Contrasting Videos: Bat vs. Ghost

First, a sweet, colorful video entitled I’m a Bat, produced as a 4th-year project at California Institute of the Arts by Lauren Adassovsky.  The message here is “Know who you are.” The second video, while also an old-school “drawn” animation (as opposed to stop-action or CGI) is a film titled The Chase in the Ghost…

Insight: Brad Bird on #Animation

“You are constantly trying to get the audience into the state of feeling, how things feel, rather than how things are.” — Brad Bird This excellently animated (illustrated?) five-minute films features Brad Bird, writer and director of animated films The Iron Giant, The Incredibles and Ratatouille, providing insights into his process and why many people…

Some of the World’s Most Creative Sculptures

One of my sisters posted a short video on FaceBroken showing some of the world’s most innovative sculptures, and it made me want to share some of them. I couldn’t find her video outside of FB, but the video below shows most of them. If you know some this video missed, maybe you can share…

The Road to Worthing

I’m finding the futility of life oddly poetic today, given the most recent acts of violence in Dallas. Carved into the hard grain of reality is a word that people seldom know how to pronounce: accountability. Whether we are directly affected by events or not is moot. We are all in some way accountable because…

Days of Art: Old Camera

I am reposting this piece, this time with soundtrack as it sounded in my head while writing. This poem is a satirical look at the young hip street photographers today and the mistakes they make in pursuing their photographic dreams. Transcript: This is a poem I composed in around 10 minutes. Inspired by a photo…

Days of Art: The Temporal Invincibility of Art

Some people may question why we’ve devoted so much of the space on this blog to the history of art. The answer is simple — the ultimate measure of art isn’t what some critic thinks or (especially) what a professor teaches or a publisher endorses. No, the measure is simpler than that and two-fold: One,…

Mono Versus Colour

My lovely husband Bill and I often have this debate, the conundrum of the apparent prestige that black and white photography has over colour. Both Bill and I have written extensively about this subject here, being that we, as you may well be aware by now are fairly prolific photographers. Although we have been known…

Days of Art #54: Photography Inspired by Edward Hopper

Edward Hopper, 1882 – 1967 was an American realist painter, famous for his simple compositions of American life that often featured a single light source, often coming from a window. Perhaps his most famous painting was Nighthawks (1942) below. Maria and I stumbled across this video of photographs inspired by Hopper’s work and thought we’d…