Sunday Reading

Interview with the pilot of the Enola Gay from 2002.

A star "only" 190 light-years away is about 14.5 billion years old making it about the same age as the universe.

PhD neuroscience grad Greg Dunn makes beautiful neuron inspired art.

An interview with Marshall Brown, a former professor of mine from IIT. His urbanism class was fantastic. It reminded me of my psych undergrad just making you skeptical of everything.

Natural gas is so cheap in the US that we need to export it. Granted that's not entirely legal yet.

Nice graphic of population density in the US.

A TED talk on data for international school performance, a tad dry but very good.

Breaking Bad - Art Prints

My artist friend Justin Santora just released prints for the TV series Breaking Bad. It seems to have more or less sold out instantly. I'm sure the last 100 will be available in his store in the near future.

Craftsmanship

Just two quick examples of extremely high quality work done by hand that caught my attention.

This guy makes all mahogany bicycles by hand. If you search around his site you can see the plys before they're worked and finished (hat tip: Steve U.)

Solid marble, carved by hand, 2.5 tons... original article here (hat tip Dan M.).

Everynone Videos

A new video from everynone/Radi0Lab.



This is the first of theirs I saw... definately have to watch it at least twice.

The 3rd and the 7th - or - The Best Renderings I've Ever Seen

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

Almost everything in here is CG. He used 3DS Max with VRay, Photoshop, After Effects, and Premiere.

Interview here.

Sketches

These are some sketches I did while in Europe this summer that I have yet to actually scan and post. I used a straight object to mark out the vanishing points but everything else is freehand.

8 House by BIG Architects in Copenhagen. Pencil and India ink on newsprint - 9" x 11".

VM Houses by BIG Architects in Copenhagen. Pencil and India ink on bristol board - 9" x 11".

Street along the river in Cologne, Germany. I was sitting in the grass drinking for this one. Pencil on newsprint - 9" x 14"

Bayer Headquarters by Hurphy/Jahn near Munich, Germany. Pencil, India ink, and watercolor on cotton rag paper - 10" x 7".

An Architect That Can (Still) Draw

My uncle is a landscape architect in southwestern Florida with Grady Minor Associates, so I thought I'd visit his office while I was there. His niche, as far as I can tell, is that he hand drafts and renders - that is, the man can draw. Almost no one does this in architecture so I assume it's somewhat rare in landscape too. He uses Autocad and Photoshop aside from drawing but generally only at the back end of the design. For the most part iterations are done free hand. What I find interesting is that clients specifically request him because of the way he works - which isn't all that surprising to me but is of course counter to so much of what I learn in school.

An entire wall plastered with plans and sections on trace paper.

This rendering (about 2' x 3') took him about 20 hours - about the same as a computer if not less.

Winter Break!

I'm on winter break, which means I'm still going to school every day; like an idiot. The wood shop and dark room are empty so I've been making prints and picture frames out of exotic woods.

This one is African mahogany and is really small - about 6" x 5". Inside is a palladium print I made of my grandfather and his three brothers.

This frame is made of maple and is meant to hold an 11" x 14" print.

Here are the 8" x 10" prints I made. This one's Vija.

And some sailing in Chicago.

Next up is a massive bubinga frame for a 16" x 20" print, and for the first time I'm going to try to enlarge some 70-90 year old large format negatives. And I need to think of something to laser cut.

Quick School Work Update

I've been documenting my work rather poorly, but this represents a few of my larger studio projects. I'll add to it later once finals week is over.

This is Rudolph Schindler's Kings Road House. He worked for Frank Lloyd Wright and actually built and lived in this house. It's considered the first modern house ever built. It's about 3' x 1.5' and made of basswood (house), MDF (base and street), and baltic birch plywood (topo and vegetation). It's a assembled component model so it all comes apart.

All together.

Upper roof taken off.

Lower roof and supporting structural beams taken out.

A few of the walls taken out. The rest come out too.

Detail of the sunken gardens, guest, and garage area.

Structure, sleeping baskets (so weird), and roof assemblage.

This is my current project. It's a public use kayak center at the South Turning Basin in Chicago. Here it's placed within the larger site.

This is just my concept model... the 3 drawings and 3 models are due later this week. It's made of chipboard and basswood.

This was our first project. We measured kayaks, drew them to scale, then made a positive and negative model of them at 1/4 scale from museum board. This measures over 4' long.

Party

It's an old post card of the building that I now live in. As in, no I don't live in a YMCA mens hotel - just a converted one.

Picturequote

"The harsh, useful thing of the world, from pulling teeth to digging potatoes, are best done by men who are starkly sober as so many convicts in the death-house, but the lovely and useless things, the charming and exhilarating things, are best done by men with, as the phrase is, a few sheets to the wind." - H.L. Mencken

This is a palladium print I made from a 3 3/4" x 2 1/2" negative I found at my parents house. It was printed on a hand-coated cotton rag paper. Palladium prints have a quality that can't be photographed or scanned. They have a texture and tonality very different from a typical gelatin-silver print. The person on the far right is my grandfather (Dad's dad) I'm pretty sure. Second from the left is Wilson who is now 91, and continuing left is Thad (fighter pilot MIA in WWII in the Pacific), Inez, and Charles.

Daguerreotype

Anonymous, French, Nude woman with cushion, c. 1855, daguerreotype, 5.9x6.7 cm

I found this in The Art of the Daguerreotype by Stefan Richter (p. 75). What I like about this photograph, other than the fact that it's a daguerreotype, is that candid, frank, and relaxed portraiture didn't really seem common place for another 100 plus years. Still today it's not the norm. I always feel very distanced from people in old photographs because they look so rigid and nothing like the people I encounter on a daily basis, but not so with this portrait.

Art Show

My friend Justin is having an art show this Friday from 6:30-9:30 at 1932 S Halsted, #408. I'll be showing a print there too, but unfortunately won't be in attendance.


Also, Justin is in the hospital with appendicitis. He called me once yesterday afternoon complaining of stomach pains and again at night to tell me he was in the hospital getting his appendix removed, so there's that. He at Palos Hospital if anyone is interested in visiting him. He should be out Friday morning in time for the show.

More Cool Art

This is an awesome photographer by the name of Richard Ross. Hat tip: Steve Urich

Here's an art blog called Arrested Motion that has a ton of great artists on it.

This is Mark Wagner. He makes collages out of $1 bills. Here's an interview with him. Awesome stuff.

Poster Artists

My friend Justin started screen printing a while ago and has become quite popular and at the same time exposed me to this world where you can buy great original art for $25 or $30. Not too bad. Anyways, here are some of my favorite artists.

This is probably my favorite working artist at the moment. His name is Daniel Danger and he works out of San Francisco. Here's an interview with him and another impressive artist with a similar style, and he's an exhibit that both of them are in right now.

Here's a guy named Justin Myer that makes intaglio prints from photographs. Quite amazing.

These next three are probably the most prolific Chicago area printers, or at least the ones I tend to see the most. This is Jay Ryan. He's definitely the most famous gig poster screen printer out there.

This is Jay's wife Diane Sudyka. She also has some wonderful etchings and gig posters.

This is Dan Grzeca (pronounced Jetsah).

Here are some others too:

Jason Munn, The Small Stakes, minimalist but clean and well put together.

Nate Duval, just really original and all of his designs are quite different.

Bennet Holzworth, uses a letterpress to make very unique posters. I have the Modest Mouse one and it's amazing in person.

Picturequote

"Around the hero everything becomes a tragedy, around the demi-god a satyr-play; and around God everything becomes - what? Perhaps a 'world'? -" - Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 150

I've shown this image repeatedly here and here, but this is my first palladium print of it that I'm actually fairly happy with. In person the palladium print (also called a palladiotype) looks very different from a normal gelatin silver print. It is completely matte and has a much longer tonal range. Once I make some enlarged negatives I'll be able to show off the process a bit better than I currently can with a night photograph.


For those interested this was printed on 8x10 Bergger cotton rag paper using a mixture of palladium salts and ferric oxalate. It was then exposed under a UV lightbox, developed with potassium oxalate, and cleared with tetrasodium EDTA. The internegative and negative were made on Bergger BPFP-18 film which was blown up from a medium format (120mm) negative.

Picturequote

"We are cooling. We are not warming. The warming you see out there, the supposed warming, and I am using my finger quotation marks here, is part of the cooling process. Greenland, which is now covered in ice, it was once called Greenland for a reason, right? Iceland, which is now green." - Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele

Hilarious and kind of scary... Here's why they're actually named as such.

This image has nothing to do with anything, I just like it. This is the view off my rooftop.

Picturequote

"Cultivate poetry like sage, like a garden herb. Do not trouble yourself to get new things, wether clothes or friends. That is dissipation. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. If I were confined to a corner of a garret all my days, like a spider, the world would be just as large to me while I had my thoughts." - Henry Thoreau, journal entry age 33

This is the front of my families warehouse. When I was a little kid it seemed huge and dark and was full of wonderous machines whos purpose was a mystery to me. Now it seems small. It's a place where I go to work, to find useful purposes for the unuseful.

Picturequote

"If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something." - Kurt Vonnegut from A Man Without a Country

These are two 8x10 gelatin-silver prints I just made of the Art Institute's south garden last winter. It's quite possibly my favorite garden in the city.

Picturequote

"If you would understand anything, observe its beginning and its development." - Aristotle

This is the last cyanotype I printed. It's made from the 8x10 enlarged negative I made earlier. There are dozens of old processes used to make and print photographs. I'd like to try as many of them as possible, especially daguerreotypes. You have to place the image over heated mercury to expose the image... and it can't be duplicated... interesting. Anymore even the most popular printing process, gelatin silver, has more or less completely given way to digital. It makes sense though. Digital allows more people to own and use cameras.

I still have a lot to learn and more chemicals to acquire, but the tests are getting better.