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.

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

These are the concept designs for a Flash at ForthMedia. The way I do it is to create individual scenes that tell the story in pictures. After that, I imagine how to "transition" from scene to scene. For me, it’s important to add a human element. Don’t you agree it should be "People Using Technology," not the other way around?

You can see the Flash for the Generation 2.5 iTours (which have been consuming most of my time) here.

Know Your Business

Get on the Web

Help Them Find You

Escher exhibit at San Jose Museum of Art

The recent Escher exhibit in Silicon Valley afforded a rare opportunity to see not only famous prints, but also sketches and intermediate pressings that revealed how the Dutch master created his illusions. Escher’s multi-dimensional Relativity was on display.

Study for Relativity

This sketch was not one of those on view, it is from a rare book. (The museum confiscated my camera at the door.)

There are three vanishing points and three different ground planes in this environment. The floor of one world is a wall or ceiling in another, a door or window becomes a trap-door.

Although it looks strange, people who enjoy 3D computer modeling can re-create it. In fact, somebody made one out of Lego.

Vanilla Transhuman

The idea for this image came from the movie Vanilla Sky. The main character is in love with two women, and at one point he can no longer tell them apart in his mind. I morphed the two actresses together to see what they might look like as one.

Can you imagine a near future in which human cloning is possible, with celebrity fans who want to DNA-splice their children with somebody famous? You can actually copyright your DNA but I don’t think its clear what would happen if someone was cloned against their will.

This work dates back to Summer 2003.

Cell phone photo before and after digital processing

Somewhere in cyberspace sites like Google and Technorati are cacheing these words in "digital stone". However, this is the artist at work. And I’m not finished with this post yet.

It started with a cell phone photo taken at Laughing Squid Decade 2, where Anita Cocktail and the Twilight Vixen Revue entertained the crowd. Cell phone cameras are cool because they fit in your pocket, and you’re taking your cell phone with you anyway, right? Mine can even Bluetooth images over to a computer. But, the pictures aren’t that good.

A 3D femail figure in self-defense stance

This is a Poser project I was working on before I got too involved with the site re-design. I think the virtual muscular structure is pretty good, but there are obvious contortions when the figure does something athletic. In the spirit of this blog, I’m posting it now, as-is.

Hand with leopard skin texture

Note the animal skin and claw-like hand. Science has been talking about the possibility of “designer babies” in the near future, through genetic manipulation. What I am curious about is whether people will do the kind of genetic cross-breeding depicted here, as a fashion statement.

Mother Earth amid rising sea level

This is a representation of the mythical Mother Earth, or Gaia as she is sometimes called. Her hands in the clouds and legs in the water show the hydrological cycle. Her body is the color of arctic ice, ranging from white to deep blue. On her person you can see a human hand brushing the surface of the water. Those are typical Northern California hills in the background, and it appears that the water line is rising.

If you enjoyed the movie An Inconvenient Truth and are interested in areas susceptible to global warming, you can view dynamic maps created about climate change and sea level.

Dozens of ArtCars converged on Silicon Valley for the day, at the San Jose Museum of Art. The vehicles, transformed by their owners into mobile, public art, moved on to Berkeley the next day to complete their 10th anniversary festival.

The cars ranged from re-worked wrecks to polished, custom-made designs. In fact, one of the exhibitors was gluing more do-dads to her car when I arrived. Watch the slide show captions, because I included some photos from a few years back. The red, high-heeled shoe and guitar-shaped motorcycle were not at this year’s event.

The fm mini-player was specially coded for this exhibit. You can swap between slide show and panorama. You should know how to work the buttons by now. Please leave a bug report comment if you "break" anything.