antisocial_notworking

i've been having a little debate with this project space by project.arnolfini... just in time for the holidays...

it landed on my desk thanks to variant's exchange with springerin and a recent article against social networking, here.

it resonates with my facebook wall, the information it pushes out to me to read of strangers and friends, the ones that i put into other people's faces and all social relations it generates, modifies and hides.

antisocial_notworking is also one of the coolest combinations of some of my own academic work on labour process, politics and moral panics over young people.

here's something for you:

Without politics, our friendships are empty of meaning and our exchanges lead to nothing but the commodification of life itself...

Furthermore, as labour time has become more difficult to measure and is less distinct from time outside work, much of it now practised as 'nonwork', outside of traditional production processes - 'notworking' as opposed to networking. The confusion over what constitutes work and non-work turns attention to situations where work takes the forms of nonwork. (Geoff Cox, 2008, Antisocial Applications: Notes in support of antisocial notworking)

now... where was the list of reference's, t told me about in september. immaterial labour etc...

now, ad 2, what does this mean for our social networking? signing up to hatebook? becoming invisible again? diverting, subverting, appropriating...

still debating...

All new on the sidelines

My brother (haalloo, Torben!) tends to mock that I really don't need much else on my comp other than firefox: all this money of the comp wasted on my single application usage.

Hah!

Today I used: well, firefox, and firefox, and firefox. AND:
- Flickr Uploader (well, that kind of plays into T's hands, I suppose)
- Thunderbird
- Word, but then:

- Komposer
- FileZilla
- Gimp and X11
- Photoshop Elements

[oh, and I must admit, I was instantly smitten with having a photoshop application on my comp again; well: I am really trying with Gimp but, hach... I kind of get that you can do a lot of things with it, but it needs a lot of running around in order to get to do them, and it's more 'into the depth of my comp' running around, I fear. So, I bought an educational copy of Elements and downloaded the trial version while I'm waiting. Rather worringly though: within 10 minutes I run up against its limits: it cannae convert monitor to print colour mode... that's not very good! For that I may just have to figure out Gimp a bit more?]

and I persevered... it meant that I missed out on the sunshine on the seashore plan but instead:

- my photos from Chile are kind of sorted and look at you and me from high above the Andes on the sidebar.

But more importantly:

Eldon Group Summer Exhibition 2009
20 May - 3 June 2009
St Andrew's Gallery, University of Glasgow

Opening party 20 May 6-8pm (with cold white wine this time!)

I finally managed to extract images from S-J's Publisher file; and even more so: overcome my intense aversion to web design and scrambled together an okish (well, rather basic, really) update of our exhibition announcement. High time for that... - though I still haven't replaced the images from last year.

My firefoxing today eventually included something I tend to dislike even more than html: putting stuff on ebay. Eventually, my growing box of redundant electronics is getting a bit of fresh air (a spare laptop keyboard anyone? or a router?), and while I was looking at it, I discovered that my old laptop may be still worth something...

and I also designed the postcards for Tom, Chris and myself for the exhibition.

Do you want a sneak preview?

Views of Glasgow from a Height
Oil on Canvas, 60x65cm
(c) Chris Turpie

Untitled,
Acrylics on Board, 20x20cm
(c) Tom Bush

Three, three, one
Pastel on board

Yesterday, we begun to discuss what we are going to hang on the walls, and how, and, and... Second time round it is actually a lot easier - well, maybe that's to do with the changed group dynamics too. I haven't quite got round to thinking about what will go in from my recent stuff - ... well, I've got til next Saturday to make up a my mind, then we'll do a mock-run.

Now: put up more larger pieces on Etsy. - Strangely (but very nicely STRANGELY), my larger sketches and paintings have been doing rather well there...

"Favourite artists"

is supposed to be the name of a new sidebar addition.

Sicile, Nicholas de Stael, 1954
Oil on canvas, 114x145 cm, Musee de Grenoble

But this is proving more difficult than I thought. I've been trying to locate museums, official websites or similar, and am already faltering. Wiki is proving fairly reliable, if less so on some of the lesser known ones. Or, I could pick museums with some of my favourite artworks as links; Or I could????

Do you link to artists' (dead rather than living) websites? What do you link to?

I think my current preference is actually to link to a google image search on the respective artist. I've tried a few ones, and it seems to work ok. In some sense it could well be appropriate - most of the reasons for me being intrigued by artists at the moment are intensely visual: it is their art, painting, and increasingly also their drawing, studies, work process. And then there's the element of luck, change and dynamism in a search phrase as link.

Here's the short list to start with

• Joan Eardley
• Lyonel Feininger
• Giorgio Morandi
• Egon Schiele
• Nicholas de Stael
• Anna Ticho
  

I'll give it a try. But am also keen to hear other people's thoughts and suggestions...
In particular with some lesser known artists, the image search gets a bit messy - see, e.g., Anna Ticho, but then again, there isn't much in way of her images, e.g. at the site of the Ticho House in Jerusalem.

All my monitor's colours

... had seemed decidedly awry of late. The shadows were far too dark and I seemed to be doing a lot of photoshopping to get back to the brightness I seemed to remember when taking photos.

Some internetting yesterday unearthed a couple of useful tests to check and calibrate the monitor.

Keith Cooper's website, Northlight Images, has a whole range of articles on monitor calibration, and the depth of colour management. I stuck with the simple test to correct for darkness/brightness for the time being [yes, I know, I need some proper colour management for my printer, too - but that's for another day].

Have a look at Keith's article on Monitor calibration here

A simple check, no doubt, and just a recent discussion of my paintings with someone who sees colours decidedly different was fascinating to emphasise the importance of value over hue to determine good compositions. For him, the beauty of Hazy got pretty much lost as it was just a bland mass of too similar values.

From the above website I stumbled across some shareware on calibrating not only brightness/contrast but the individual colour channels for RGB - Hex2Bit, to download from here.

So, while I now see that my monitor at home looks similar to mine at work, but also that I can see all the variations in the test above, it still leaves me wondering about the communicatibility of colours and intersubjectivity - sorry, work morning, and work thoughts to continue...

And?! What do you think?!

... I've been meaning to do this for ages: widen the margins and doing something about the far too grey look of the blog template. So: a much simpler template allows even me eejit to do some html, colourise the sidebar and label cloud accordingly, plus: long overdue, to add some more links.

Better?!

Finally: website live

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Torben!
The website is fully (as in 99%) up and running and my brother will be glad to hear that in future he won't get irritated phone calls from me, unjustifiedly questioning his programming skills. - But who would have thought how much skype in the background messes with my internet!

Anyway: in time for the art sale for which I have to drop of the paintings tomorrow evening, www.ghelms.com is alive and kicking. It took me a time to upload the mixed media work and sketches but I hope I've picked some good ones.

Please have a look - and please, again, crit and comments are really apreciated - both in terms of functionality and artwork.

Here is a look of the first page:

Poster sale at Imagekind

Imagekind is a US-based website selling posters and prints. Several other artist bloggers such as Vivien at Paintings Prints and Stuff and Katherine at Making A Mark have been writing about it and recommending it for an easy to use, good quality print-as-you-go business.

I have had some business cards and postcards made recently in preparation for the upcoming art sale, been distributing them eagerly and thought I'd try and see about the quality of poster prints from some of my photos. So, as a new sidebar addition, you can now go and buy some of my paintings as prints. I've been toying with the size of file and quality of the print outs - and it seems to work pretty well.

I can buy back prints as and when I want to - I tried different sizes and quality of paper - their standard enhanced matt poster stock is very good, and their more expensive Hahnemuehle Torchon gives a clear crispness to the pastel paintings which is excellent.

While based in the US, they post all over the world, so no excuse really ;)

Happy birthday... three months of Paint & Pastel

I'm a big fan of good birthday celebrations - be it other people's or indeed my own. A few days back I realised that, with the first post written on June 26, it's today - September 26 - that this blog is three months old.

When I started blogging, these first three months were mentioned again and again as the time span in which most blogs will falter and disappear. So, quite pleased with myself and this blog for keeping going - here's a happy birthday, with more proper birthdays hopefully coming up in due course.

I treated myself and the sidebar to a new gagdet - a label cloud based on phydeaux 3's excellent instructions here. The cloud is fairly straightforward to create by editing the HTML template, and offers some good easy tweaks and customisation - e.g. colour, fontsize and most importantly, frequency of mention - mine is currently set to a minimum of two for the label to appear. I still have far too many single use labels to show them all.

With the label cloud, searching the blog for particular items is much simpler than using the blogger search function. The cloud also shows easily the different topics discussed and their frequency.

And of course, by playing successfully with the HTML, I'm a bit closer to internet geekdom :)

Online photo collections

Continuing to get organised online, I have uploaded more photos to my flickr account. I had slowly started to place some of my landscape reference photos into the first set. And only recently I begun to upload some of my small artworks, too.

Crail, Eastneuk, Fife,
mixed media sketch in Moleskine, 21x14 cm

However, for quite some time I had been thinking of moving more of my photography to a service such as flickr as the one I had previously used with one of my email accounts was rather tiresome and also difficult to grant people access too (if they didn't have an email account with that provider, that is). In any case.... this afternoon's enthusiasm (once I'd cleaned my landing) quickly came to the free account's limit of three sets - and if there's one thing I get irritated by, it is the inability to start with some decent sense of organisation. It is just so much more fun to throw one's rules, plans and conventions overboard rather than not to have any in the first place ;)

So, now I have an account with unlimited sets to create, groups to participate in and photos to upload.

Here are the links to the two artwork sets that I have uploaded so far:

• Crail Sketchbook

• Window to the Sky

But also, have a look at some of these other people's pages:
They are the flickr accounts of some of the Etsy sellers I have come across recently, and while I've always liked photography not merely as a means of recording but as artwork, it is when I saw the vast collections of some people that I was reminded of the power of photography and the visible in general.

Tara Anderson's With A Twist - Photography and Paperwork

Susannah Conway's Photography

Both of them have made it very quickly onto my favourite items list in etsy - Tara has the cutest paper creations, and Susannah's photography of beach huts, dunes and the South English seaside had me dreaming of a beach holiday.

Blog gagetry

I do occasionally phantasise about a modernist, minimalist flat and life: clean white lines, spaces and not much else. But everyone who's known any of my flats would laugh out loud at that thought: far too many books, things and generally life getting into the way of those clean white lines. - And quite rightly so getting into the way of them...

I feel that this blog is going quickly the same way... if you drop by here often you surely will have noticed how the sidebar is quickly cluttering up with assorted new items.

In particular the geotagging of the world map made my geographer's heart jump up in joy... and that was nonewithstanding of all the things that I know are wrong with equating people with where they are from (how often was I frustrated to being reduced to being someone's 'my German friend' LOL). But I've nonetheless been examining excitedly the map day by day to see if somebody new would pop up - in particular from those more exotic locations like Saudi Arabia, Hawaii and the middle of the Australian outback.

But also (and again my professional heart was put to contented rest), of course, these maps are gloriously inaccurate - first of all, many people never map onto them, but secondly, my mum would show up from anywhere across Germany (Hallo Jutti!!), similarly my friend in Israel from anywhere between Haifa and Jerusalem (I initially I did think my tagging for Israel, desert and Anna Ticho accounted for all those many Israelian hits, again LOL).

It's all good fun to pass the day (sorry: I mean evening, of course) nonetheless.

And an interesting aside has been that I've become much more confident with what any internet technology can do - just look at those photo lists on Flickr or the link to my Etsy shop, and I'm still fascinated how a couple of lines of words and numbers make the computer go elsewhere when you click here. - In the early 1990s I took some of the first computing classes in my school (in fact: the first girl to do so, if I remember) - but keeping in line with the gender stereotypes, I still have to write to this day a programme that actually does what I want it to do - just as well that html tags have got so much more easy.

Tree line repetition
Originally uploaded by gesah

But to end with something closer to paintings - I've started to put some of my reference photos onto a public site at flickr - they are largely landscapes, sky and cloud references so far - trying to keep a reference base for some of the sketches and studies I've been working on. In so doing, I am then, yet again, pleasing my utterly unmodernist self - filling, extending and cluttering to my heart's content.

Enjoy!

Team blogging adventures

... my favourite way to spend the evenings seems to be getting thoroughly lost in cyberspace art worlds these days. I somehow feel similar to when I first discovered the internet 10 years ago: where have all the hours gone???

I've been spending more time with my Etsy shop and trying to find some way around the vastness that makes up Etsy. Etsy seller organise themselves in various street team - to promote their work (e.g. beadwork, or by locality) and to provide a more friendly and personal face to the thousands of shops and their artworks.

One team where I liked many of the members artworks calls itself VAST (see the pun ;)) - the Visual Artists Street Team. After joining them, my blogger dashboard - the interface software with which all these informative blog entries are written and posted - has doubled in size as I can now decide to which blog I will contribute. - Just need to remember to keep checking for which blog I'm creating posts now.

I am excited in the sense that some of the web 2.0 technology just opens up so many possibilities of communication, and a group communication via a team blog seems just like one of the good ones. - And one which makes you easily forget some of the more tedious asides of all this internetting.

Website blurb... help needed

... not often that I post twice a day, but tonight I finally made myself write through the two missing pages for the website: the intro page and the about me - can't imagine why I was procrastinating over these two ;).
In any case... I thought I may get some comments from you if I post them here. Please have a read and I'd gladly receive any comments... in particular if it sound too weird and laboured!
These will be really the only two pages with much text on them, the rest will be rather plain pages with picture with a bit of info each.

Many thanks!


Homepage


About me blurb - this is anything like a resume/cv/artist statement, but I felt I need to have something to put in there first :)

Thanks again!