Tuesday, February 22, 2011

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Shinichi Maruyama



"Once your brush touches paper, you must finish the character, you have one chance. It can never be repeated or duplicated. You must commit your full attention and being to each stroke. Liquids, like ink, are elusive by nature. As sumi ink finds its own path through the paper g

rain, liquid finds its unique path as it moves through air." -Shinichi Maruyama


Shinichi Maruyama is a Japanese artist who works with liquids, and not in the typical sense. He throws liquids in the air and his photography catches the moment when it spreads and the liquid collides with other liquids or even the wall. One series of his, Kusho literally means “writing in the sky” which is what it looks like. He uses to liquids to “Write with” and almost create strokes. He merges space and time in his works and makes then seem as one. His work is almost like calligraphy, but in the air.

So how does he manage to capture such beautiful moments? Maruyama uses a combination of water and ink, and as he hurls them together, he photographs this. These beautiful photos would not be able to happen if it weren’t for technology. His camera is capable of capturing these photographs with strobe light technology, which can record these events which happen faster than our naked eyes can perceive them. We see the liquids and flowing, and all as one, and the camera is able to break this down.

I love these photographs, mainly because they’re so unusual. This comes from the fact that we normally don’t see liquid frozen in motion. You wouldn't usually see this view of the world, from such a brief moment, which I think is beautiful. I love the idea of the imprmanent. But does a photo make it lose some of this beauty?

I particularly like his series entitled “Gardens” because of the interesting dialogue between the different colored paints. This series contains colored paints as well as water, and the thickness of the paints allow it to intersect more heavily. The thickness of the paints give it a different quality which really draws my eye.

Website, Article

Thursday, February 3, 2011

pictures, pictures, everywhere

Here are some of my Photo Retouches:

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This first image is of a bird we did in class.


Here is the new, retouched, much brighter bird:


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Here is a picture I took during my Post& Beam Class while raising the roof on one of the ghost houses seen from Route 5. There's still a pine bough on it if you ever drive by...
The picture is dark and crooked, but I didn't fix the crookedness because I didn't want to crop it yet. [:

Tah Dah! New picture.

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This picture is of Tyler and his grandma. It's suepr dark and he begged me not to put this online...

Aaaand the lighting is fixed.


ze end.


I found the artist Evelien Lohbeck on Rhizome.org. Her work, Noteboek (2008) is a multimedia work which portrays the media’s affect on society. It begins as a video of hands opening a notebook to reveal drawings of a keyboard and a screen drawn in the notebook. Stop motion is now used, and the “computer” boots up. The video goes on, as if the viewer were going on a computer and searching for more of Lohbeck’s works, except it is all drawn.

There is no sound except for whatever sounds typing and clicking make, and the occasional sounds that the internet on the screen makes. Her work takes you into a frame within a frame. When I watched this, I felt it was an extremely interesting and intriguing way to experience the internet. We are so used to all the crisp looks and intense graphics, but this internet is all hand drawn and with no color.

Sources: Rhizome., EvelienLohbeck.com

One of the videos shown on this interface involves her scanning her face into another notebook, and that notebook acting as a scanner, all while happening in a video on the notebook that is a video itself! It's crazy, which is perhaps why I love it so much!