a little bit of summer

Soooooooo I've not been keeping up with this little bugger. at all. this summer. Even though I keep learning really neat things and seeing great things and experiencing awesome ..things...
So heres where I display an array of pictures that I've taken so far. Not totally in chronological order.


Seafood Gumbo In the Summer. YUM



Apparently my yard has become a haven for fungi. I'm not complaining though... I love taking pictures of all the mushrooomies.





So a professor of Gabby told her that when taking a beautiful photo always turn around because there's bound to possibly be an even better shot behind you. andddd he was right...


Yellow powdery mushroomies.


I intern at this talent agency/costume rental/boutique ..and while there these guys from Microsoft UK came by to get some costumes for a party they were having at Mardi Gras world. I happened to be on the computer working on some illustrations I had done and the guy asked me if I would go to the party and paint something while I was there. I did this in 5 hours. (drew it before hand though)


SURPRISE!




I went eat out with my family at this place that had this.....wonderful bear cat.
oh Louisiana.


Who says that digital cameras dont make beautiful accidents as well as film cameras!!! they lie!


again my little obsession with the plants here. I would have straightened and touched up this picture.. If I weren't lazy.


yeaaaaaah mushrooomiiieee


COLORADOOOOOO. I went visit wonderful Kris in Colorado and spent the week. We did a bunch of awesome stuff AND got to go to an AMAZING music festival which had an AWESOME lineup. oh yeah...

So TOOL played. and... I some how managed to squeeze my way to the centerish frontish because i'm stealthy and i have a vagina and guys aren't apt to fighting girls for front row. Actually I take that back. This one guy got pissed but then got un pissed.

One thing I'd like to mention before I go on with this story is that... I've met a good few people who talk about how shitty Tool fans are...and the funny thing about that is... I actually talked to and made friends with a number of Tool fans while awaiting this glorious show...where as at all of the other bands I watched.. I conversed with no one. so BAM!

back to the story. So all the anticipation in the crowd was all hot and ready for some live greatness that had been dormant for 7 years.... and I didn't quite grasp that... until as the music began to play I found myself in the frontish centerish right smack dab in the MIDDLE of a raging death mosh pit. My body was in a diagonal and not touching the ground very easily sooo thats when I decided it was time to skooch on out to the frontish sideish and NOT die by trample. and I unfortunately had to sacrafice my shoes. The end...of my shoes because I could only find one of them when it was all over. but... it was well worth it.

Adam Jones.


TOOL


This was the second day after Thievery Corporation played. Colorado has the stranges storms.. although believe it or not it didn't storm at all there that day.




Because concert fever has not yet let go it's grasp on me... I went to see ZoSo at the Varsity with some really awesome people and had a great night.







This little fellow is named Amigo. Says so on the handle area. He lives at Walmart. I wonder if he has a cousin in South America called Friend.


His name is also Amigo and he lives in my car. Yes he is a real blowfish.



Ta Da!!!!!!

What a day.

People like to rebel.
It's kinda everywhere.
I mean, think about it... People like things that are new and against the normal-whatever.
I'm speaking mostly in terms of art and entertainment.

I'm going to start in Egypt...because thinking back, this is where I first see signs of this.
Most Egyptian art followed the same gridded cannon, the same basic poses-body build-facial structure..all idealized and muscular.



Then Amenhotep IV (Akhenaten after his 5th year in reign) comes along and changes the entire look of Egyptian art for a few years. He makes artist depict the figure much more feminine or androgynous with slender hips, a round waist, skinny arms...a face with larger eyes and lips. The figures are also more interactive and affectionate than the figures of earlier Egyptian art. Amenhotep also starts the worship of one god and not many. But....many Egyptians later rebelled against this and destroyed most evidence of his reign...and after his death the worship of this one god was abandoned. Oh, and btw... his son was King Tut. woop.

Anyway. Why the sudden change in the look of these depictions? WELL there are MANY speculations. Like...he wanted himself to "emulate the creative nature of Aten" (the god he worshiped...called "mother and father of all that is." oooooor because he was actually deformed in some way...and that's similar to what he actually looked like. Ooorrr aliens..... psh. aliens. anyway.

The point is. Compared to the old traditional style of Egyptian art, Akenaten's way is radically dfferent in appearance.


So this would be alot easier if I had my history notes.

But I'm finding what I forgot.

SO

The Romans borrowed from the Greeks who built upon the sculptures of the Egyptians.

The Romans created something like this:

Which is anatomically correct, muscular, idealized, in a contraposto pose, twisting naturaliztic drapery, details paid attention to...etc
















THEN they produce something like this:

..Which is not anatomically correct, they have no knees, very stylized and NOT individualized at all.

I mean.. the Roman's didn't just forget how to produce the above sculpture. This was a choice. (unfortunately in my opinion) Oh fun fact. This sculpture is made out of a purple stone called porphyry. There was only one quarry in which this came from, which was in Egypt... It was designated ONLY for Roman royalty and the Romans used it allll up.









Now I'm going to skip to the Rennaissance which was all about balance/symmetry and naturalism/realism.... you get something like Raphael's "School of Athens"



Then we move into Mannerism... artist who are tired of this naturalistic approach go for something more artificial. You begin to get paintings that are disproportioned and distorted. It is easy to spot a Mannerist piece by the hands of the figures. They are all sort of elongated in the same way. And look, this is not balance. That tiny little man on the right could not level out a scale with all of those large smooshed figures on the left. Dont think sooooo. The Mannerists also begin to rely on color more often.... incorporating more viiiibrant colors.
Parmigianino's "Madonna with the Long Neck"


Then you get Baroque... artists decide to take things back to the more naturalistic scale of things but dramatize every aspect. You get intense chiaroscuro (light and dark), rich color, complex compositions--all at the most dramatic point in the story.
Caravaggio "The Crucifixion of Saint Peter"


Then we find ourselves with Rococo which is characterized by the subject matter of the more wealthy leisure class. The colors are much more toned down and pastel-ey. Everything is a lot more light hearted and happy-ish--highly decorative. There is a DRAMATIC mood change when you look from a Baroque piece to a Rococo piece. TOTAL REBELLION.
Fragonard "The Swing"


Then we get Neoclassicism which looks back to the Rennaissance.....(which by the way looked back to the Romans...who looked at the Greeks) Stability, fully rendered...no visible brush work, naturalistic/realistic, etc.
David "Oath of the Horatii"


Thennnnn we come to Romanticism. This was influenced alot by literature and is characterized mostly by its subject matter and not on a particular visual style. It was largely a rebellion against aristocratic norms. It's subject matter usually dealt with things such as exotic places or people, present day events....romantical things... But not like romance as in "oh George... I've loved you for as long as my breath has breathed.." So... this rebellion is on subject matter. It's not the same old same old historical or religious scene.
John Henry Fuseli "The Nightmare" .....get it?


Then we get into modern art where everything goes all crazy.

Edward Manet a ProtoImpressionist goes all out and paints a nude female in a GENRE scene.. of CLOTHED MALES. crazy. This was unheaarrrd of. The nude female was only acceptable in historical paintings and mythological paintings.



The Impressionist focus on capturing the light...painting the light instead of the objects.
Claude Monet "Haystacks I"


and then artist go all over everywhere from there. No bounds.
Cubism- Picasso "Le Guitariste"


Fauvism - Henri Matisse "Green Line"


Surrealism - Dali "The Temptations of Saint Anthony"


Thennnn after they all go everywhere with distorting and playing and imagining they bring it allll back to the natural----photorealllliiismmmmmmm.

Richard Estes- YES IT IS A PAINTING




okay. so that took me way too long. I hope I got my point across.. which is.. the fact that people get bored and tend to go all out in the opposite direction to find their excitement.
and you got a history lesson that I don't know who will actually read.
woop.

ohhh and the fact that.. there really is just about nothing that hasn't already been done. Modern art has a CRAAZZYYY array of insanneeeely random eras and things and concepts and lack of concepts that I didn't feel like going through. because it already took me so long.
yeah.