Wordless
Monthly Archives: September 2013
(Nearly) Wordless Wednesday
“Dainting”
My business card identifies me as a Barefoot Writer, Photographer, and Engineer.
I took a series of photos looking across Burlington (VT) harbor and Lake Champlain toward the Adirondacks on a gray and dismal summer day. The weather didn’t keep the sailors away, just the sun. Rather than losing what was a nice scene with good composition, I decided to use it as the underpinning for this digital painting.
The idea for creating a photorealistic — and artistic — image from a bland photograph isn’t new to me. American artist and illustrator Bert Monroy is one of the pioneers of digital art. In an interview I heard he talked about his (phenomenal) Times Square panorama but even more than that, he reinforced this notion I have of making lemonade out of the spilled lemons.
I go for a realistic representation in my own work, even if the individual objects are more drawn than pixelated.
My own Burlington lighthouse is pretty accurate. The sailboats, at greater distance, less so but they stand up to poster sized enlargement. And I deliberately flattened what Liz Arden called “the cartoon mountains.”
I take a lot of images at my own beach on the Atlantic in the Keys. It’s a place I like to go back to again and again and I like taking you all along. Every day is not perfect there but every day is perfect in my photographs.
Of course, the painted nude is perhaps a bit more fanciful. That palm doesn’t exist in nature. I don’t think my inch of beach has ever seen that much surf although I did use it and its sky as my model. And I’m pretty sure no ladies have taken the sun quite that way on that beach. I do like the artistic use of body paint.
Enjoy.
Syria (Sigh)
The President of the United States drew a red line in the sand. Then he lied about it.
I worry…
1. I worry that our Administration just keeps on lying to us. Again. (From the vast domestic surveillance program to ordering Boeing to shut down its new factory in South Carolina — because the factory and its 1,000 new employees were non-union — that should be no surprise.)
2. I worry that isolationism is taking hold. Again.
3. I worry that we either don’t have a plan or that our plan is radically different than anything the Administration is telling us. Again. (See #1.)
4. I worry that every airhead in a “leadership” position says Mr. Assad is violating “norms” because they want us to think they have neither law nor treaty authority. Again. (Except the Chemical Weapons Convention explicitly outlaws producing, stockpiling, and using chemical weapons.)
5. I worry that so many ostriches are asking, “Should there be consequences?” Again.
Should there be consequences? Committing genocide, whether writ large or small, violates my very core and, I suspect, yours. We do have two options:
1. Snatch Mr. Assad and deliver him to a world court.
2. Destroy the chemical arsenal of any nation or terrorist group that uses them anywhere in the world. Then do number one.
According to a poll making the rounds on the Interwebs, the Majority Of Americans Approve Of Sending Congress To #Syria.
Wordless Wednesday
