James Victore in town

Location: The Portfolio Center

125 Bennett St.
Atlanta, GA 30309

Phone: 404.351.5055 or 800.255.3169
Fax: 404.355.8838

Date: Thu, Oct 14
Time: 6:30 PM - 9:30 PM

Admission: TBD

James Victore, vastly talented, world renown graphic designer, is giving a chat at the Portfolio Centre in Buckhead Oct 14th.

"James Victore is an independent graphic designer whose clients include Moët & Chandon, Target, Amnesty International, the Shakespeare Project, The New York Times, MTV, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and Portfolio Center. He has been awarded an Emmy for television animation, a Gold Medal from the Broadcast Designers Association, the Grand Prix from the Brno Biennele (Czech Republic) and Gold and Silver Medals from the New York Art Director’s Club. Victore’s posters are in the permanent collections of the Palais du Louvre, the Library of Congress and the Museum für Gestaltung among others."

I'd heard about the Portfolio Centre from my days doing graphic design at State - they have great resources for designers, freelancers, and artists of all stripes.

Kirkwood Ballers, Eyedrum

Last night, on a whim, decided to abandon the hypnotizing computer screen for more interesting climes. Randomly saw on ArtNews a thread regarding the Kirkwood Ballers' Club, an event (like many many many) I'd always SAID I would attend but never manage to.

Not this time, by gad!

Drove down to Eyedrum. Got there at 11pm and saw all of 7 people. "Is this over?" I ask one of the fellow I run into "It's just begun..." ok, I can dig it. Small audience. Cozy. Nice.

Promptly I run into our old buddy Tom, who's ready to do some of his numbers. Since I'd sang along with him at one of his Christmas parties, he invited me up on stage with them, where I let loose a number of shrieks and verses, the whole time trying - and failing - to read the lyrics sheet in front of me. No matter, this is improv!!!

The other numbers were just ear-shattering, trip-inducing melanges of sound, sensation, vibration. I was able to completely disconnect from what I am and what I am doing and where I'm going and where I've been just by riding that 30-minute synth & kitchen pot & african drum airplane - my consciousness exploded into endless scintillae of sound, such as aerosolized U-238 ordnance sparks liberated from their shells. In other words, it was hell of cool...

I don't know if the meagre attendance speaks to the decadence of this activity, which promises to happen once a month at Eyedrum, but I dearly hope not... Go! Go forth, people. It's well worth it.

Next time I go I may take my violin.

Mountainousness

Glorious gorgeous natural scapes do invite one to let one's hair down. At least that's what I've found to be true in the mountainous climes of Transylvannia County, NC.

There's a moment of being before nature, especially upon hearing the roaring cascading swirls of water, where the rest of the world just falls away, and an attentive person will find herself blending with the landscape. After a while you cease being a person with that constant barrage and baggage of noise - you just be.

This particular swirly wood lent itself to that theme

I feel the need to update this blog

so I will just post some random stuff:

1) a possibility exists of a collaboration show at Eyedrum with a good friend. If not this year, soon


2) wood art: these pieces are created from found driftwood

3) Other "plutonian" work, actually, that does take me away from art but which seems important and transformative in its own right - helping post, code, and illustrate Jim's intensely powerful output on JustMeans.

I'm making a committment now to start posting here more - and elsewhere. Aside from my constant scribble-scribble in journals hopefully nobody will find till I expire (and hopefully not even then) I realize I do myself a disservice by staying holed-up in my own little universe for so long.

My output here makes no sense - it is random and hermetic and not really representative of all I do or all I care about. I've kept it up because it has served as a portfolio of sorts, but I'm tempted to just take it all down, my entire online reality, and start from scratch. That's probably too much effort, but I will, even though it will be difficult, strive to be more real - even if it hurts a bit.

Dragon and Derivatives

What begun on June 2008 as "Venus Commemorative" morphed into Dragon and its various derivatives. I realise I'd not posted these images before so, here we are
1. Original drawing from June 4, 2008, finished
2. close-up top centre
3. close-up top left
4. two plate pronto-lithography process + poem
5. the 5 editions of a 3-plate pronto-lithography process
6. 3-plate pronto-litho

I am delighted to have made the acquaintance of Neeti Ray, astrologer extraordinaire (albeit virtually). She posts fun meme in her blog that I'll enjoy taking part in and, in the off-chance someone actually reads this, feel free to participate.

If you want to play, you have to ask the person whose post you’re reading to interview you. Then you get five unique questions that you answer by posting them on your own blog.

Then...

1. Leave me a comment saying, “Interview me.”
2. I will respond by emailing you five questions. (I get to pick the questions).
3. You will update your blog with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

1. Which aspects or placements in your chart are revealed in the art you create? Inevitably the Venus- Uranus conjunction with the Midheaven comes through as an urge to make stuff - and I suppose a lot of what comes out is sort of dark, chthonic - perfect for this conjunction ocurring in good ole Scorpio. The other thing about this question which is interesting comes re sthg I read in Dawn's Astrology blog, actually - that of the 4th house planets denoting that place where our psychology happens. Well, Mercury's my only planet in the 4th house - and what do you know... I've been an obsessive-compulsive journaler since age 13. In fact, most times I can't even string 2 thoughts together, much less act, unless I spend about an hour ranting into the little ole notebook beforehand
   
2. If you could pick any sign for your sun which one would you pick? I think Sag's fine, but at times I think I would be better off having been born 4 hours later - Capricorn would agree better with that pesky Virgo moon and would have added that oh-so-necessary Real World energy
   
3. Which aspect or placement do you find challenging in your chart? The fact that every blessed planet is below the horizon - I have NOTHING save random Chiron anywhere above the Asc-Desc line. I very much feel like some sort of Emily Dickinson at times - not due to any hopes of posthumous glory but due to a sense of living in an entirely private world communing with ghosts and random insects instead of actual people - save a special handful
   
4. Which has been a joyous synastry aspect that you enjoy with any one person in your life? For some reason, my favorite people on earth have all been Geminis (I married a Gemini)- though I've not been able to account for it synastrically, aside from a Sag sun and a lot of Mercury energy
   
5. Why astrology? hmmm... hard to say... because it's beautiful?
   

update on forever drawing

still not finished though much changed

began in March - suffered a break and restructure, then have just been adding

who knows where we will end up...

"Pia"

Another goop painting. I call it Pia bc it somehow reminds me of my aunt

House Portrait

began in May, completed in November - a first plein air experiment, now a gift

oil on canvas

process - Stravinsky Ideation

this frightening piece emerges as a pre-Halloween, Stravinsky- induced hallucination ("The Rite of Spring", for all you musical folks) and actually had the privilege of spending two weeks in October in a haunted art gallery (DeFoor Centre, Howell Mill Rd, Atlanta GA). I found that appropriate.

pictures of process are interesting, and something I strive to keep up most of the time

two for eyedrum benefit

sort of an interesting backstory to these 2 (and other 2) works that I may or may not go into here

can i just say that EnviroTex is the best stuff ever? Makes tempera on gypsum look like a million bucks (or at least tons better than without it)'

a fairly typical nightscape

something interesting might come of this

mao

this is very old - 2004. Food coloring on bristol board. Colours have actually held up OK

rose

Advent of Spring and newest work

after graduating, I took a sabbatical from creating any sort of art. i guess I just needed to decompress for a while.

I've been working on the following drawing for a week or so, and am planning on working it to the point of utter saturation, an idea I got from a very helpful and talented instructor at GSU, who taught a class on what I would call 'the forever drawing', which I did not get to take.

very old - conclusion of earlier figure studies project

death by junk food indeed...

last stuff

venus commemorative

as I insist on a cell phone camera and silly blog as constituting a viable art portfolio, I take the time to upload a recent work in progress, commemorating the current weird and wonderful world of

sculpture

for this project we were to make a self portrait bust which was not only anatomically/proportionally correct but which also spoke something about ourselves.

I am undertaking to make my head out of cake. I baked them, stuck them together with icing, and carved the essentials with an eleectric knife

the rest of it will include fixing proportions with more icing and poss attempt skin tone