Manliness!

I followed this link from The Glenn to find that this blog is supposedly gender neutral and has a 50% chance of being written by a woman.

"We guess http://jerub-baal-studio.blogspot.com/ is written by a woman (50%), however it's quite gender neutral."




OK, well here goes...

Will Dale Earnhardt Jr. ever break this streak and win a NASCAR race?

Let's drunkblog the swearing in of POTUS #44! (OK, let's not)

Beer! Beer! Beer! Beer!... and Bitters.

Speed Week! Superbowl! World Series! Poker! Hotrods! Boxing! Guns! (go out and buy ammo now, before the rules change with the above mentioned POTUS 44) Hunting and shooting small furry animals with big brown eyes that look like Bambi!

TESTOSTERONE!



Sheeesch! With all the Kate Bush posts (labeled under "obsessions") you'd think somebody would get a clue...


UPDATE: Heh! One post, and now "We guess http://jerub-baal-studio.blogspot.com/ is written by a man (54%)". I guess I just have to say "Beer" and "Testosterone" more often.

UPDATE 2: Yep, that's the ticket, that one update pushed it up another point to 55%

OK, I need this guy



Saint Expeditus, AKA Saint Elpidius, patron saint against procrastination...

... OK, OK! I'm off to the studio now. Time to work.

H/T Neat-O-Rama

oh, and yes, I went away... but now I'm back

The Right Brush

Painting in acrylic is murder on brushes. An average brush lasts me maybe one year, sometimes two. As a result of this, I had been loath to try more expensive brushes, like Kolinsky Sables, even though I wanted the level of control that such a good brush brings.

Never the less, I broke down and bought a set of Performen Kolinsky brushes by Creative Mark from Jerry's Artarama when they were on sale...

... last summer.

Even though these are not very expensive (especially for Kolinsky Sable, which can retail for between $400.00 and $700.00 per brush for the larger sizes), I was still uptight on using such a brush and automatically condemning it to an early death.


Well, I bit the bullet yesterday, and started using them.

It was amazing! They hold more paint, so that I can do longer strokes and cover more in less time. They have excellent control, allowing me to pull long lines and to accurately pull an edge. And they rinse and wash out better and easier than any brush I've ever owned.


Just goes to show that there is no substitute for quality.

A Conceit



the Artist as a Steampunk

Tease!





A finished detail of my current painting project.


More later...

Conversation With a Poor Unprepared Freshman

I got a call this evening from Northeastern University, my old Alma Mater.

This is somewhat paraphrased, as I'm not a steno...

N.U.(Brian) "Hi, my name is Brian, I'm from Northeastern University. We wanted to call and make sure our information is up to date and find out what alumni have been doing. Are you still at (... my address ...)?"

Me "Yep, haven't moved yet, but we're trying."

Brian "I see you studied Theatre, are you still working in that field."

Me "Actually, I'm a fine artist now."

Brian "Cool. Well, I'm glad that's working for you. Now, part of what I'm doing is trying to raise money for Northeastern. Gifting has always been a big part of what keeps the University going..."

Me (trying to interrupt in a polite way) " ... uh, Brian, that's 'Artist', as in 'Starving Artist'."

Brian (pause) "Oh, well, anything at all would help, even twenty dollars..."

Me "Sorry man, but we're strapped, thanks for calling though, and good luck tonight!"

Brian "Well,... thaannnks.... Good night."


Well, I did get a degree in the Arts and Humanities from the place, what did they expect?



At least I don't have a day-job where I have to ask, "Would you like fries with that?"

Finally Took the Plunge

On Saturday, we hit the Apple Store, and picked up a family pack of Leopard, otherwise known as OS 10.5.

Spent Monday afternoon and evening backing up everything I could think of on my iBook G4, and on Tuesday installed the upgrade (I had been running 10.4.2). I figured that my laptop could be the 'sacrificial lamb', as it is the one that has had the most abuse, and I have the old eMac G4 as a fallback, where as my wife only has her iBook.

Things actually went very smoothly. I lost my wallpaper (bummer, it was a customized version of a Michael Whelan illustration that's no longer available on the net... thankfully I have the original version somewhere, so I'll have to play with it in Photoshop) and my printer drivers, which were easy to get back once I figured out what to do. Considering that I am the polar opposite of a techno-geek, this was pretty simple. To give you an idea, I still have yet to figure out how to get one of my outbound email accounts to work, after four years I still can only receive mail through that one account. So that fact that this worked so well, with so little problems is a neat thing to say about Apple and the new OS.


Now to upgrade my wife's laptop. Cross you fingers....

The Internet as One Vast Cabinet of Wonders


Crickets

I had a very privileged childhood. By that, I don’t mean that my parents were affluent, had influence or power, or were in any social sense important. On the other hand, I had an undoubtedly rich time growing up. My parents insulated me from a lot of the news and confusion of the ‘60s. (Unlike others my age that I have known, I have no idea where I was when JFK, or even RFK were shot, but I can remember Studebakers as new cars.)

The real richness was my parents’ love of all things printed and bound.

The old farmhouse that I grew up in was filled with books. These increased in number every year, covering history, biography, the classics, fiction, art, myth, and literature (as well as some of the more obscure areas of spiritualism, my Mom’s contribution). My kids now get to read from the “First Book” series that I had as a kid, which are copyrighted in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. As a kid, I got to read stuff that had been written and printed in the middle of the 19th Century. With the collections of different stuff, the craft projects, tools, and other fascinating sundries, the house I grew up in was something of a wall to wall Cabinet of Curiosities.

Now my wife and I share the same bibliophilic passions as my parents. We have been given (or given stewardship over) a good number of the 6000 plus books that were in the farmhouse. I had been accumulating art books and magazines for some time before our marriage, and my wife has been doing her level best to catch up. We have well over 1200 books easy to hand, and at least 1500 more in storage.

And now there’s that Internet thingie. I love books, there are usually three or four going at the same time. There are a few art and history books that get taken out and referred to at least once a month. But when I need info, especially visual info, where better to go than to the web, the greatest Wunderkammer of all time. You can search for images in overwhelming numbers. Are you doing research on Chartres Cathedral? A simple Google image search finds 41,000 images. Search under just the one word, “cathedral” and Google comes back with approximately 5,600,000 images!

Or, if like me, you like to collect things from the natural world, a search for “Coyote Skull” brings back about 91,300 images. Searching for a skull to put into your very own cabinet of curiosity? Searching “Coyote Skull Retail” brings back over 66,000 sites, but you may want to further qualify your search terms. As of my typing this, there are nearly twenty different human x-ray images for sale on eBay (over a dozen of them in eBay Stores). In fact, on eBay, you can find things like crocodile teeth, meteorites, or the disarticulated skeleton of various small mammals. Building your own Wunderkammer is just a PayPal account away....

Then there are the photo sharing sites. My two favorite are Pbase and Flickr. You can search for something and get caught up forever chasing link after link, as one photographer or artist may have another fascinating person making a comment, or as part of the first one’s contact list. I’ve already blogged about Len Cowgill. There is another artist who deals with assemblage (amongst other things), GODLOVESDEATH. Then there are people like Steffe in Sweden, who photo-documented an old Oxel tree in a field at Välsta for a year and he still periodically posts new photos of this lonely hardwood. And speaking of finding everything on the web, I found a former professor of mine on Flickr, with whom I had lost touch for over twenty years, Karen Marlene Larson, with her absolutely gorgeous photos, interesting essays, and all her faithful commenters.


Marionette by Karen Marlene Larsen

Searching amongst the public Flickr photo pools for “Cabinet of Curiosities” yields five different groups (actually, the search pulls up eight, but the last three really aren’t on topic… ed.) with up to 7000 images between them (depending on how many images are in more than one of the groups.) My favorite by far is Wunderkammer, which I am a part of.


Extinct Birds

Curiosity Cabinet- Handmade Specimens is also amazing, especially the artifice and imagination involved.

There are also many pools for images from museums around the world, two of which are At the museum and The Global Museum with tens of thousands of images between them.


Sexual Dimorphism in Insects

In fact, even The Library of Congress and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston have a presence on Flickr, though the latter’s photostream is rather thin. A list of museum photo groups on Flickr (probably not exhaustive) can be found here.

Flickr is just one small part of the internet. I haven’t even had a chance to touch upon the many talented people who aggregate the unusual, the beautiful and the rare, like David Thompson’s Ephemera posts, Bioephemera, Shorpy Vintage Photos, BibliOdessey, Lines and Colors, or the Art Renewal Center.

So, go and play inside the largest Wunderkammer ever!

…Not that I have to tell you.

After the Storm

We had a bit of a nor'easter on Monday.




when the wind is from the north, the trees get a coating



snow on neighborhood trees



the neighbor's birch tree



grey skies, sun on the next hill

Winter is beautiful.



Shoveling is not....

Current Show!





I've been remiss. The new show at the Glass Garage Gallery went up on the 6th. (Click on the invitation for a larger version)

If you are in the Greater LA area, take a gander. They carry a number of incredible artists, as well as myself.

Below are the two pieces I sent out for the show.





"Charon"

acrylic on canvas 16 X 20 inches, copyright 2007 MJAndrade All rights reserved





"Crossing the Jordan"

acrylic on canvas 16 X 20 inches, copyright 2007 MJAndrade All rights reserved

I've blogged on this before

...but as Walking the Berkshires has a new carnival, called "Cabinet of Curiosities" I thought it time to post this again. Besides, my Cabinet has changed a bit since moving my studio.



One part of it is contained in a miss-matched set of barrister book shelves, with a drop front desk halfway up. My parents had bought these at a junk shop before I was born. (Of course, now they are antiques.)

On the upper shelf, you can see on the left a glass jar with the finger-bones of a coyote, which I found along with its skull and much of it's skeleton in the woods. The skull is to the right (on top of the remains of a pull toy that had belonged to my mom, and may be from the 20's or before). On the second shelf, on the right, is a small jar of knucklebones from the same unfortunate beast, and one of its thigh bones is on top of a cast metal level that has passed down through the family from my great uncle. The books on the second shelf are all antiques from the library of the house I grew up in.

There are even two Halloween skull candles from when I was a little kid (some forty and more years ago).

This is the type of stuff I try to surround myself with in my office/studio.

For more notes, and related pictures, go here.

UPDATE: My wife pointed out an omission on my part. On the top shelf, right hand corner, in back, is a small Bell jar containing my ponytail from a couple of years ago.

I have long hair, it's in a jar in my office!

Following up on a post at New Wineskins I took a web-based 'Spiritual Type Test'.

I came out as a Mystic.


No surprises there, I suppose.

Aaaauuuuugggggghhhhhh!

The external hard drive that was my primary repository for all my photos, my family's historic photos, iTunes and suddenly stopped recognizing its directory (or even that it had information written to it). Most stuff is backed up, but not all.

It's now in the hands of a data recovery shop in Boston. A friend recommended the place to me. I will post a review when all is said and done.


(quiet weeping...)

Dr. Helen kicks off her new advice column at Pajamas Media

She discusses what things all adults should be able to do, starting with the famous list by Robert Heinlein, and continuing with additions of her own.

(from Heinlein) A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.

Dr. Helen's additions, drive a stick shift, be able to swim a reasonable distance, surf the web and answer an email, understand and be able to use a basic handgun, give a good backrub.

My abilities as compared to these lists are,

Change a diaper. With three biological children (and several infant foster children who have come through our home) this one is a natch! Ability includes changing both cloth and disposables.

Design a building. I've done stage design and do a lot of historical architectural research. I'd want someone to check me against the codes, but I could do a reasonable job for normal sized wood framed homes or farm buildings.

Build a wall. I grew up in the woods of New Hampshire. Fixing and building stone walls came with the territory.

Comfort the dying. Unfortunately, I have experience in this.

Take orders, give orders. Many years as a boyscout and a few in leadership positions. Believe it or not, but working on the tech side of theatre covers this as well. Check.

Cooperate, act alone. Trained in the theatre, including some acting training, so this one is both literally and figuratively true.

Pitch Manure. Again, farm country boyhood. It didn't happen often, but enough to know I didn't want it for a career.

Cook a tasty meal. The wife and kids think so, most of the time.

Drive a stickshift. Have, will, want to buy something with one (preferably large, overpowered, and from the 60s!)

Surf the web and answer email. Uh, Dr. Helen? You posted this on a new media site. The number of people who will read your column in Pajamas Media who can't do these two is a number aproaching zero.

Understand and be able to use a handgun. Haven't done it much, but yeh. Paraphrasing Tom Selleck's character from Quigly Down Under, "I said I didn't like pistols, not that I can't use them." I'd rather have one of these.

Give a good backrub. Hey, my wife didn't marry me for my looks (or money).

Of the rest, hmmm....

Fight efficiently. Not so much, unless we back up to be able to use a handgun.

Plan an invasion. No miltary training. I could take a stab at it, but this would probably best be left under be able to take orders. I'd rather follow somebody who knows what they're doing, and live, than think I'm capable by myself, and die.

Analyze a new problem. That essentially used to be my corporate job, doing stratigic sales research. Now I spend my time thinking up new paintings and new symbolism.

Balance accounts given a little more enthusiasm for bookkeeping... Nah, that's not gonna' happen.

Solve equations, write a sonnet, not since college....

Swim a reasonable distance, yeh, my doctor would like me to be able to do that as well.

Butcher a hog, conn a ship, program a computer, not yet - probably not likely.

Die gallantly, don't know yet.

If you have any additions for the list, drop a comment at Dr. Helen's column.

You scored as Clint Eastwood, Names aren't important as you dish out steaming bowls of piping hot brutality to your enemies. You also enjoy a good spaghetti dinner once in a while.

Clint Eastwood		88%
John Wayne		88%
Lee Van Cleef		75%
Charles Bronson		75%
Lee Marvin		63%

What Kind of a Western Bad-Ass are You?
created with QuizFarm.com

Useless comparissons

I'm a year older than Glenn Reynolds! Funny, I thought he would be younger than that...

Here's the math. Yesterday he said that he was 6 during the Summer of Love. In that post he linked to this by Ann Althouse who said that the Summer of Love was 40 years ago. (I personally have no recollection of this stuff.)

That would make Mr. Reynolds 46. I'm 47.


I am only a year older than he? That can't be right! I thought he was just a puppy...


...oh wait, that wouldn't work!

Fun with my paintings, Flickr and fd's Flickr Toys

Making faux Motivational Posters

Decay



Oxidiztion




are you ready to take on the world now?

You're It

It appears that I have been tagged by Assistant Village Idiot with the instructions that I blog five things about myself that I never have before, and potentially tag five others. I may have to take a pass on the second (or at least do a much smaller list) because the majority of the bloggers that I read are much higher in the food chain than I, and as AVI notes, to tag any of them would be highly presumptuous.

So, five things...

1. Every once in a while I Google the names of old college friends. This started several years ago when I tried (successfully after a bit) to get back in touch with my former design professor, who is now an Emmy Award winning designer on the West Coast.

This morning, I think I found two others, both women. One I'm not so sure of, but the other I'm pretty certain, as her name is unusual to begin with, the age is right, and the information shows connections to Boston.

Now what do I do?

As for guys, with the exception of my prof, they've either not gotten written up or otherwise attached to the web, or their names are so common that a web search (without more recent or identifying info on them) is futile. Or more likely, I'm not very good at hunting people on the web....

UPDATE: I don't know why I didn't think of this when I first posted, I recently found my Costume Design professor through Flickr. I also just found my best friend from college (so much for the theory on guys-on-the-internet) and we've emailed each other.

2. I have asthma. When I am stressed it is worse, and can physically make me sick.

I am also a self-stress-monger. Bad combination.

I know, TMI.

3. My wife and I had known each other for almost three years before our first date. She and I had been great buddies, having all sorts of interesting conversations about topics that no one else we knew cared much about, and one day, when I knew that she was down in the dumps, I suggested that we get together for a cup of coffee and just catch up. Through a comedy of errors (worthy of a Shakespearian play) our plans for a morning cup-o-joe morphed into an evening at an art gallery where we were to meet several other couples and then go out for desert. Though they all showed up, we somehow never found each other and so my future wife and I gave up, walked to the Blue Diner (now renamed) on Kneeland St, and had coffee and a desert. We fell in love. Then in three months she moved to D.C. After a bit she came back to Boston, and (being a bit old fashioned) I asked her to "go steady".

The week after that, at church, I went to introduce her to an old friend and completely blanked on her name. (She still ribs me about that.)

I was a bit freaked out that she was ten years younger than I and so I started adding to her age in my head, until I told someone in front of her and she corrected me.

Two years and one day after that botched attempt at a prosaic and platonic cup of coffee we were married.

4. My father was an electrical engineer, and my mother was trained in the arts. Both were bibliophiles, history buffs, and continually seeking new knowledge for themselves. As a result I grew up surrounded by art and history books which I avidly read. My mother loved my creativity and always encouraged it. However, my dad taught me critical thinking and problem solving. When I gave up Physics in college for Theatre Design it took me six months to tell him (and almost another six months before he would really speak to me again). When my family came to the first show for which I designed the set, my freshman physics department advisor and his actress daughter came as well. He congratulated me in front of my dad for making a good choice for going into the Theatre. It still took me a while before I stopped feeling guilty.

Looking back on it, my dad, with all his stories of scratch-made machinery and creative thinking in engineering, was the greatest influence on my becoming an artist.

5. I'm probably smarter than I was when I was twenty. When I was twenty, I wasn't half as smart as I thought I was.

Disturbing Self-Revelation!

A little while ago, while on hold for customer service, the background muzak started playing Olivia Newton-John's "Magic."

I realized that I remembered all of the lyrics.

(shudder!)




On a related note, my brother chimes in with this question about muzak, Who's bright idea is it to use old rock standards in grocery stores? There you are, trying to decide between blended yogurt and fruit-on-the-bottom, and suddenly you're assaulted by the Edgar Winter Group and "Frankenstein."

"BADA BAMP BAMP BADAH-DAH DAH! BADA BAMP BADAH!"



OK, fruit-on-the-bottom it is...