|
|
|
chromatic illumination jellyfish
Tuesday, January 28 2014
I was on dog walking duty again this morning, and it was substantially colder than it had been yesterday (it's doubtful, for example, that I would have tried to wipe my ass with snow today). Though I'd bundled up with a hat and scarf, the exposed skin on my face became so cold that it ached. I never saw a thermometer this morning, but it was probably somewhere in the single digits at the time.
Despite the cold, I went on a moderate-length walk involving the Chamomile Headwaters trail and a shortcut over to the Stick Trail. On the walk home along the latter, I noticed that the evergreen leaves of a Mountain Laurel had turned black, presumably from the prolonged exposure to extreme cold. I don't think I'd ever seen that before.
When I was a kid, I had a special fondness for certain illustrations from the Peterson Field Guide to the Atlantic Seashore. The color ones were great, but I also like the white-on-black line illustrations of jellyfish and shrimp. Today I decided to add a fifth painting to the collection of small works to be donated to KMOCA for their annual benefit, and instead of painting a fifth variant humanoid based on my 20 inch sculpture, I did a reinterpretation of one of those white-on-black line drawings, lighting coloring it in the process to give it something I call "chromatic illumination" (reddish on the lit side and bluish on the unlit side). You can see the results here, alongside the other paintings (which I've tweaked a little since I last showed them to you).
(Click to enlarge.)
Another thing I did this afternoon was experiment with a little 8 by 8 monochromatic LED grid, which I easily interfaced with an Arduino and then reveled in the animatory possibilities.
Susan and David would be coming up from the City today, where they would rendezvous with Carrie (of Carrie & Michæl) and Michæl (who would be coming down from his three month internship in Sherbrooke, Quebec) as well as Deborah. The seven of us humans would be having a dinner party and all six of our dogs would present. After that, Susan and David would be flying out to Los Angeles, leaving their dogs to stay with us for a week. My involvement in all of this mostly took the form of waging a modest cleaning jihad. As always, Gretchen spent much of the afternoon in the kitchen making a three course meal.
When everyone arrived at around 7:00pm, the house was suddenly a riot of overjoyed dogs, squealing humans, and social chaos. Everybody else seemed to be in an ecstatic mood, but to me it was like fingernails being dragged across a chalkboard. Susan had brought some watercolor paintings of a rabbit (her contributions to the KMOCA benefit) and everyone was gushing about how awesome they were. They wanted me to get my paintings, but I found some excuse not to because I didn't want to be part of the spectacle. [REDACTED] Gretchen bought one of Susan's watercolors right then and there, which was probably in violation of the spirit of the benefit.
After I had a Little Sumpin' Sumpin' Ale in me, I was feeling better and didn't cringe as much at the dog chaos that was still playing out. As for the humans, they'd settled down considerably. Carrie & Michæl couldn't keep their hands off each other; absence might make the heart go wander, but in this case it clearly hadn't.
My favorite of the three course was soup made of a basil-and-cauliflower puree into which big fat morsels of gnocchi and white beans had been suspended. It was absolutely divine. I also liked the main course, a thick risotto stew that had turned into a sort of semi-solid mush. Evidently not everyone at the table like it so much because large amount ended up going into the compost (that's the problem with serving people instead of letting them serve themselves).
Dinner conversation was mostly about what Michæl has been doing up in Sherbrooke, a place where -25 degrees Fahrenheit is a plausible temperature. We talked about the ecosystem of graffiti and how it plays out in Sherbrooke. It's a relatively poor city and can't afford to clean up the graffiti, so people like Michæl have been called in to help channel the creativity of the artists and provide a less anarchic framework for graffiti to continue within.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?140128 feedback
previous | next |
