{"id":509,"date":"2008-05-09T09:32:28","date_gmt":"2008-05-09T17:32:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2008\/05\/09\/new-paintings\/"},"modified":"2008-05-12T10:17:51","modified_gmt":"2008-05-12T18:17:51","slug":"new-paintings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2008\/05\/09\/new-paintings\/","title":{"rendered":"Photos of New Paintings"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I put some more of my paintings up on Imagekind<\/a> where you can buy prints of 34 of them and — tada! — you can now buy them as inexpensive greeting cards!<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s a major hassle getting the pictures into digital form. I reshot some of the older ones too, by the way, to enhance the resolution. I photograph them on high-end slide film with my old \u201csafari model\u201d\u009d (i.e. green) Leica R3 single-lens reflex on a tripod, get the film devloped at Superior Color Lab in the Willow Glen neighborhood of San Jose, then send the slides to this nice place, My Special Photos<\/a>, in Los Altos up the peninsula that scans them at 4,000 dpi to 16-bit deep color TIF files with effectively 24 megapixels per image, using a high-end Nikon scanner. <\/p>\n

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And then I PhotoShop the hell out of the images to make them pop. Speaking of PhotoShop, I just got CS3 and am playing a little with the HDR (High Dynamic Range) gimmick where you can fuse several images taken at different exposures so as to get better highlights and shadow areas; the image above is made of three exposures. The one below is a better picture, compositionally, using just one exposure, though it\u2019s not all that sharp and maybe I over-PhotoShopped the color. Both shot at Castle Rock Park.<\/p>\n

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Every step of the way, in turning my paintings into digital files, I\u2019m dogged by uncertainty and worry; the most maddening thing is that at the end of the road, I\u2019ll often feel that the original photo I shot wasn\u2019t as good as it could have been in terms of lighting. Glare is a problem, as is over or under exposure, even when I shoot bracket shots. <\/p>\n

In any case, I’ve come to accept that the final colors are more or less arbitrary, with only a casual relation to the original. ‘s all PhotoShoppable. But bad glare or a blown-out negative is hard to compensate for.<\/p>\n

My friend Mimi was kidding me about “learning to suffer for my art.” Uploading the 80 megabyte files to Imagekind is a hassle too, I might add, it takes about an hour per file, and doesn’t always work.<\/p>\n

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I\u2019m feeling a little frazzled these days, as I\u2019ve had a frikkin\u2019 cold for three weeks, which gets depressing. Also I miss the \u201cnarcotic moment of creative bliss\u201d\u009d that I get from writing. Now and then a photograph gives me a tiny hit. PhotoShop CS3 has this nice FilterDistort|Lens Correction filter that lets you get rid of barrel and keystone distortion in a shot of something rectangular like the frame above. I love neon martini signs.<\/p>\n

It would be simpler to shoot my paintings with a heavy-duty SLR digital camera, of course, as then I could right away see what I’d shot, and I wouldn’t have to deal with two separate photo labs. But (a) I don\u2019t have one, and (b) if I did, the current typical 12 megapixel size would be about half of the 24 megapixel I get via the hig-res scan, although it could be that the crispness would be just as good if I was doing it digitally, also I could be sure I got the framing and exposure right. It could well be that the slide to digital conversion puts in more noise than you\u2019d have if you shot straight to digital and just did a resampling to raise the size.<\/p>\n

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I do love using that old Leica. Actually you can get an adapter to put Leica lenses onto Canon EOS <\/a>bodies, although then you have to do manual focusing. The lower end bodies are plastic, which I hate the feel of, but you can get a magnesium body Canon 5D for under $2K, or a Canon 1D Mark III with a 20 megabyte sensor for maybe $5K, but that’s really a lot of money to spend on something I might not use that much.<\/p>\n

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In practice, I really like shooting with my pocket SONY Cybershot 8 Megapixel T100. If I have a camera in my pocket all the time, I get lots of shots, and if I have to put pounds-heavy camera around my neck, I hardly use it. And, after all, mostly I just use my photos for my blog at some really low pixel count, like 2 or 3 megapixels. Of course if I got into selling prints I could open up a whole new world of effort…<\/p>\n

Anyway here\u2019s descriptions of the five latest paintings of mine that you can buy prints of.<\/p>\n

31. Mossy Trees <\/h3>\n

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Acrylic on canvas, 18" x 24", November, 2007.<\/p>\n

I got into an en plein air<\/em> thing again in the sunny winter of 2007. I wore a paint stained overcoat and wedged my paints into a knapsack and strapped a canvas to that. It was great to be all covered in paint clothes with a knapsack. I looked like a bum. People looked askance.<\/p>\n

On a ridge in the Castle Rock park above Los Gatos and Saratoga I found some trees that were completely covered with fronds of moss. The sun was going down in the west over the Pacific Ocean, edging the mossy trees with brilliant yellow-green. The tree\u2019s a little like a woman\u2019s legs, too, very fertile. To pep up the picture, I added an eye. I like to wrap my paintings around, painting on the edges so I don\u2019t have to frame them. I put another eye on the left edge, though you can\u2019t see it in this image.<\/p>\n

It was beautiful here. I was thinking of a drawing by Hieronymus Bosch were he sketches an eye on the ground and an ear on a tree.<\/p>\n

32. Giant\u2019s Head <\/h3>\n

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Acrylic on canvas, 18" x 24", December, 2007.<\/p>\n

Like \u201cMossy Trees,\u201d\u009d \u201cGiant\u2019s Head\u201d\u009d is a painting I started outdoors in Castle Rock Park near Saratoga, California. This particular rock is called California Ridge. I circled around on a narrow ledge to get to this vantage point. I was somewhat worried about falling off, there was a hundred foot drop to the ground. I painted my hand in there, like clutching at the rock to show that I was scared.<\/p>\n

The rock itself reminded me of the profile of Homer Simpson. There were a lot of little lichen patches on it, I just tried to suggest those with some spots of color. That white line in the sky is a jet contrail. The green of the trees was really lovely, it felt good being alone up here on the ledge. I didn\u2019t have room to stay very clean and I got a lot of paint on myself.<\/p>\n

33. The Muse <\/h3>\n

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Acrylic on canvas, 24" x 18", January, 2008.<\/p>\n

My wife was out of town for a week visiting our daughter in New York, and I took my knapsack of paints and a canvas out to a cliff overlooking Four Mile Beach north of Santa Cruz, California. This spire of rock was probably part of a natural bridge many years ago. I often walk along the beach to this spot, it\u2019s usually deserted and very beautiful. You don\u2019t see any sign of human activity in any direction. <\/p>\n

This was the first time I\u2019d gotten onto the cliff right above the rock. It was a very windy day, and I found a depression in the cliff, a little grassy dell, and I settle in there. I particularly wanted to get the shape of the long, breaking dark wave near the horizon. A pelican flew past and I got a digital photo of him. I wished my wife were there with me.<\/p>\n

When I got home, I kind of had to laugh at the inadequacy of the few daubs of paint I\u2019d made—compared to the joyful, living seascape that I\u2019d been looking at. It\u2019s insane. You\u2019re daubing ground up bits of stone onto a cloth and hoping to capture the physical world. But I did two more layers on the painting and finally I was happy with it.<\/p>\n

To liven it up, I printed out a large image of the pelican I\u2019d scene, also an image of my wife, and I slid those images around on the canvas until the composition looked right. And then I outlined those spots and painted copies of the images. I wasn\u2019t sure I could do a human face—and the woman doesn\u2019t really look that much like my wife. I think of her as \u201cThe Muse.\u201d\u009d When I go out alone in nature, that\u2019s who I\u2019m hoping to hear from: the muse.<\/p>\n

34. Spacetime Donuts <\/h3>\n

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Acrylic on paper, 17" x 13", April, 2008.<\/p>\n

In April of 2008, I arranged for a small press to reprint two of my early science fiction novels, Spacetime Donuts <\/em>and The Sex Sphere<\/em>. As part of the deal, they agreed to let me design the covers.<\/p>\n

Spacetime Donuts <\/em>is about a somewhat punk-like young mathematician who finds a way to shrink down so small that he wraps around the scale axis and gets big. Scale turns out to be circular, and spacetime is in some sense like a donut. I wrote this novel in 1979, and it can be argued that this was one of the very first cyberpunk science-fiction novels. The characters in the book plug their brains into computers, which is why I have that wire coming out of his neck. <\/p>\n

He\u2019s wearing an earring that\u2019s a variation on the W.A.S.T.E. symbol in Thomas Pynchon\u2019s novel The Crying of Lot 49<\/em>. As it turns out, the book\u2019s plot resembles this symbol. I had fun making this image really pop with cadmium red and cadmium yellow.<\/p>\n

35. The Sex Sphere <\/h3>\n

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Acrylic on canvas, 14" x 18", April, 20087.<\/p>\n

In April of 2008, I arranged for a small press to reprint two of my early science fiction novels, Spacetime Donuts <\/em>and The Sex Sphere<\/em>. As part of the deal, they agreed to let me design the covers.<\/p>\n

The Sex Sphere<\/em> is about a being from the fourth dimension named Babs. Her intersection with our 3D space looks like parts of a woman, squeezed together and rounded off. She manipulates some of the characters into setting off a terrorist A-bomb in Florence, Italy. You can see the mushroom cloud in the background. I liked painting this, as it\u2019s so intense and cartoony and surreal. I think the sex sphere looks a little scary.<\/p>\n

Originally this painting was going to be a landscape looking out over Silicon Valley. I went up on St. Joseph\u2019s Hill with a canvas and paints and started the picture there with my painter friend Vernon Head. Vernon knows my working habits by now, and he knew something weird was going to show up in the foreground. For awhile I wasn\u2019t sure what it should be, but when I realized I needed a cover image for The Sex Sphere<\/em>, I was ready to go.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Click here to see an earlier blog description of my first thirty paintings<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I put some more of my paintings up on Imagekind where you can buy prints of 34 of them and — tada! — you can now buy them as inexpensive greeting cards! It\u2019s a major hassle getting the pictures into digital form. I reshot some of the older ones too, by the way, to enhance […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=509"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}