Is fractal art ‘button-pushing’? Is photography, come to that? What is art — does it only count when you have developed some skill… whether in pushing the right buttons or in some other way?
I found a button-pushing discussion on deviantArt just now!
A couple of years ago I wrote a post called How Do We Define Art? but maybe someone has fresh insight on all these weighty questions… 
(Splutter… a slap of seawater down the wrong way).
A little sea picture from Bryce 5.5 (Mac version):
It looks a bit bare… no boats, birds, swimmers or paddling dogs! No seaweed or barnacle-encrusted rocks. No planes in the sky with vapour trails, nor even a single rainbow.
But it took me all today and all yesterday to come up with something I was happy with!
I found that:
my sea waves didn’t look like waves;
the horizon left a bare-looking, cloudless gap above the waves… or the waves refused to go all the way to the horizon;
some materials and skies worked better than others… till something changed and I had to choose another;
reflections and shadows weren’t always where I wanted them, and I didn’t know how to pin them down (things can disappear completely if they move out of shot!);
the stars were either too gritty or too faint;
the comets were too faint;
the moon was too pink, and sometimes had a strange blue outline…
There’s no way I’m adding birds and boats; the waves are as much as I’m up to (and sometimes over my head)! But none of these woes have put me off. I’ll go through Robin Wood’s tutorials again; there’s a lot to grasp the first time round, but I notice that some things are already making more sense.
If you’re interested in trying it for yourself, Bryce 5.5 (for PCs and or Macs) can be downloaded free from CNET Downloads, or direct from the DAZ site. If it gets a bit hard, just dabble… it will start to come together in the end. Enjoying yourself is the most important thing.
I’ve a feeling it was Pete who said that blog posts are like buses. You wait for ages, and finally three come along at once. I try not to crowd them all together, so it can put me in a bit of a quandary.
Anyway, maybe I’ll just put this one in as a scheduled post, so I can type it now (right after publishing ‘Brycian Worlds‘) and it will come roaring up to the blogstop by itself later!
In town today I was feeling absolutely allrighto. No wooziness or giddiness or wanting to crawl into a dark shadow somewhere. And there were enough people around, so sometimes you really have no idea why on some occasions you feel woozy and want to go home, and other times you’re perfectly happy.
At least… I say there were enough people around, but I’m trying a bit hard to convince myself of that. We generally had plenty of elbow-room. When people started treading on our heels in one narrow little street, I got a tad unhappy again, but then we escaped into our new favourite coffee shop (the last one closed down) and I forgot all about it.
The only thing that it seems to positively confirm for me is my theory that I need long rests from things! The more I do something or go somewhere, the more stressed out I get. But if I take a break and stay at home for a while, and get really involved in some project of my own (like Bryce), then the next time I go out, it’s as though the ’stress slate’ has been wiped clean. “All good things in moderation”, they say!
Anyway… I bought an old record (see the following photo). The manager of the charity shop was sadly disappointed when she said something about Handel being on TV, if I was interested, and Mum popped up and gave away my guilty secret: “she only bought it for the picture!” And everybody rolled their eyes and sighed.
Whaaaatt?? A picture takes just as much work as a piece of music, and deserves as much appreciation… LOL.
(Click photo to see bigger size).
PS: When I went to upload the Handel photos, I reached round to attach my card reader to the Mac’s tail, and accidentally knocked something down behind the desk! I hadn’t seen it was there. It was a small glass pyramid (the one in the photo below).
It was such a solid, heavy thing, though, that it came down with a crash. I was worried it had smashed into smithereens, but when I crawled under the desk to get it, it was intact.
I think it was Mum who gave it to me, and it looks nice on window sills with the sunshine streaming through it, and then it gets in the way when you go to pull down the blinds. So it ends up not on the window sill; instead lurking in a dark, dusty corner behind the iMac.
Looking at it just now, I was thinking “but what is it FOR?”
From the expression on his face, I don’t think the Piggin is sure, either.
Piggin Paperweight!
Here we are, the latest news: Apple releases trio of long-awaited desktops.
Judging from the comments, there’s a certain amount of disappointment out there amongst the hoi polloi. My own question: where are the matte screens? My sister’s question: where’s SnowLeopard?
And why so dear? The other day I read something about prices being lower during recessions, and I said to Mum “so why is our recession different? Our prices seem to go up in a recession, not down…”
Mum said, “they will go down. Just wait. They will go down.”
“Apple put their prices up recently,” I said. “I read that it was because the prices of their components had gone up.” (?!! Why?)
“Then don’t pay those prices!” said Mum, sharply.
So… more waiting, for the prices to sink? How long will my Mac hold out? I get a lot of spinning beachballs. My ‘painting’ in wallpaper pictures is punctuated by little freezes and jumps of the cursor while the Mac processes something else. I’ve gone back to scooping files onto the external hard drives and deleting them off the computer, which is how I nearly lost 40 GB of digital art and scribblings a few months ago. At least this time I have two external drives.
Again, as I’m prone to headaches, I’m not happy about the glossy screens.
I apologize… the Mac hardware updates finally come out and all I can do is carp and stamp and have Diddumy tantrums.
The eagle-eyed amongst you might wonder what this news has to do with my dreams… typical Diddums, but how?
Well, it was quite strange. Last night I dreamed that I was busy making my wallpapers and taking cloud photos and reading my copy of ‘Digital Photography for Dummies’, and then the words ‘Ars Technica’ intruded themselves into my dream. I wasn’t quite sure what that was about, but said to myself that it sounded like the Latin for ‘art technics’ and probably had a lot to do with digital art.
I still wanted to know what it was about, and as dreams have a habit of disappearing, I kept repeating it to myself in my sleep, just so I would remember to check it out later. “Ars Technica…. Ars Technica…”
When I got up, I wandered downstairs to the kettle still murmuring, “Ars Technica, Ars Technica,” and Mum came into the kitchen but didn’t raise an eyebrow. She’s used to me…
Back upstairs with my coffee, I turned on the Mac and typed it into Google. It was such a strange term it couldn’t possibly come from anywhere, but you can type just about anything into Google and get a concrete result. It can be an interesting experiment.
The very first Google result was this: Ars Technica. “Ars Technica specializes in original news and reviews, analysis of technology trends, and expert advice on topics ranging from the most fundamental aspects…” (and there the Google description ran out of steam).
The second Google result was this: Infinite Loop – Ars Technica. If you looked more closely, it said ‘apple’ in the URL, but I was in a hurry, and didn’t notice.
The third Google result: Ars Technica – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. “Ars Technica (Latin for ‘Art of Technology’) is a technology-related website that caters to computer enthusiasts, …” (and there the description runs out again).
Art of Technology? So my dream translation wasn’t too far off! And I don’t remember hearing about or visiting this site before. Presumably I’ve read about it now and then but it never really showed up on my personal radar. It was just part of the surrounding sea.
I thought since I was there, I might as well read it. The main headlines didn’t look all that interesting. The only two to take my attention were:
2009 to be a nightmare for PC industry, says analyst
Pirate Bay: a guilty verdict is an attack on the Internet
Once, when trying out the ‘next random stumble’ button in StumbleUpon, I ended up on Pirate Bay. I got such a shock at the sight of that big black pirate ship that I sculled rapidly away on my little raft, wondering if anybody saw… and haven’t used the ‘random stumble’ button (or StumbleUpon itself) since!
And… if fewer people are going to be wanting desktop computers, prices should be coming down, not going up. Or so you would imagine.
I thought that was it. I might come back a few times, since it was now on my radar, but there wasn’t anything much there for me. But before I went away altogether, I looked at the Wikipedia entry. I got as far as the line “…regular columns (such as those relating to Linux and Mac OS X)…” and zoomed straight back to Ars Technica. Found a button that said Apple. Ended up on the Infinite Loop page (‘ars covers the world of apple’). Right at the top it said: “Rounding off another ‘Update Tuesday,’ Apple followed today’s sweeping desktop, router and AirPort Client upgrades with two software updates for users of Aperture, iLife ‘09, and iWork ‘09.”
“Sweeping desktop upgrades? Yesterday?” I thought — and we were off!
Thank you to Ars Technica, whose blog feed capabilities are second to none. I have just signed up to the Infinite Loop feed, as I can’t rely on your messages always reaching me in my dreams. In my blog feeds I usually sort feeds by how I came across the sites (WordPress Surf, Via Bloglinks etc) so how to file this one was a bit of a puzzler…
Been nosing around the charity shops again. I got more books… recently it’s usually been Dean Koontz, so today rang the changes.
Humour books:
Loosely Engaged by Christopher Matthew (Oxfam, £2.99)
Mrs Parkinson’s Law by C. Northcote Parkinson and illustrated by Robert Osborn (Oxfam, £2.49)
The Law of Delay by C. Northcote Parkinson and illustrated by Osbert Lancaster (Oxfam, £2.49)
Art books:
Photomosaics by Robert Silvers, edited by Michael Hawley (Oxfam, £1.49… got this a couple of days ago)
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain: How to Unlock Your Hidden Artistic Talent (c’mon out of there!) by Betty Edwards
Also in the photo: Pentax Supaclean microfibre cleaning cloth (local optician, £2.75)!
I liked the cheerful yellow… and I keep losing these things; there’s always just one hanging about while the rest have gone on holiday. I’ll put this one in my bedside drawer, and when I finally can’t find one anywhere, I’ll break it out. I like things to stay in their packages for a while, all shiny and new…
The photomosaics are lovely. Like many others, we’ve completed the odd photomosaic jigsaw. The Yoda is in one of the photomosaics in the book, and it’s incredible that you can see the bags under his eyes. There’s also one of Vincent Van Gogh, along with a quotation by him: “The more ugly, older, cantankerous, more ill and poorer I become, the more I try to make amends by making my colours more vibrant, more balanced and beaming.”
It was Mum who found the drawing book. She had been telling me the other day that there was a bit of news on the radio saying that men look at women with only the right side of their brains, whereas women look at men using both sides. She opened the drawing book, and it fell open at ‘Perceiving the Shape of a Space: The Positive Aspects of Negative Space.’
Ha.
This is also the source of the Bugs Bunny analogy, which I mentioned in my Negative Space post. I begin to realize, though, that negative space is always ‘the other’, depending on whatever you consider to be the ‘positive’ elements of the picture.
I wonder if Delilah looks at Samson with the left side of her brain as well as her right?
For Elizabeth’s writing challenge A Feeling of Harmony.
This is what I think… harmony comes when things are simple.
I had this thought lurking around yesterday when I was looking at the dA site for the first time in months. I had over 970 deviations waiting for me to view them… and this was after I had gone in and tweaked the settings to allow only some to get through to me.
There were comments, notifications, news articles, polls, journal posts (dA blog posts), notices of contests and contest winners. It’s often pleasant to feel surrounded by so much activity and life, but yesterday I couldn’t pause very long on anything. I glanced at about 80 of the deviations, scanned the news, skimmed 50 journals out of 250. Checked off all the notifications and messages. Two of my ‘colourings’ seem to be gaining a little more attention, even ending up in ‘glamour’ collections. Someone said she liked the colours of my last post. I like my last post too, but was impressed she had even looked, as the thumbnail is very dark and contrasty. What’s one dark thumbnail amongst thousands of bright and crisp ones?
I stopped long enough to comment on a fractal I really liked.
The profile pages have had some extensive tweaking by dA — I’ve not figured out the options yet, though there was a long news article explaining. I sort of ricochetted down it like a stone across water… trying to pay attention but not terribly involved. I figured I would come to each new thing gradually, and could come back to that page later.
Yes, there was so much there.
There was a journal entry from a fractal artist. She was expressing disappointment, disillusionment and a form of burn-out. She was not giving up or going away entirely, but she was withdrawing. She had to deal with too much and too many people, and hadn’t (she believed) made much headway in her own art, so she was going to disable comments and just upload the occasional item while she focused on her own attempts to improve.
One of her respondents said she’d taken time off herself, and had come back to such a backlog she felt she couldn’t post any work herself till she’s looked at everybody else’s.
Yes, that crossed my mind too. Everywhere, I saw words asking for some form of attention and involvement… do this; try that; view her photographs and his etchings; go to the chat room; join the club; nominate people; submit entries.
I felt sapped of all energy. You want to be involved in all this and to talk to everybody, and one person’s picture deserves as much attention as the next person’s, but it’s physically and mentally impossible. You realize you are at your best when you can pick out a few things and really concentrate on them. That’s when things hum along sweetly, and that, to my mind, is harmony. Peace, focus, natural communication and going with the flow. That will be the environment in which fractal artists don’t end up writing fractious posts about feeling split a thousand ways….
We can’t order this, though… people are like the tide. If we don’t want to be swamped, we have to organize our own boundaries, dams, sandbags etc. We have to choose our own paths. We don’t have to invite all of the water in, which we probably did to start with.
Harmony comes with simplicity… more is less… all that jazz. I’m sorry this post is so disjointed. The irony of it. 
Yesterday we were visiting my sister, who went out of the room for a few minutes. Mum and I were laughing when she came back in, and she asked curiously, “what are you talking about?”
“Negative space in art!” said Mum.
E (a dyed-in-the-wool scientist) rolled her eyes and we laughed again. Sound good, doesn’t it?
Mum asked if I had written on my blog about the book I bought, and what it said about negative space, and I said “no, but he uses it as a way of seeing things, he doesn’t put it forward as a picture about negative space.” Which I think was a large part of the problem for me… I had just come from a context where the fact that negative space was used in the picture was the important thing, and I wanted to know when could you view an image and say “look at the negative space?” Or when an image wouldn’t really count.
Surprised yesterday to find Misplaced Bracket in the following fairly heavy race group (click to enlarge).
Even the older Beanfrog isn’t in a group like that.
Apologies for missing out Frog Number 12… it was the way I had to crop it, without taking 3 screenshots just for one extra frog…
Misplaced Bracket was last of course, and all those pretty icons you see above him are the medals, luxury apartments, yachts, helicopter rentals and Superfrog placings sported by the other frogs or trainers. Today he had struggled up to 20th place, leaving the medalled Monkee last, so that’s not too bad.
Oh, and I have a newish frog. You have to look at this one and say “yes… that’s a picture of Negative Space!”
His (randomly allocated) powerboosters seem to fit in, somehow… Atom, Magnetism, Radiation. Could explain why he’s in a ‘heavy’ group… ha ha.
PS: this doesn’t usually happen, but I noticed there was no space between my post and the following ‘tags and categories’ line.
Ah… sorted!
The following thoughts are ramblings, straight out of my hat, and I’ve probably completely missed the point. Maybe someone out there has more experience with this topic and can offer a few helpful pointers?
I’ve been wrestling with the concept of Negative Space. I’m told that it’s taught at most basic art classes, and it humbles me to realize I was never at such classes (after leaving school). What I remember from school is very little; I don’t think they threw about such terms as ‘negative space’! They just said “please draw this old boot.”
There is doubtless very little ‘negative space’ in any of my fractal wallpapers. Someone (without seeing my work) mentioned ‘negative space’ the same evening I’d finished an abstract with ornate detail and vibrant colours in every pixel of it. The irony wasn’t lost on me. Perhaps I should have a sign above my desk saying, ‘Negative space? Not around here.’
Nevertheless, I’ve been on a mission to work out what it is and what relevance it has to my own work, so I’ve been Googling… and the more I read, the more confused I get. People post ‘examples’ of negative space, and I think to myself “but that doesn’t fit with the descriptions I’ve read.” Sometimes the negative space in such an example is so overwhelming, so in focus, so much part of the picture that it becomes the main subject. Meanwhile the main subject is insignificant and not that interesting, a bit like a fly on flat yellow paint. Is that an example of negative space?
(Brings to mind the lost swimmer in a storm-tossed sea at the end of The Perfect Storm. At first it focuses on the swimmer, then it draws back and back and back, so you see more and more of the sea, and slowly realize how huge and black that ’space’ is… the swimmer is just a dot; in fact, not visible any more. Where do you cross the boundary between the sea being the ‘negative space’ and the sea being the main subject? Perhaps the sea never was negative space).
I’m told it’s all right (though not obligatory) for a negative space to become more interesting than the positive space… but there has to be a good balance. What comprises a ‘good’ balance is left up in the air; possibly it depends on good composition and whatever you’re trying to do; trying to focus on.
OK, so I read somewhere that negative space, more traditionally, is a ‘non-distracting background’ that enhances the subject, and isn’t merely non-distracting.
I like that, but then you read about studies of objects such as chairs, where you draw the spaces in and around the chair, but not the chair itself. That goes beyond ‘background’… that, to me, is something else.
‘Negative space’ must be in most (or all) pictures, but is not necessarily good, in that you might have a photo of a child with a cluttered background. The clutter in general is as much ‘positive space’ as the child is, along with anything else that distracts or holds the attention… but that doesn’t mean there’s no negative space; just, probably, that it’s not a good example of it. The differentiations, then, are only in degrees of how well the negative space works, and how uncluttered and ‘clean’ the positive space is.
Maybe one person has a view of what negative space is, and uses the term to describe this, whereas someone else has a different use for it. I wonder if negative space isn’t just what it is… the area surrounding an object… whereas the relevance it has to art tend to shift. Perhaps asking people to draw the area around an object has helped them draw better or pay more attention to background and composition, but I wonder if defining negative space by the specific value you attach to it doesn’t confuse, rather than clarify.
I wonder if there aren’t more down-to-earth ways of expressing what an artist or photographer should be looking for and trying to do?
Mum told me just now that she remembered something from her own art classes — what she said was written down so it’s not half-remembered:
“When I was taught Art at school we were told that there was no such thing as an outline. There was only contrast between background and foreground — light and dark that made objects appear to us as having outlines — a trick of the mind. So a child draws a house [draws basic house] but that’s not how it works really.”
That fits in well with the concept of the background throwing the main subject into sharp relief in some cases, or ‘accentuating’ it, but I’m not sure how it fits in with the drawing studies of what are essentially outlines… the shapes of the background being observed through and around a chair, for example. I read somewhere that children are viewed as having an instinctive grasp of negative space when they are young, but adults seem to have lost the knack. What Mum was taught about the wrongness of childish houses flies in the face of that (or does it?) Perhaps it’s part and parcel of the same perceptions… or has nothing to do with it at all.
Probably at Mum’s school they talked about contrast and balance rather than ‘negative space’.
I brought up the subject of people drawing the space around rather than the actual object, and Mum frowned and said “I’m getting an arty headache. Maybe you should sit and stare at something till the background takes it over.”
An example of negative space I’ve seen mentioned on several sites is of Bugs Bunny running through a closed door, leaving only a Bugs Bunny shaped hole. Apparently the bunny-shaped space is the main subject, and the door is the negative space. (Though in other places I’ve seen photos of objects with designs cut in them, and the hole was described as being the negative space whereas the object with the hole in it was the positive space). A lot of people seem to find the Bugs Bunny example illuminating, but it just fogs me up even more. To me the door is the main subject… or rather, the door with a bunny-shaped hole in it is the main subject. Bugs Bunny has left the building, and isn’t the subject any more. The negative space, if any, would be anything else that was in the picture… carpet, wallpaper, lamps, table, anything you probably weren’t really looking at, but which sets the tone. Perhaps I haven’t ‘got’ it yet; perhaps my attention is on the wrong things, or I’ve conjured up the wrong picture in my imagination.
There are light moments in everything, however, and I smiled when I came across something by a blogger who said he tended to post about things he only had a certain amount of interest in, but stores away items of even greater interest because they needed to be explored in greater detail. And so they never get written up, or are eventually dealt with only sketchily. (Don’t I know the feeling?) He finished by claiming that readers should read the white space on his blog rather than the words themselves, as the real value lies in what isn’t there.
See A weblog in negative space…
This morning when I woke up, the song in my head was ‘The Space Between’ by Roxy Music. It’s still there.
I searched for ‘wind willows’ in DeviantART and liked the following piece of fan art:
Nature’s Domain… see the otter baby!
So far, my Wind in the Willows ‘favourite character’ poll shows Moley in the lead, while Toad is nowhere. Just sitting in a broken car shouting ‘poop poop’, probably. If you count Mum’s vote, it’s always ‘the current Moley vote plus one’, ie 3 Moley votes is actually 4.
I haven’t closed the poll, so if you haven’t voted yet, it’s here.
Kate mentioned (though we both realize ‘Ratty’ was actually a water vole) that rats get a bad press, which is something that bugs me as well. Just the day before she said that, I dreamed I was talking to Stephen Fry. He was asking me questions about my hobbies and showing a lot of interest, and I thought to myself “what a nice man!” Then we went into the next room where a very poor woman lived, and she had a cage full of rats. We noticed one rat in particular, who was very dark, long and thin with a long, thin neck. I thought he was a wonderful little fellow, but obviously scared. Stephen was horrified and asked the lady why she had these desperately scrabbling, obviously wild, rats in a cage, and she said they had no food as a rule, apart from whatever rats they managed to trap during the day.
Stephen said “well, if you let those rats go, I’ll take you all out for a meal tonight; we’ll get some lasagne at this place I know.”
The woman was disapproving and reluctant, and said “well, that’s very nice of you, but it’s such a waste! We could have your lasagne tonight and then eat these rats tomorrow,” but Stephen was adamant and said “it’s a condition of your having lasagne tonight. Let the rats go.” So she opened the cage door.
Strange dream!
I’ve been spending more time than I meant to in Apophysis. Downloaded Apophysis-J for the Mac. It doesn’t do everything I would like it to do, but it’s still being developed. It renders a lot quicker than the Apophysis on my old PC.
I gave the Mac something last night which would have tied up the PC for a week, turned my back for 5 minutes, then returned to find it saying it would be finished in 15 minutes. I was almost dismayed… If it does it that fast, it’s hardly worth leaving it to render overnight as people advise. It’ll be done before I’ve finished kicking off my slippers.
Problem is, it doesn’t do transparent PNGs, which I prefer. It’s supposed to be able to, as the setting is there, but maybe it won’t unless I export the flame. Unfortunately I can’t find any clear information on how to set up a flam3 renderer on the Mac.
The information on setting up the Apo-J is a little unclear; it took me a while to figure out how to install the extra plugins! It’s easy with the normal Apophysis because you just put the plugins in a folder in the right location for Apophysis to find them, but Apophysis-J is a different kettle of fish. You have to learn its language and issue your commands in a confident manner before it will do your bidding… or perhaps get the help of a nice bottled genie from somewhere.
Just in case you found this post because you were trying to do the same thing, the following is what worked for me:
1) Run Apo-J
2) Close Apo-J but not the terminal window
3) Into the terminal, type:
cd . apophysis-j/plugins/apophysis
open .
Don’t miss out the single space before each dot. (I hit return after the first line and it waited for me, which was encouraging… up till then it had just been saying “file or folder not found”).
This should open the window you’re looking for (it was called apophysis); put those extra plugins of yours inside.
The mistake I was making to start with was that I didn’t realize there was also a space between the cd and the dot. Once I cottoned onto that, the right folder opened and I poured those plugins in. Next time I ran Apo-J, I looked in Options, Variations tab, and the number of variations had increased from 40 to 81. Success.
Despite the difficulties, it’s fun and I’m enjoying it; the more I learn about it, the more there is to learn… but a challenge is always good, giving us a world of colour and infinite possibilities…
Credit: I based the tiled fractal on this tutorial.
NB: It wasn’t working in Apophysis-J: the image disappeared from the window and other strange things began happening… so I started again in Apophysis 2.08 beta.
