This weekend the air felt Fall-ish. It’s my favorite season and it’s on its way. Here’s an old piece, but one I don’t think I’ve yet put up here. Let’s hear it for Fall.
Fall
5
Yearly Archives: 2009
Work
I’ve been busy working on stuff that wouldn’t be that interesting to post here. Also, some of the things have non-disclosure agreements attached. Here’s something I did a little while ago. I’ll post again soon. Hopefully, something so cool it will knock your socks off. But until then, here’s this.
Here was the idea the client liked.
She suggested a few changes, and because time was tight I just incorporated them into the final.
A note about the color. Originally I planned to do my foundation piece in sepia tones with oil paint, but the deadline was tight, so I had to do it in watercolor. I had a bottle of magenta watercolor meant for use in an airbrush. The pigments are really saturated. Anyway, I took a look at the bottle and thought, “I haven’t touched this bottle since I got it in 1996. I should use some of it.” So I used the magenta to do a value watercolor painting. Clearly a mistake. I thought it would be easy to change the hue digitally to something nice, but for some reason the darks in the painting burned out completely when I adjusted the slider. At any rate, I now have a super saturated princess color watercolor ready to burn the eyes out of any one that dares dig through my production art stack.
Despite the fact that the painting looks like it belongs in the purse of an 8 year old strawberry shortcake fanatic, I somehow subconsciously painted in what look like monster’s eyes in the tree. The client pointed it out, and I corrected it in the final.
Here’s the final. The client liked it, but I fear I spent most of my creative energies trying to pull the thing from the brink rather than pushing it to some place really great.
I’ll try to post again real soon.
Quick Sketch
I’m working on a painting that’s giving me trouble, and it’s not yet good enough to post, so I did this for the blog today.
I wish the likeness were a little more dead on, but it’s Jimmy Stewart from the greatest movie ever made: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
You think I’m licked! You all think I’m licked. Well I’m not licked!
Abe Lincoln
It’s a festival of Lincoln!
Underpainting
Here’s my underpainting for Lincoln. I pasted my drawing to a masonite panel, and painted over the feet, because I felt the little boxy body was sort of silly. I think I might try some color glazes tomorrow. I will most certainly mess it up beyond recovery so I captured a shot before I began.
Here’s the deal after it dried enough to scan:
Lincoln Drawing
I did this drawing today, and erased out some quick highlights from a photoshop layer. I love the asymmetrical nature of Lincoln’s face. His face seems to bare the burdens of a man that, according to William Herndon, “God rolled through his fiery furnace.”
Edwin Markham penned these words for the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922:
The color of the ground was in him, the red earth,
The smack and tang of elemental things.
Sprung from the West,
He drank the valorous youth of a new world,
The strength of virgin forest braced his mind,
The hush of spacious prairies still his soul.
His words were oaks in acorns;
And his thoughts
Were roots that firmly gripped the granite truth.
Stigma Vs Dogma
This pic attempts to illustrate Stigma beating Dogma in the political realm. It’s not a very successful experiment. First of all, I found that writing “Stigma” and “Dogma” on the boxing gloves drew inadequate attention to the point. The texts were super small, and I eventually got rid of them. Overall, I intended to do an underpainting that I could then color in photoshop. I was too eager to begin painting and I left some drawing mistakes that came back later to haunt me. But it’s an open disclosure blog. So welcome to my problem pieces.
Pelosi
Nancy Pelosi is in the headlines again for demonizing opponents to national healthcare. She says that the events seem manufactured. As evidence she charges that the people are bringing swastikas to the town meetings.
Not surprisingly, Jonah Goldberg questions such a tactic.
“How does that work? What public relations genius says: ‘OK, we need these protests to seem like an authentic backlash of real Americans. Make sure everyone has enough Nazi paraphernalia!’”
(If you like you can read his full editorial here).
Thank you Ms. Pelosi, you’ve made the news fun again! Anyway, this is a sketch I did tonight, with highlights in photoshop.
Stewart Eats America For Breakfast
Time Magazine held a poll on their website. The question was, “Now that Walter Cronkite has passed on, who is America’s most trusted newscaster?”
The options were Katie Couric, Charlie Gibson, Jon Stewart, and Brian Williams. Jon Stewart won by a landslide.
Okay, granted. The poll is stupid. Jon Stewart isn’t technically in competition with the other mainstream networks. The other networks are likely to cannibalize each other’s votes and push Stewart ahead. Also, it’s an online poll and therefore skewed to the Daily Show’s younger audience, in contrast to the 60-year-old median audiences of the mainstream networks’ Nightly News shows.
Still, it’s a bit frightening to be reminded that there are people who regard Jon Stewart as the King of the News. The biggest problem with The Daily Show, and The Colbert Report for that matter, is that they serve as news for people who don’t like news. That’s not an exaggeration is it? The fact that the shows are slanted towards the liberal side is not in itself problematic. The problem is that people watch the shows and take their political stance with an eye to fashion, not good policy. Colbert’s entire show is dedicated to the stigmatization of conservatism. A thinking person can appreciate Colbert’s humor and still be independent of the stigma. Unfortunately, non-thinking college students eager to sit at the political equivalent of the “cool kids table” advance the stigma without analyzing the issues. By acting like the counterpoints are too ridiculous to consider, people never consider the counterpoints.
Stewart’s show is particularly troublesome, not because it’s an irreverent editorial show. It’s troublesome because people treat it with authority. Jon Stewart has managed to import middle-school popularity dynamics into a discussion of national politics. He sometimes dismisses an entire issue by merely rolling his eyes. The audience guffaws and then moves on without having to think. Again, if you can pour contempt on an opposing viewpoint, you don’t have to refute it. To see a sycophantic audience in action, take a look at this interview of Jonah Goldberg. Stewart says in the interview, both that he doesn’t understand what Jonah talks about, and that Jonah is misrepresenting progressive causes. The audience cheers for both sentiments–Jon Stewart doesn’t understand (cue audience), and yet Stewart does and Jonah doesn’t (cue audience). Dismissal is an effective technique for people who desire an approved stance rather than an informed stance. What’s more annoying is that the Daily Show viewers, who have never considered the issues, are confident in their criticism or praise of an idea.
Though Jon Stewart enjoys the benefits of his authority, he denies its legitimacy. He’s sort of like Jerry Springer in that he shrugs his shoulders and says, my show’s ridiculous. It’s a disarming way to distance himself from his show’s haughty proclamations. He used to say that he came on after a show where puppets made crank calls. The inference was that anyone who takes his show seriously need not themselves be taken seriously. Yet he seems equivalent to a man who “satirically” sits on a street corner with a cup, but still expects money. After the hit piece Stewart ran on CNBC’s Jim Cramer, Stewart’s “I don’t take myself too seriously” shrug, seems a little less convincing.
In the style-over-substance-age of television politics, someone as likeable as Jon Stewart is here to stay. So I did this picture of him.
Ayurvedic Remedies
I read an article about Deepak Chopra last night. What a smug, self-righteous, frustrating man.
He promotes Ayurveda, which is the ancient traditional medicine that can cure anything as long as you believe in it.
Chopra is a multimillionaire celebrity doctor that provokes oohs and ahs over his remedies and Pop Hindu lectures. Many pay him money to hear him say that they’re god–mostly middle aged women who watch Oprah. In addition to his best selling books, he also occasionally writes anti-american screeds on the Huffington post.
He’s a shrewd business man who equips the “Me Generation” with the tools for self worship, and he’s managed to convince Americans that in order to fulfill our health and wealth desires, we need to tap into the traditional folk medicine of India. That’s right. INDIA!
Seems odd, right? Because if you want to buy magical Ayurvedic rocks and things from a stall in Bombay, you have to step over diseased, impoverished folks in the streets. Despite India’s pervasive Ayurvedic remedies, it still struggles with poverty and health problems. In 1999 during the peak of Chopra’s fame, the World Health Organization estimated that 700,000 Indians died of diarrhea. That’s 1,600 deaths a day. In addition, this year CNN reported that a gene mutation among non-smoking, vegetarian, Indians has caused a radical increase in heart disease. That’s right, Chopra is importing the secrets to health and wealth that work so well for the folks in India.
Is it important for Ayurvedic medicine to actually work, or is it cool enough for it be pagan, foreign, alternative, and old? A scientific study in the Journal of the America Medical Association (Saper et al., JAMA (2004)292:2868-2873) found:
“One of 5 Ayurvedic HMPs [herbal medicine products] produced in South Asia and available in Boston South Asian grocery stores contains potentially harmful levels of lead, mercury, and/or arsenic. Users of Ayurvedic medicine may be at risk for heavy metal toxicity, and testing of Ayurvedic HMPs for toxic heavy metals should be mandatory.”
Thomas Wheeler, Ph.D., reported on an Ayurvedic AIDS clinic in San Francisco. Apparently, the physicians told patients to stop taking their regular medicine and instead take the herbal remedies they sold the patients for $500 a month. Laboratory analyses revealed that some “herbal preparations were composed of plant material, fungus, feces, and bacteria, which may have caused the gastrointestinal problems reported by the patient. At least one patient died.
The claims of alternative medicine, particularly Ayurveda, are so radical that they beg to be tested. I mean, if washing your eyes in your own saliva can cure cataracts, why not test and promote such a remedy? Ten years ago, the government began testing herbal and alternative health remedies. It has cost taxpayers 2.5 billion dollars. Which remedies work? According to an AP story last month “… the disappointing answer seems to be that almost none of them do. Echinacea for colds, Gikgo biloba for memory. Glucosamine and chondroitin for arthritis. Black cohosh for menopausal hot flashes. Saw palmetto for prostate problems. Shark cartilage for cancer. All proved no better than dummy pills in big studies funded by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. The lone exception: ginger capsules may help chemotherapy nausea.”
What interests me is how Deepak Chopra knows which Ayurvedic secrets to uncover to his American audiences and which to leave covered?
Matt Labash writes that in ancient Ayurveda “Most diseases were originally attributed to demons; often they were cured with the wearing of gems and the use of fragrances…. Poor digestion was treated with goat feces prepared by washing with urine. Got constipation? Drink milk — with urine. Male potency was supposedly enhanced by 216 different kinds of enemas, including the testicles of peacocks, swans, and turtles. If that didn’t work, one was supposed to follow up with an enema of urine. Hemorrhaging was a nice break from the regimen, since it was treated with an enema of the fresh blood of a rabbit, dear, cock, or any one of numerous other beasts. Epilepsy was treated with ass urine.”
American New Agers already believe that demons find certain fragrances and gems revolting, but what they need to understand is that demons really really hate urine. Unfortunately, American audiences are kept from the less sexy Ayurvedic treatments. Think of all the healing that could occur.
.
NEW AGE DOCTOR:
What seems to be the problem?
HOLLYWOOD CELEBRITY:
I’m having nosebleeds.
NEW AGE DOCTOR:
Interesting. How long has this occurred?
HOLLYWOOD CELEBRITY:
About a week. I think it might be the change in the weather or–
NEW AGE DOCTOR:
Demons in your nose?
HOLLYWOOD CELEBRITY:
Or demons in my nose.
NEW AGE DOCTOR:
Normally, I would suggest that you rinse your nose with urine to repel the demons, but I think your case is more severe.
HOLLYWOOD CELEBRITY:
What do you suggest?
NEW AGE DOCTOR:
I’m … writing out a prescription for …
HOLLYWOOD CELEBRITY:
A chicken blood enema?
NEW AGE DOCTOR:
Yes, you will need to acquire a chicken, and then drain it’s blood into a bag…
HOLLYWOOD CELEBRITY:
Can’t I just close my eyes, and fix myself? Go within?
NEW AGE DOCTOR:
Like I said, I think your case is pretty severe. Chicken blood enemas are the product of ancient wisdom.
HOLLYWOOD CELEBRITY:
There’s no pagan spirit mantra? No herbs to brew? I thought I was god. Can’t I just align myself with the universal consciousness and believe in myself.
NEW AGE DOCTOR:
Nope. Chicken blood enema.
HOLLYWOOD CELEBRITY:
I don’t know.
NEW AGE DOCTOR:
Oprah swears by it.
HOLLYWOOD CELEBRITY:
Why didn’t you say so!