes along their recommendations to the President and the board of directors. The entire process is anonymous and confidential. Most new MacArthur Fellows first learn that they have even been considered when they receive the congratulatory phone call.
