{"id":5909,"date":"2015-05-23T21:17:06","date_gmt":"2015-05-24T05:17:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=5909"},"modified":"2015-05-23T21:41:52","modified_gmt":"2015-05-24T05:41:52","slug":"art-show-new-paintings-fujifilm-x100t","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2015\/05\/23\/art-show-new-paintings-fujifilm-x100t\/","title":{"rendered":"Art Show. New Paintings. Fujifilm X100T Camera."},"content":{"rendered":"

My art show at Borderlands opened this week. It\u2019ll run through July 6. We\u2019ll have a reception part on Saturday, June 13, at 3 in the afternoon. We\u2019ll hang out, I\u2019ll do a reading from Journals 1990-2014<\/em>, and give a little tour of the paintings.<\/p>\n

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\n Click for a larger version of the poster.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

And here\u2019s a panorama shot of one of the walls in the Borderlands cafe. <\/p>\n

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\n Click for a larger version of the pan shot.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Many thanks to Rudy, Jr. and fellow Monkeybrainer Devin for helping me set up. No way could I hang all these paintings alone. You can find prices on my Paintings <\/a>page.<\/p>\n

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\n \u201cThe Sage and the Messenger\u201d\u009d oil on canvas, May, 2015, 28\u201d\u009d x 22\u201d\u009d. Click for a larger version of the painting.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Over the last couple of weeks, I finished two new paintings for the show. The Sage and the Messenger <\/em>relates to a short story I\u2019m working on with Bruce Sterling. One of the characters is sage or hermit who lives inside in a hollowed out spot high up in the trunk of a sequoia tree. And a artificial biotweaked organism comes to bring a message to him. Wanting to lure him into a wild and hare-brained adventure. The messenger iss a thing like biological drone, or like a flying jellyfish. I like the interplay of the expressions among the sage, the jellyfish and the squirrel.<\/p>\n

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\n \u201cCells\u201d\u009d oil on canvas, May, 2015, 24\u201d\u009d x 24\u201d\u009d. Click for a larger version of the painting.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

About four days before the show I dove into Cells<\/em>. I had no real idea what I\u2019d paint when I started. First I did an underpainting in acrylic with a heavy gel medium to get some texture, and to have some extra color glowing through. But I don\u2019t like how flat acrylic looks, so I layered an oil painting on top of that. I outlined some blobs in my original painting, and then filled them in to look like living cells. I used a fan brush for the halo effect, and I flicked the bristles of the fan brush to add some life with splattered dots.<\/p>\n

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A big push.<\/p>\n

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My old Sony RX100 camera died this month. The telescoping zoom lens seized up and won\u2019t properly go in and out. I\u2019ve had thee or four pocket digital cameras die in this same way. The lens is a definite weak point. When it breaks, it costs almost $200 to fix, so it\u2019s questionable if that\u2019s worth doing. So I decided to get a small \u201cprime lens\u201d\u009d camera, that is, a camera with a non-zooming lens. So there\u2019s not the telescoping crap to break. <\/p>\n

I sold a couple of paintings this month, so I splurged and went for a Fujifilm X100T. It\u2019s a compact digital camera (despite being called Fujifilm), solid, great lens, solid metal frame, and with a nice old-school look, kind of like a vintage Leica M-Series camera, but at relatively reasonable price. Not a pocket camera, but it\u2019s small and light.<\/p>\n

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So I\u2019m going around taking lots of pictures. Some reviewers like to gush that the camera is so good that they use the X100T images just as they came out of the camera. Me, I pretty much run every single shot though Lightroom and\/or Photoshop. That\u2019s my work flow. That way I can crop, possibly lighten the shadows, maybe sharpen the image or warm the tone. But this particular shot is right out of the camera. A sweet shop.<\/p>\n

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I call this terrifying \u201chand puppet\u201d\u009d Cousin Millie. I\u2019ve been showing her to my kids and the grandkids for years.<\/p>\n

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And the camera is automatic enough that you can hand it to someone that the shot comes out good. I\u2019m till learning the ins and outs of fine points of the controls. The (online PDF) manual is well over two hundred pages long.<\/p>\n

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The thing about walking around looking for shots is that I dig below the smooth familiar reality to find little bits of oddness. A dial with numbers. What might this mean?<\/p>\n

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You can never go wrong photographing street-workers\u2019 markings on the asphalt.<\/p>\n

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Midnight in the china closet. The X100T really fills out the three-dimensional space.<\/p>\n

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Exultant in son Rudy\u2019s car, riding through the Mission after my paintings\u2026with my new shooter in hand.<\/p>\n

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I\u2019ve photographed these phone\/electric\/cable lines a dozen or more times over the years. I think this one is better than usual. Thank you Fujifilm!<\/p>\n

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My grad-school friend Jim Carrig\u2019s son Eamon showed up the other day. I took him to San Jose\u2019s finest fast food stand, named simply Falafel. It\u2019s on Stevens Creek Blvd near Bascom Ave. They\u2019ve been there since 1966. Wonderful, wonderful falafel. Green inside, freshly cooked and mashed beans, crisp on the outside, hot.<\/p>\n

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Eamon Carrig himself. He\u2019s started a company that\u2019s designing small robotic sail boats. Sailing drones for the high seas.<\/p>\n

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Weirdly enough a woman reporter named Leona was at Falafel. She’s from LA, but is writing an article on falafel restaurants in California for Brownbook magazine, published in Dubai! Once the sheiks hear about Falafal of San Jose they’ll be jetting in no doubt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My art show at Borderlands opened this week. It\u2019ll run through July 6. We\u2019ll have a reception part on Saturday, June 13, at 3 in the afternoon. We\u2019ll hang out, I\u2019ll do a reading from Journals 1990-2014, and give a little tour of the paintings. Click for a larger version of the poster. And here\u2019s […]<\/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-5909","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\/5909","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=5909"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5909\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5920,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5909\/revisions\/5920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}