Recently in Art Category

Here's an image I found recently that I thought people might get a kick out of: A parody I created of a Spin magazine cover which features my musical alter ego, DJ Snarky.

If I'm not mistaken, I created this in the late Spring/early Summer of 2003, right about the time I quit my job and was contemplating a move to Barcelona.

I recently discovered an interesting site called Medium Large. Its author is cartoonist, Francesco Marciuliano, who is more widely known for the syndicated, but relatively sedate strip, Sally Forth.

I think one of the more interesting series on this site is called Teenage Girl President. Marciuliano describes it as answering the question, "What if My So Called Life had nuclear strike capabilities?"

If you grew up reading Peanuts in the comics as a kid like I did, then you'll also get a hearty, but sick laugh out of Marciuliano's tribute to Charles Schulz in his Peanuts Gallery.

I was surfing YouTube the other day and found this amusing video:

I found some cool frost patterns on a window in my apartment. This is my interpretation of them:

By popular demand, here's a few alternative manga-style portraits of me...of course now I look like an acid tripping Doonesbury character:

I was surfing the net during my lunch break and I found this cool site called ABI-Station which creates a manga-style portrait of you. Okay, so the hair style is, shall we say generous, so this is more like me ten years ago than now, and the smile indicates a bit medicated with Vitamin P. Anyhow, it's still pretty cool.

This is what my friend Rob would categorize as a "Time Sucks" web site. Hope you enjoy!

Here's a few others from the collection of self-portraits I made this past weekend:

I've been feeling a little stressed out about work and a tad blue this holiday season, so I thought I'd do a couple of self-portraits. Don't worry, while these capture my mood over the last few weeks, I've finished the stressful projects at work and am looking forward to having some time off at Christmas and New Year's.

Images on this entry are Copyright ©2004 Alan T. Sloan.

Here's another image from my 1988 university photography class. This one was part of the set that included the bag of knives I posted back in July.

In previous portrait drawing classes, we've drawn on 18"x24" drawing pads. In this week's class we drew the subject on a much larger scale, we did a quick study sketch, divided it into four quadrants, and then drew each quadrant on an 18"x24" sheet. Here's what the my quadrants looked like:

Top left quadrant.		Top right quadrant.
Bottom left quadrant.		Bottom right quadrant.

And the four quadrants, roughly aligned look like this:

Among the photos I took on Saturday's Big Bug Birthday adventure were a series of four of two dragonflies mating. Here's a collage of those images:

Here's another photo I found in my attic before moving to Spain. This is from my 1988 college photography class. This project was about creating a series of photos that captured the personality of a subject without showing their face.

The subject was my brother, Peter.

I knew that I'd be working a lot in June so one of the things I did to try and maintain a balance between work and life was to sign up for a portrait drawing class at Cambridge Center for Adult Education.

This week was the third class and the first one where I made a drawing that I felt really looks like the person. In the first two classes we were all drawing the same model, but in Thursday night's class we set up our easels in a zig-zag pattern and drew our classmates. This is my rendering of Louise. Mercifully her hair kept flopping down over her eyes, so I didn't waste any time obsessing about drawing them. You'll have to take my word for it, she's got lovely eyes.

The image has an odd wave pattern in it because of the humidity's effect on the newsprint I used. Next class we're going to start using better quality paper. Newsprint is fine for sketching, but isn't thick enough to be reworked and is a pretty low archival quality.

Trying to keep from getting too bummed out by the four days of rainy weather and the pace of the job hunt, I turned this afternoon to making a collage from some photos I took at breakfast while out with my friend Amy and her kids a few months ago. This is her daughter, Natalie, who was seven and a half at the time:

Click on the image for a larger version.

"The art of a people is a true mirror to their minds."

- Jawaharial Nehru (1889-1964)

I found this quote on a job web site this morning and thought it was worth sharing. For those of you who don't remember your world history, Nehru was the first Prime Minister of Independent India and architect of its foreign policy.

This quote gave me reason to reflect on how moved I felt when I toured Antoni Gaudi's architectural wonders in Barcelona last October. I still think about the beauty and diversity of his works, particularly how they stand in contrast to the rest of Barcelona's far less inspiring architecture, let alone the stale trends of cookie cutter architectural blandness that drive us to complete the paving of America.

My friend Liz has been kind enough to host me at her apartment in Dover, NH for the last few weeks, so this week I finished a little thank you present by way of making a pair of Christmas presents for her to give her new boyfriend, Andy. He's a huge Boston Bruins fan, so I made a pair of faux Bruins memoribilia items (click on them for a closer look):

Here's another set of photos found in my attic this past week. These are also from my 1988 college photography class. This project used multiple images--being one set of photos I took of my friend Kelly overlayed on a set of photos I took of myself. This series is a dream sequence...though I don't remember now who was dreaming of whom. I'm pretty sure it was me haunted by her.

Here's two photos I found while digging through my attic this week. These photos are from my college photography class in 1988. This project's subject had to be people. As I recall I had read about and seen several photos by Cindy Sherman, a famous photographer who dresses herself in different costumes to create dramatic images and thought-provoking scenes. I wasn't prepared to do anything quite so serious, so I used it as an opportunity to experiment with some different costumes to show some aspects of my personality.

The first image is me in a Boy Scout uniform. I was in Scouts for over 11 years, so this is an authentic uniform.

I found this photo while cleaning out a box in my attic the other morning.

When I saw it I thought I recognized some similarities between this photo of me from 1990 and the cover of Jack Johnson's 2000 CD, Brushfire Fairy Tales. The photo of me was taken by my friend Debra while we were visiting Letchworth State Park. Mr. Johnson's photographer has nothing to worry about, I don't think Debra will want to sue him for using her photo composition.

"Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas."
—Georges Braque

On the way home from celebrating my niece Rowan's birthday on Wednesday, I saw this amazing cloud formation and felt compelled to photograph it. I think it's a stunning image:

This image appeals to me because of the feeling of an aerial landscape photo made by the foam floating on the water. The shadows cast by the branch add to this effect as well. I also like the touch of color provided by the green leaves floating in the bottom left corner.

Camera
Olympus Camedia C-3040 Zoom

Location
Broadmoor Wildlife Sanctuary
Massachusetts Audubon Society
Natick, MA

This image appeals to me on two levels: first the sense of primordial nature that ferns invokes; and second, the contrast between the color of the ferns and the maple and oak leaves in the background.

Camera
Olympus Camedia C-3040 Zoom

Technical Notes
I've lightened the foreground using Adobe Photoshop because the flash on my digital camera wasn't strong enough to create a proper fill-flash without washing out the detail at the base of the ferns. A side-effect of this was that the ferns' stems and tips now seem to have a glow.

Location
Broadmoor Wildlife Sanctuary
Massachusetts Audubon
Natick, MA

This image appeals to me because the deep blue fades to white at the horizon in both the sky and the water. I also like the curling action of the clouds.

Camera
Olympus Camedia C-3040 Zoom

Location
Broadmoor Wildlife Sanctuary
Massachusetts Audubon Society
Natick, MA

This image appeals to me because it shows a new growth of pine trees in an old growth pine stand.

Camera
Olympus Camedia C-3040 Zoom

Technical Notes
I've lightened the foreground using Adobe Photoshop because the flash on my digital camera wasn't strong enough to create a proper fill-flash.

Location
Broadmoor Wildlife Sanctuary
Massachusetts Audubon Society
Natick, MA

This image appeals to me because its angle gives the appearance of the tree projecting into the sky while the vines tether it to the earth.

Camera
Olympus Camedia C-3040 Zoom

Technical Notes
As you can probably guess, I've altered this image using Adobe Photoshop to punch up the color of the sky and subsequently draw out contrast between the vine wrapping around the tree trunk and the tree's branches.

Location
Broadmoor Wildlife Sanctuary
Massachusetts Audubon Society
Natick, MA