busy bunny

making waves for MAR DE FUNDO.

This past week-end, I did some live painting at Inshala. I had a nice set up and experimented with my newest acquisitions, Chromadepth 3D glasses and an airbrush system.  The fun is over, all of a sudden things are coming to a head. Clients who haven't approached me in a month all of a sudden need work done. When it rain it pours. There will be plenty of work and catch up to do this week-end. Here is a project I completed before dinner today.

I had a day to make a 12 frame animation project titled MAR DE FUNDO out of Venezuela.
My good friend KT asked and it's headed up by Richard Reeves. So I said "I'm in for sure!"
The theme is water sea navigation tools. I figured whales are good navigators and the loop is meant to be a cycle. SO I designed a cyclical loop made up of 12 different species of Ceteceans at their relative scale to one another.

 I scanned the drawings into Photoshop then used After Effects to compile and align the drawings then output them to the various formats requested. I cant wait to see what they do with the various pieces made by all the participants.

We are the Champions

my friends.....

 I had to make myself wait until after the Versus show to share the piece on this blog. I started with a little bit a month ago but then stopped just to be fair. Hopefully you got out to the exhibit if you could. There were over 40 artists involved in the project and some amazing collaborations. The Gentlemen Destroyers made some cool walls in the front space to hang all the work and there was a good turn out while I was there.

A quick review. I ended up cutting out two different stencils back in may of the champ Batista, also a means to sign my piece since we share the same last name.

I had drawn out my anatomical heart which eventually became completely covered by my ballistic gel inspired victim figure. I started in pencil and painted in with acrylic on the re-stretched canvas.

Here is an early process shot after Ray got his Rich stencil cut and applied to the surface.

 So jumping ahead, I added the beam out of the characters mouth as an integration challenge to bring the two sides together. I have eyeballs popping out of the skull, they still need irises at this point. The blood is red but still too transparent. I splatter painted in the Batista Stencil and rubbed iridescent silver into the negative space then gave it a light sand.

I allowed a variety of browns to drip down the canvas to create more layers and depth. I cut a second negative stencil of Batista and splatter painted blues over the silver. I applied a thick pink to cover the blood and I was going to stain it red afterward but liked the interplay of pinks and blue so much I left it.  I painted in the irises in the eyes and blocked in the lower jaw.

A little further along and now there is a bit more back and forth between my collaborative partner. He added the laser rays to the piece. I decided to add a background of stars and rework the depth and shading on the skeletal elements. I created some star stencils and some tear drop stencils. I sprayed in some reflective gold spray paint and worked out some finer details.

Here you can get an idea of the detail and layering that went into the piece, this is after it is frames and varnished.

This is an angled shot taken the day Derek picked up the piece to bring to the gallery. You can see the frame job and the interplay of light on the reflective surface. ray stayed up for 2 nights working on a party binge to get the piece together with BONUS framing = sweet surprise to wake up to!

Here is the final piece to be delivered. I hand wrote the pieces title with my favorite gold paint pen. we gave it a healthy coating of outdoor vehicle clear coat. The piece has a nifty little write up explaining our process making it. Hopefully you get a chance to see our handy work in person =;)

Preparadness is key

Shiva +

I began working on the final canvases to be prepped for my upcoming show titled "Divine Inspiration" at the Stride Gallery at the end of October.

I put together this 72" X 54" frame with lumber that I found by the freight elevator and the cross bars were from a dismantled canvas. I had some repair work to do and a lot of sanding to get the frame fit for stretching.

This canvas just so happens to be the measure of man, this man, like a Leonardo drawing, that's sacred geometry that fits my person, just right.

I spent one evening stretching some of my 15 oz canvas over the frame and some additional frames while enjoying Penn's Sunday School podcast, God I love that show. lol. I game them the first coat of Gesso and let them dry overnight.

The next evening before hitting the studio, I went to see a buddy DJ a set at the Hi Fi. While there a beauty parade of gorgeous gals in artistically altered prom dresses joined me for some dancing. Afterward, I stretched two new supports, and primed them all with a pepto bismal like color, inspired by the no frills no gimmicks dress of a friend. I used the super sponge to give it a little texture.

I let that dry for a day and then came back  and gave a light sand with 100 grit. I then put a second and third coat on the canvases to create a little more texture. I added some blue to the pepto mix and coated the supports with some more texture. I am still not getting what I want, the soupy gesso seems to want to level itself out. I am trying to get it like the lead white we did in Martinho's class, except without using the poisonous stuff.

After being turned to mince meat in my martial arts class, I toughed it out and brought a jar of black gesso I purchased that morning after cutting mattes for my framed prints at Motion Gallery. I applied it with a brush in a way to create more texture on the surface.

I had some fun applying the black, it was so hot in the studio I painted in the nude.
True story.

Profitts studio visit

I had a great studio visit from some new friends of mine the Profitt family.
It was a good time and I'm glad they came by to ride the freight elevator and hang in my studio with me and see what a professional artist's work space is like.

Very quick to find the best seat in the house!

Miss SP chooses to focus her discerning eye up close and personal on my Vinegar Tasters.

Dad, Danny and I have a serious mind meld.

It was a good time and there was talk of Tubby Dog afterward but I was on a detox so now goodies for me. I cant wait until they can come back and see all the new work I am making.

With a name like Profitt, you cant loose ;D

Aesthetic pleasure and how we process it

 Here is something really interesting I came across..... 

^{A theory (see below which is basically saying that things that are easily understood and processed are experienced as pleasurable. We like simple harmonious things because they are easy to process. Hmmmm.} food for thought....

Order vs. Chaos.

^{What we individually experience as beauty is informed by our thoughts and preconceptions of beauty so it can inborn (evolutionary) or familiar/culture specific (acquired/ trained into our brains).}

^{Surprise sensation have a strong effect: The less we expect in the perceived object and with greater easy that we perceive it the more we enjoy it and the more it affects us.} 

^{Certain dynamics are perceived as beautiful because of our upbringing and biological evolution, the more complex the patterns and out understanding the less easily we perceive it as beautiful.}

^{Simple harmonic designs and symmetry are more easily understood immediately by the brain and therefore  complex design is more harder to perceive and understand easily and is thus less beautiful.}

<sup>So beauty is how we perceive a stimulus and what experience the effect has on us.


"</sup> In this theory, beauty is seen as an experience that has nothing to do with artistic merit: Beautiful works of art may be without any merit whereas good art is not necessarily beautiful."

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Processing fluency theory of aesthetic pleasure

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The processing fluency theory of aesthetic pleasure^[1] is a theory in psychological aesthetics on how people experience beauty. Processing fluency is the ease with which information is processed in the human mind. The theory is based on four basic assumptions:

1. Objects differ in the fluency with which they can be processed. Variables that facilitate fluent processing include objective features of stimuli, like goodness of form, symmetry, figure-ground contrast, as well as experience with a stimulus, for example repeated exposure or prototypicality.
2. Processing fluency is itself hedonically marked (that is, it possesses an inherent affective quality) and high fluency is subjectively experienced as positive.^[2]
3. In line with the "feelings-as-information" account,^[3] processing fluency feeds into judgments of aesthetic appreciation because people draw on their subjective experience in making evaluative judgments, unless the informational value of the experience is called into question.
4. The impact of fluency is moderated by expectations and attribution. On one hand, fluency has a particularly strong impact on affective experience if its source is unknown and fluent processing comes as a surprise. On the other hand, the fluency-based affective experience is discounted as a source of relevant information when the perceiver attributes the experience to an irrelevant source. This helps explain the inverted U-shaped function often found in research on the effect of complexity on preferences:^[4] very complex patterns are not judged as beautiful because they are disfluent, and patterns are judged as more beautiful when they become less complex. When viewers perceive a simple pattern, they are often able to detect the source of fluency—the pattern's simplicity—and do not use this experience of ease for judging the beauty of the pattern.

The processing fluency theory of aesthetic pleasure emphasizes the interaction between the viewer and an object in that it integrates theories and a wide range of empirical evidence that focus on effects of objective stimulus attributes on perceived beauty^[5] with those that emphasize the role of experience, for example by invoking prototypicality.^[6] In this theory, beauty is seen as an experience that has nothing to do with artistic merit: Beautiful works of art may be without any merit whereas good art is not necessarily beautiful.

The theory resolves the apparent paradox of inborn and acquired preferences. For instance, infants prefer consonant melodies. According to the fluency account, this is because infants share perceptual equipment that make them process consonance in music more easily than dissonance. When children grow up, they are exposed to the music of their culture, resulting in culture-specific musical fluency. This familiarization explains why individuals from different cultures have different musical tastes. In addition, the theory helps explain why beauty (in a wide sense; perhaps the term elegance is more apt) is a cue for truth in mathematical problem solving and scientific discovery.^[7][8]
The theory and its implications have influenced theory and research in the psychology of perception,^[9] cognitive psychology,^[10] social psychology,^[11] empirical aesthetics,^[12] web design,^[13] marketing,^[14][15] finance,^[16] and archeology.<sup>[17]

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References

1. ^ Reber, R., Schwarz, N., Winkielman, P.: "Processing fluency and aesthetic pleasure: Is beauty in the perceiver's processing experience?", Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8(4):364-382.
2. ^ Winkielman, P., Schwarz, N., Fazendeiro, T., & Reber, R. (2003). The hedonic marking of processing fluency: Implications for evaluative judgment. In J. Musch & K. C. Klauer (Eds.), The Psychology of Evaluation: Affective Processes in Cognition and Emotion. (pp. 189-217). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
3. ^ Schwarz, N., & Clore, G. L. (2007). Feelings and phenomenal experiences. In E. T. Higgins & A. W. Kruglanski (Eds.), Social Psychology: Handbook of basic principles (2nd ed., pp. 385-407). New York: Guilford.
4. ^ Berlyne, D. E. (1971). Aesthetics and psychobiology. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
5. ^ Birkhoff, G. D. (1933). Aesthetic measure. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
6. ^ Martindale, C., & Moore, K. (1988). Priming, prototypicality, and preference. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 14, 661–670.
7. ^ Schwarz, N. (2006). On judgments of truth & beauty. Daedalus, 135, 136–138.
8. ^ Reber, R. Brun, M., & Mitterndorfer, K. (2008). The use of heuristics in intuitive mathematical judgment. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 15, 1174-1178.
9. ^ Topolinski , S. (2010). Moving the eye of the beholder: Motor components in vision determine aesthetic preference. Psychological Science, 21, 1220-1224.
10. ^ Opacic, T., Stevens, C., & Tillmann, B. (2009). Unspoken knowledge: Implicit learning of structured human dance movement. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 35, 1570–1577.
11. ^ Rubin, M., Paolinia, S., & Crisp, R. J. (2010). A processing fluency explanation of bias against migrants. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46, 21–28.[View]
12. ^ Plumhoff, J. E. & Schirillo, J. A. (2009). Mondrian, Eye Movements, and the Oblique Effect. Perception, 38, 719–731.
13. ^ Thielsch, M. T., & Hirschfeld, G. (2010). High and low spatial frequencies in website evaluations. Ergonomics, 53, 972-978.
14. ^ Lee, A. Y., & Labroo, A. A. (2004). The Effect of Conceptual and Perceptual Fluency on Brand Evaluation. Journal of Marketing Research, 41 (2004): 151–165.
15. ^ Labroo, A. A., Dhar, R., & Schwarz, N. (2008). Of frogs, wines, and frowning watches: Semantic priming, perceptual fluency, and brand evaluation. Journal of Consumer Research, 34, 819-831.
16. ^ Alter, A. L.; Oppenheimer, D. M. (May 2, 2006), Predicting short-term stock fluctuations by using processing fluency, pp. 4
17. ^ Hodgson, D. (2009). Symmetry and humans: reply to Mithen's 'Sexy Handaxe Theory'. Antiquity, 83, 195-198.

Further reading

• Gazzaniga, M. S. (2008). Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique. New York: Ecco Books, Harper Collins.
• Song, S., & Schwarz, N. (2010, February). If it's easy to read, it's easy to do, pretty, good, and true: fluency effects on judgment, choice, and processing style. The Psychologist, 23, 108-111. [1]

A little bit of beauty goes a long way....

Man's drive to create and communicate is also a drive to surround oneself with beauty and harmony. For me beauty is not decorative, which implies it is superfluous,  but often times decoration is beautiful. An action, a sound, even a smell can convey beauty. Beauty is infinite, it can transcend space and time. 

I can recount an experience where art had an effect on me similar to stendhal syndrome. I love visiting art galleries in my travels. I was with a friend in NY at a museum. Enjoying walking through the galleries, I turned the corner and it was if a magnet dragged me toward a particular work by El Greco. I had not really seen his work or been a big fan. I am not a Christian and am not drawn to this particular iconography, however on this day, this image of Jesus Christ being lowered from the cross captured me and wrapped around me like a warm embrace. This image of suffering was so beautiful.

I was glued to the piece. It had felt that I had transcended time into some sort of divine space. I felt myself beginning to tear as happiness filled my entire being. It was as if I had traveled back in time to the 1500's and I was the paint on his brush being put on the canvas. It was like a brain aneurysm, each stroke was made by the artist tickled my brain, like I was there at the moment it was created, like I was paint on the end of his brush.

A friend saw me frozen there gazing, tearing up. I vaguely remember him saying "I'll leave you two alone". I cant say for sure if I was there for 2 seconds or two years, it felt as if a lifetime had passed. He said it was 20 minutes. I'm amazed if the gaze can be kept for two. This piece had me riveted, not because of its subject, not because of its color, not even the powerful application of paint, but because of its entire beauty, I was entirely captivated.  

When I returned home I had to seek out the image again. I looked at a reproduction and it wasn't the same. I had to experience it in person. And that is one of the things about art, it is a think, almost living, a copy or print is not entirely the same as the real thing.This work did what beauty is supposed to do. It change me and my life forever in a positive way. That is what I hope I can accomplish as an artist.