Monday 25 December 2017

Christmas Eve

Walked to the home of friends last night to celebrate how much cheeses love us. The walk there was magical – no sound but that of snow crunching underfoot, the soft ticking of snow on my hood - and church bells ringing in the distance. And at midnight, it was even more magical. Thoroughly toasted, I wandered around Dundurn Castle and the cemetery for an otherworldly hour.
 The garden.
The Dundurn dovecote.
Cemetery gatehouse.
Crypts.
Cemetery.

Thursday 21 December 2017

Happy Accident Fire Truck

For thirty years I’ve been clapping gleefully whenever something visual screws up.

The blurry, or double exposed, photos Black’s didn’t charge you for. The odd shapes formed at the edges on stat cam prints by the bulbs when you really shrunk something down. Postscript printers deciding it didn’t like your file and spitting out pixelated mayhem. PMT prints that didn’t work and left strange patterns and colour fades. Early monitors that would sometimes show a chopped up version of the file you were working on as you zoomed out, and stay there long enough to get a screenshot of. Images after they’ve been stapled to a phone pole for a half year. Run up sheets from offset presses, with oddly juxtaposed type and images.

I’ve got a huge file of this kind of stuff. Not used so frequently, but when you can find a use for this sort of randomly generated imagery for something, terrific.

Happy accidents I called them.

A bunch of years back I was home one morning when a fire truck parked between calls on the quiet cul-de-sac I lived on. Went out to say hi and snap some photos as reference for possibly building a Lego version. (Still haven’t gotten around to it.) Somewhere along transferring them between camera and various storage mediums, the entire folder of images got truncated.

PhotoShop can’t do anything other than show a narrow strip along the top. If PS can’t open it...that’s saying something. Single previews don’t work, but for some inexplicable reason, opening them all at once showed me this riotous collage of strips of stuttering colour. Took screenshots of the expanded screen, because other wise these are inaccessible.

“Accident is the greater part of art, not design.” – Aleister Crowley

Thursday 7 December 2017

S.o.t.D. - Skinflowers – Young Gods

Skinflowers – Young Gods

Patchery: 4AD

I was a huge 4AD fan in my teens. Would buy records sound unheard just because it was on the label. 

The top two were very early efforts. Not perfect. They often aren’t. The white and black one stair stepped a bit along the top, and the grey and black one had the thread get messed up in one area. I can fix it.

I made them fairly large, because my early experiments seemed to indicate that they needed to be large-ish. After a while I figured out that wasn’t necessarily the case, and I did a much smaller version.

Tuesday 5 December 2017

Sunday 3 December 2017

S.o.t.D. - The Good Life – Tony Bennett

The Good Life – Tony Bennett

What a voice.

Woodlanders

Woodlanders is a crowd funded online film series that seeks to document the work of people who care for and depend on forests for their livelihood and well-being throughout the world. 

Definitely worth your time. And your support.

Woodlanders

Friday 1 December 2017

S.o.t.D. - Angels In Dub – Code Blue

Angels In Dub – Code Blue

How could I hear bass and drum lines interwoven like this, with production quality like this, and not fall deeply in love with this whole genre.

A frequent Jarkko tune. Usually slowed down.