Sunday Post 11-30-08

Tom Grill

Tom Grill is often considered the father of stock photography. He pioneered it's best pre-internet marketing tool, the catalog. He founded companies such as 4x5 and Comstock, and now owns Tom Grill Images and Tetra Images. He has written The Art of Scenic Photography, The Essential Darkroom Book, and Photographic Composition. He began his photographic career in his twenties doing photojournalism work while living in Brazil. When he returned to New York he began shooting commercial work for big-name cosmetic companies. Now his daughter, Jamie, is following in his stock photo footsteps with her company Jamie Grill Photography. His images are simple with clean backgrounds and definitive product placements. They look like the jumped straight off of a brochure, when the reality is they most likely jumped straight into one.

Interview:
http://rising.blackstar.com/comstock-founder-tom-grill-continues-to-adapt-to-change.html

Gallery:
http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-65393p1.html

Website:
http://www.tomgrill.com/index.htm

Thursday Post 11-27-08

Composition

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.
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Lord Byron (1788-1824) British poet.

Grill, Tom. Photographic Composition: guidelines for total image control through effective design. Watson-Guptill: New York, 1990.

Black Star Rising said of Tom Grill, "He’s been called everything from the father of stock photography to the sage and guru of the industry." He owns Tom Grill images and Tetra Images, and founded Comstock. He started shooting photography in his 20s doing photojournalist work in Brazil. Upon returning to New York City, he began shooting for cosmetic companies such as L’Oreal, Revlon and Clairol. The book covers depth of field, color controls, concepts, and technical skills.

Composition is obviously important in every image, from photos to paintings to television images. The compositions of my images come together like puzzle pieces, since there are built in limitations. Being as I require the tattoo of my subjects to be displayed in a visibly understandable and pleasing way, this limits my use of angles and poses with the model. Also, the colors of the tattoo and its placement on the body are out of my control. In many cases, what I envisioned for the picture becomes physically impossible because of the placement of the tattoo or other physical barriers with the surroundings. I have had to work through this on every image, and hopefully will be bringing it to completion as I savagely hunt down my last two models and force them to pose for me.

Sunday Post 11-23-08

Louis Bourgeois

Bourgeois was born in Paris on Christmas Day, 1911. At twelve she was helping her parents draw the missing parts of tapestries that they repaired to make their living. Eventually her father would have an affair with their governess/seamstress. Many of her later works draw from the tension created by her own knowledge of this and her mother's refusal to accept it. She studied painting at the École du Louvre and then the École des Beaux-Arts, and worked as an assistant to Fernand Léger. She married American Robert Goldwater and in 1938 they moved to New York City because she did not feel she would continue to be an artist in Paris. There she studied at the Art Students League of New York. Though one of her pieces in her first show, with one of them being sold to MOMA, she did not truly become a successful artist until after the deaths of both her husband and father in the 70s. She describes her work as being mostly about relationships, but also about desire, anger, betrayal, and jealousy. Her sculptures are constructed from a variety of mediums including steel, fabric, rubber, plastic, plaster, wood, stone, and bronze.

Interview:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2007/oct/14/art4

Gallery:
http://www.gallery.ca/english/index.html

Website:
Does not have her own website

Thursday Post 11-20-08

Dedication

“In order to excel, you must be completely dedicated to your chosen sport. You must also be prepared to work hard and be willing to accept destructive criticism. Without 100% dedication, you won't be able to do this.”
Wilson Mizner quotes (Playwright, 1876-1933)

Evans, Troy. From Desperation to Dedication: An Ex-Con's Lessons on Turning Failure into Success. BenBella Books: Dallas, 2007.

Troy Evans is a former drug-addict, drop-out, irresponsible father who attempted a bank robbery and was sent to prison for seven years. He wrote this book on the steps one can take to remain dedicated and focused on improving one's life and prospects. During his time in prison he obtained two degrees with a 4.0 GPA, and when he got out he became a responsible father and an acclaimed public speaker, giving about eighty lectures a year. CNN and Good Morning Americahave both profiled him.

Dedication has definitely been a theme in my work, for my subjects have dedicated their skin to pieces of their identity. In doing this they also dedicated time, pain, and money in their dedicated pursuit of achieving these tattoos. Also, through my dedication through not-always-improving work and frustration with models and my own equipment I have finally begun to achieve images that I like. Even though I was producing "shit" and "trash" and felt like I should just give up and do something else - still lifes or abstracts - especially when the doctor told me I needed to take a break from all Photoshop work because of the shooting pains I was getting from my elbow to my wrist (probably from masking around hair more than anything) I kept at it and I'm finally happy with my images, though they do still need a bit of tweaking.

Thursday Post11-13-08

Desire

All human activity is prompted by desire.
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Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) British logician and philosopher.

Desire is the starting point of all achievement, not a hope, not a wish, but a keen pulsating desire which transcends everything.
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Napoleon Hill (1883-1970) American speaker and motivational writer.

Irvine, William B. On Desire: Why We Want What We Want. Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2006.

Since 1983 William Irvine has taught at the Wright State University College of Liberal Arts' Philosophy Department. He received his B.A. in Mathematics and Philosophy from University of Michigan and achieved an M.A. and Ph.D. at UCLA. In this book Irvine explores the psychological, scientific, and religious aspects of our impulses, wants, and needs; where they originate and how we might achieve them. This includes looking at thoughts by writers like Seneca, Tolstoy, and Freud, and the teachings of Buddhists, Hindus, the Amish, Shakers, Catholic saints, ancient Greek, Roman, and modern European philosophers. Irvine also looks at the modern science perspective--the physical occurrences in the brain when we desire something as well as the evolution of certain desires in animals and advances a new theory about how the ability to desire developed. He implies that when we started to desire, we were "programmed" to desire some things over others. Irvine has also written A Guide to the Good Life {the Ancient Art of Stoic Joy}, The Politics of Parenting, Doing Right By Children, and others.

Desire is a key component of my work. The people I work with have desires in their life that have been translated into their desire to have that represented in some way on their skin. I had a desire to work with this because I have had similar desires as they, and in my seeking to understand the origin of theirs, I gain perspective on the origin of mine.

Sunday Post 11-09-08

Michael Eastman

Michael Eastman, born in 1947 in St. Louis, studied business with the intent to take over his father's business. He started taking pictures when he got out of college in the midst of the Vietnam war and all the mayhem that it was causing within our country. After that he was working for a record company when they were looking for someone to shoot a jazz band. The shoot went successfully so he began to print up business cards and took off from there. In the past thirty years he's done fine-art photography on subjects such as European architecture and Midwestern storefronts. His work is in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the International Center of Photography, The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, as well as others. He has received the National Endowment for the Arts grant and been published in Time, The New York Times, Life, American Photographer, and Communication Arts. He still lives in St. Louis. His photographs are mainly architectural, usually lacking in people. When there is a person or people present, they act as small details in the photograph, often dwarfed and enveloped by the spaces they occupy. The spaces Eastman shoots have a sense of being very open, never claustrophobic or cramped. His lighting is highly atmospheric, with a specific color palette tailored to the emotion of the piece.

Interview:
http://www.art-interview.com/Issue_010/interview_Eastman_Michael.html

Gallery:
http://www.artic.edu/

Website:
http://www.eastmanimages.com/photography/index.php/photos/view/18#Home_1

Thursday Post 11-05-08

Goal

A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder.
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Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) British historian and essayist.

Difficulties increase the nearer we approach the goal.
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Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832) German poet, novelist and dramatist.

Cox, Jeff; Goldratt, Eliyahu M. The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement. North River Press: Great Barrington, 1992.

This book acts as both a novel and a business book. The story covers a character who owns a failing plant and has ninety days to save it. The book explains how to see businesses as systems as well as how to improve the performance of a system with a process that applies to analyzing any human or engineering system. The power of the Socratic method is addressed as a way to stimulate the mind and Socratic questions can stimulate the minds of others. Eliyahu Moshe Goldratt is an Israeli physicist who became a business management guru. He originated the Optimized Production Technology, the Theory of Constraints (TOC), the Thinking Processes, Drum-Buffer-Rope, Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) and other TOC derived tools. He applies the essence of the scientific method to solve problems of people and organizations. He has authored several business novels and non-fiction works, mainly on the Theory of Constraints. Jeff Cox is the creative writer behind 7 fictional business novels. Six of these were collaborations with business consultants and executives, and one was his own. Two made it to the top of the list of bestselling books in the 1990’s.

Since Paul said that what I need to do is come up with a goal for what my perfect print is. I definitely have an image in my mind of what I want the prints to look like, and I think my goal should really be not being so uncomfortable with shooting my models. I don't normally shoot models, especially people I don't really know, so a lot of times, especially if I feel I'm inconveniencing them I have a tendency to hold back and not do as much shooting. I also usually have very limited access to my models so in an effort to maximize my time I often go in with a specific pose in mind and tend to stick to it. My goal is to try and find some time with my models when they have more then a few minutes, and not feel so nervous about asking them to do different things for me.

10-28-08 Lecture

Garth Johnson's Extreme Crafts website

Garth Johnson knows how to give a lecture. He was upbeat and amusing, and clearly cares about the work he does, and the work he displays from other artists on his website. I thought that he divided the work up very interestingly, after giving us a taste of different "extreme crafts" he showed us work that was "Art masquerading as craft" "Craft masquerading as art" and "Craft extending it's middle finger". While obviously any piece in any of these categories could cross over into another, I thought the titles alone were clever. The work of his wife, who sprinkles glitter over glue to make large, detailed images in a very Buddhist monk making a mandala sort of way, blew my mind. I know I would go insane if I ever tried that. The concentration that the people who make some of the crafts we saw was mind boggling and showed extreme dedication. One woman had done a needle point of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, which took her about ten years. I thought the most intriguing section was the "Cozies" that we got to see. Though the cozy for the missile was shown last as if it was the best, I felt the lengths the artist went through to get permission to make the cozy and adorn the missile with it was more impressive than the work itself. The image we were shown before that one was a tank covered in a cozy of several shades of pink, and a fluffy pink ball hanging from the opening of the cannon. Garth's described this as delightfully emasculating because all the cannon could do was "poot" out the ball of fluff. I thought that piece had a lot more concept wrapped into it than many of the other pieces we saw. I am excited to see the book he plans to put out which will feature a number of crafts made from recycled/ready-made items.

Sunday Post 11-02-08

Guy Atchison

Guy Atchison, born 1968, served as an apprentice at the Jacklich Corporation in the art department after graduating high school in 1985 until 1986. He painted record covers from then until 1990 mostly for California-based Shrapnel Record such as Vinnie Moore, David Chastain, Apocrypha, Hexx, Skatenigs. He started his tattoo career in 1989 apprenticing at Bob Oslon's Custom Tattooing in Chicago until 1991. Then he opened his own shop, Guilty & Innocent Productions, until 1998 when he closed it to move to the country and paint more. His tattoos have been published in Outlaw Biker Tattoo Review, Easyrider Tattoo, Skin Art, Skin&Ink, International Tattoo Art and others, and his paintings have appeared in Art Alternatives and Savage Magazine. He has published his own tattoo manuals, The Graphic Language for Tattooists and Special Effects for Tattooists. His work has shown in many galleries including Karen Briede Gallery, Chicago 1992, Don Ed Hardy's Eye Tattooed America (touring show, which roamed the country for over a year), 1993, The Layaway Gallery, Chicago 1994, The Cleveland Independent Art Gallery, Cleveland Ohio 1994, and 2-South Gallery in Detroit, 1994. Atchison's work is bright and bold, with intricate detail, often relating to surreal and/or biomechanical imagery. His tattoo's flow beautifully with the structure of the body, and his series on lightforms is filled with ethereal pieces.

Interview:
http://www.prickmag.net/guyaitchison.html

Gallery:
http://www.deluxetattoo.com/

Website:
http://images.hyperspacestudios.com/guy_gallery_index.html