Three Musicians (1921). Version residing at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

When I was a kid, I had a small art book with a picture of Picasso’s Three Musicians on the cover. The image was about the size you see on your computer screen. Maybe smaller.

When I unexpectedly came face to face with the real thing in a museum, I was stunned by its size and true colors. To read that the painting is so many tens of inches by so many hundreds of centimeters, doesn’t explain it. Look at your wall. It’s about that big.

Four books, four Olgas

Since I can seemingly never have enough books about Picasso, I can show you an example of how hard it is to figure out what artwork looks like, without actually standing in front of it.

This is a painting of Picasso’s wife, Olga. Just looking at my version (from four different books) I think I’ve made my point. You can’t tell what art looks like from books, or on the Internet.

Knowing the artist had the color ochre in his palette, you might decide one of the middle slices are right. But the blues are different. Knowing the artist was imitating the smooth-skinned, idealized beauties painted by Ingres, you might choose another.

Olga Picasso poses for her portrait

Working from this photograph, Picasso embraced technology. Early film cameras were becoming the must-have gadgets of the day.

FemmeScape 1

The above was realized with Photoshop. Below is the digital model. Her dramatic pose defies gravity, but I think it works in its intended context.

Pose

Zazzy

I called this one jazzy because it reminded me of Matisse. It started out as a live sketch, that really celebrated the female figure, without being too overtly sexual.

Sketch - Los Gatos, 11-Feb-08

»Zoom this

In this video Penelope Cruz and Salma Hayek combine to create a new person. Start with two familiar faces and create someone vaguely familiar, who exists only in imagination.

»Now Playing on YouTube Cruz, Hayek : A Photo Never Taken

The La Gata video exposes the software foundation behind a digital media portrait that seems like someone you know.

The term “la Gata” is a tribute to these two Latina superstars. It’s a slang term that, loosely, means “female cat.” The proper Spanish word for cat is the masculine, “el Gato.”

The Making of La Gata

The La Gata painting and video were digitally produced using a variety popular software applicaitions running on ordinary computers.

Gwen Stefani - Sexy

Gwen Stefani goes from sad to happy in this morphed sequence. You can also see it on YouTube.

Gwen Stefani - A Range of Emotions

Peter Gabriel Wisdom portrait Now Playing on iPod

My ghost likes to travel so deep into your space.

Simply drag from The Artist at Work to the Now Playing window, bottom left, in iTunes.

Cydonut Matrix Animation

I created the Cydonut Matrix in the Spring of 2000. It was my first all-digital painting. I ended up making 100 different versions of the picture in this animation, to populate a photomosaic of about 1600 elements.

What I liked about the painting was that it drew upon the scientific notion of self-similarity on various scales of magnitude. Both the image and the individual picture elements were the same thing. So, it was scalable. That is probably why I made two prints, one Zoomed In and one Zoomed Out.

Living Space

I think artwork should be lived and worked with, as opposed to something seen in a museum or lobby some place. Here’s the Zoomed Out painting wedged into a recreation space.

Work Space

Over here the Zoomed In painting resides with some office and networking stuff. People ask, "Are your walls really yellow?" Yeah. Just those two.

Peter Gabriel - Digital watercolor and stylus

For 2008 I’m adding video clips. Peter Garbriel ages 20 years in this morphed sequence. You can also see it on YouTube. (The one below is higher quality.)

Peter Gabriel - Yesterday and Today

Anjelica Huston - Digital watercolor and stylus

Warhol-Sunglasses
What I like about Andy Warhol is that he knew how to "photoshop" before there was Photoshop.

Simply Liz by Andy Warhol

Warhol’s portrait of Elizabeth Taylor disappointed art investors this week when it sold for less than hoped for. Auctioned for $23.6 million, it seems to me that the painting is holding its value.

Small wonder that former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan mentioned artwork in the same breath as real estate and investment portfolios when he wrote, "Stock and bond prices, homes, commercial real estate, paintings, and most everything else joined in the boom." Actor Hugh Grant, who sold the painting, realized a 665% increase over the six years he held on to his investment.

For those of you who are interested in art for art’s sake, Simply Liz’s sister painting Red Liz lives at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. To my own disappointment, she wasn’t actually on display the last time I went up there, so you may want to call ahead.

Warhol-Sunglasses 2×2