philinthecircle.com Blog

So I’m a dork.  I just got my new external hard drive that holds a mega 2 Terabyte’s.  Which sadly I imagine will only last a year.  Ah well.

I’ve spent much of the weekend trying to put prints together.  I decided after talking with some people that I would make limited prints with the editions being below 50 prints.

I was trying to get outside today to put together another goodbye art piece, but it’s amazingly cold.  We had a high of 1 degree Fahrenheit today.  My outdoor clothes are good but I’m not sure they are that good, and my cameras won’t actually work in that temperature.  But I will get out there and create something tomorrow for sure regardless of the temperature.

hope all is well.

So good news.  As many expected I can continue with the art that I am doing.  I am apparently walking a thin line with getting sued or not but since I have social and political commentary in my work I’m a bit more safe.  I think legal stuff barely ever gets talked about between artists.  The idea that “it’s legal because it’s art” doesn’t hold up a lot of the time.

But I am very happy that I have been given a fairly green light to start up on my current large piece.  I hope to get moving on it again, although I will need to raise some funds to complete it.  I did some calculating and decided it would be in the range of three thousand USD to finish this piece.  I can get a bunch done now, but I may have to hold off to do the real technical stuff until I can afford the supplies.

That being said I am about to change around my print section and get rid of a bunch of pieces and make limited editions.  They will be below 50 prints each.

I need someones help.   If your interested in helping with this e-mail me.  I want to make a list of all the moments that appear in “a moment” if you have purchased the poster and are interested in writing them all down I would greatly appreciate it and maybe we can work something out.  again, e-mail me if you are interested, I would really appreciate it!

I hired an attorney a month ago to check out my work and tell me what is legal and illegal. He is coming out tomorrow. He looked at the work on my site and said some things are of concern (which made me nervous). But he said he really enjoyed looking at my work and wanted to come out to talk about it all. I will definitely let you all know the outcome. I am finding that most people that make art don’t know much about the legal side of what we can and cannot do. I must say I was totally clueless. All the things I was told in high school and tidbits I picked up here and there were totally wrong. I’m a bit nervous because I may be put in a compromising position.

Goodbye Art is back in full swing. I’m excited about this. It was a really fun go for quite a while there and then became a bit of a burden. I have come back to it with a renewed vision and lots of ideas. Some projects will be playful and others serious.

high five for warranties! my laptop is crashing on me from time to time and I called HP and luckily they can fix it for me (I made it within two weeks of the warranty). But it will be gone for a week or so.

Alright I gotta run. I have some wine that is freezing out on the porch.

By the way:  If there is a subject you would like me to talk about here, email me.  I hopefully will discuss it.

So I have hired an attorney to see if my work is legal or not.  The things I learned about the right an artist has were apparently wrong.  Kinda sad but at the same time I’m rather happy that I didn’t know the law or maybe I wouldn’t have made the work that I did.

It is rather obvious I work from photographs and technically I have to get permission to work from those photos if the end product can be connected to that picture.  …. eh, the short of it is, who knows if I can display or show some of my work because of this.  I’m really curious to see how it all turns out.

Art stuff:  I took on a more abstract idea this week.  I’m in southern California at the moment for vacation and spent yesterday in the mountains running around a burned hillside with a friend of mine that experienced the recent fires.  The picture that I came up with was a very fun and different piece.  It relies more on the viewer to interpret the work which as you know I don’t do a lot of.  But I am enjoying conveying ideas in a different way.  I will move this way from time to time and begin creating another body of work that is different than the large pieces I have done and the goodbye art.

So it’s been a little bit since I wrote a blog and I’m a little surprised.  Since going part time I thought that I would be doing more writing and I have shifted so many thoughts and opinions it entertains me.  Before I get too far along I want to throw this out there,

DO YOU KNOW someone in New Orleans that lost their home to Katrina and the home has not yet been demolished?  If so please contact me because I am interested in talking with them.  And when I say home I mean a stand alone home that they still own and are waiting for demolition.   e-mail me iam@philinthecircle.com

So what’s been happening, uh lets see, well I haven’t touched the goodbye art idea and it barely ever crosses my mind.  I have been putting my time into my newest piece that unfortunately you can’t watch the progress on the ‘ol webcam because that thing sucks.  I fought it one week for two and a half days and then came to the conclusion that I was wasting my time and so I cut it out completely.  I also changed the entry photo to a piece of my art instead of those headless shots.   Anyway back to the new piece.  As willing as I was to let people watch the process I don’t really talk about it much except with some real vagueness.  I found that I don’t want to hear other peoples opinions of what I’m working on but opinions on the final product is of course cool.  I just don’t want to be impacted while I’m working on a piece.  That being said, the new piece involves lots of drawing and photography and the end product is playing on an idea we all know with a very technical twist to it, as well as it will change with time.

Hope everyone is well.

phil

Things are changing.  I just spent the last few days working
on things only related to Goodbye Art, then it hit me.  This
is not what I want to do with my free time.  I want to focus
on the large scale, long term projects.  So Goodbye Art is
being shelved in a fashion.  Not totally but definitely not
weekly.  I will put up a new piece from time to time, but only
when I feel it’s really worth while.  Maybe once a month,
maybe once every other month.  Going part time means I need to
start getting into shows and competitions etc, so I’m going to
focus and really put myself towards that goal.

I don’t know the last time I actually did a painting.  Other than the influence piece which was two toned I think the last one was when I was a kid.  It’s really fun!  I was up late last night and knew I needed to get started on this project so I cranked up the music and went at it.  There is so much more freedom in it than the other mediums I work with.  I could really tear through it which felt good.

But now I’m going to be side tracked a bit and go back to the fragmented style that I do so much of.  I’m definitely coming back to painting though.  It’s really quite fun.

I have been really cleaning up this week.  It’s really nice to spend time doing things I’ve been putting off.

One thing I mentioned before is I found a way to get my pictures digitally, and I did the final touches this morning and found that the final product is supremely top notch.  I scanned the gary ridgeway piece and the final picture is just impeccable.   I called around and have found a place that can do Giclée prints at 48 inches, so that print will be slightly larger than half size which is just wonderful.

If you saw the ‘ol webcam you will notice I moved stuff around. I will be doing a small piece tomorrow (today officially) that will be part of the goodbye art for this coming weekend.  I am a bit curious how that project will all filter out.  you’ll see come monday why I’m a little apprehensive.   oh and the piece that was in the webcam is going to be done an hour each day so I had to put it to the side for some time.  as it will take forever at this point.

When part time actually hits, in a couple weeks.  I think I will step out of my norm and do a series of just straight up paintings.  I had an idea today for a series and think that I should celebrate going part time and do something a little different.

g-night

When visiting my sister once I remember hearing her read a book “too much stuff” I’m really feeling that at the moment.  I have spent the last year only focusing on the most important things and ignoring everything else.  And all of a sudden I’m going part time so I’m finding myself overwhelmed with all the little things I need to do.

crap just remembered one that I started yesterday, be right back……

10min later – okay, so there was something I have been meaning to do for about…. a year and a half that I never did until today.  That’s what my time has become.  It’s really nice, the “thing” which shall remain a thing and not discussed is something I have planned for when I get my first real show somewhere.  A piece that will get attention, but I had to run an experiment.

The other major thing I am taking on is trying to make superbly large scale prints.  Which is a total pain because there is the problem of how to get my work photographed or something.  I have solved that problem with a scanner a hand saw and thirty feet of USB cable.

Where it all sits now, I will make limited edition fine art prints that will be about half the size of the original.  Or in the case of Daudi I will make a full size print of that piece.  I will also occasionally make a special limited, usually when I find a way that I think will be an interesting way to recreate the piece.  For example, I am working on the possibility of putting the Rosa Parks piece on a light box, it will be small but it will also include a close up in which text can be read.  I am really happy with the idea and want to do it, but it will have to be limited to 25 because of the amount of work I have to put into each one.  I may do a recreation of “As of April 30th 2005″ that will be full size, again limited to 25.  I think the full size recreations will start as pieces that will go to shows.

I came to the conclusion yesterday that the piece that’s been sitting in my studio for half a year will take at least another half year to finish.  Using the brush aggravates my hand too much.  So I can only do an hour a day on it.  Which leads to very little getting done.  That being said I will start the next large piece, and work on it at the same time.

time for lunch

I haven’t blogged in a bit.  but that will change in the coming month becauseeeeee I’m going part time in the beginning of November.  It’s freaky close.  wow.  This will be fantastic!