Tag: urban sprawl

CINEFIELD® – Nocturne 10

I always have several things going on at once. Currently I am in the middle of finishing a big project (full length novel) while about to start several others. My CINEFIELD® work tends to start to sprawl across my studio. And despite now vacuuming/sweeping daily when working on one, there is still paper confetti snow flurries and sheets of tiny pieces waiting to be used that find their way onto every available surface.

There is a great pleasure in my working in this medium. Mess aside, they are also very time consuming. I don’t want too long a time to go by without doing a piece as, like all my other mediums, it’s very much become a part of me.

The solution was to do a smaller piece which makes far less mess. Surprisingly though, smaller pieces are more difficult because the already tiny components must be even smaller. And the smaller general area means far less space to create sense of tension and release. (I equate this aspect to way back in the day, early vinyl had technical limitations, so the average record time wise, was shorter than later. Because of this, great jazz soloists, when doing their thing had to take far shorter solos than during the Long Playing era. This limitation forced all the greats to learn to make their statements within the confines of the medium’s limits.) I am always up for a challenge as I feel it facilitates evolution.

Like all my works, ever image used was from photos which I personally took. There is no digital magic, I use scissors & adhesive applied with a brush. The piece is 2×4 inches.

Free Advice: Aside from blogs, most people are on one if not all other social media sites. Adding to the non-stop stream of Twitter. Instagram etc. are new posts from whomever one follows. If a minimum of 500 people are being followed and they are posting every day, when combined with everything else one has going on digitally, it reduces what could be meaningful content (learning something new, interactions etc.) down to white noise babble.

If you are an artist/anything in the arts, then the goal should be interaction, creating an audience who will be curious to what you do next. If you want to exchange ideas/interact, in general, this too will be hindered by the deluge.

Even some of the better blogs would benefit from posting less frequently.

Last time I posted this idea, people got defensive. There are only so many hours in the day a productive person can give to bowing their heads in prayer to the screen of their phone tablet. I am not commenting on anyone’s legitimacy but merely offering way to be a better, more effective blogger.

by Wayne Wolfson

Underworld

Pop Culture seems almost a misnomer. It’s offerings are discussed,debated and anticipated. Almost inseparable at this point from American culture is the concept of a spoiler alert. Binged watched shows masking so-so writing with the compulsion to see what happens next. To know ahead of time of a characters death or other plot developments is to take away a major component of a work’s strength.

This is a more recent phenomenon as with many books of the western cannon or the ones which have served as a template for countless other stories such as Romeo & Juliet, we know what will happen, has happened but still get enjoyment from the journey.

I find myself often returning to Homer. Of course the trajectory of the characters’ narratives are well known to me now at this point but it still manages to offer up delight, like revisiting a well known city held dear.

There is one scene in the second part (The Odyssey) where the (anti) hero Odysseus/Ulysses is going to talk to the shades of some of his fallen comrades. To do so he must follow a complicated ritual which involves spilling out of oil, incantations and spelling things out on the earth with a stick.

During my last rereading of the epic it occurred to me that most of us now can not even remember or know anyone in our lives phone numbers as our phones do all that kind of thing for us. (this includes myself too). Yet Ulysses was given the instructions and doesn’t even write it down, he remembers it and executes it perfectly.

I got to thinking, an idle stream of thoughts where i started transposing Homer and Ovid to our times and vice versa. In some versions of Orpheus’s tale he is merely allowed to wait at the gates of the underworld for Eurydice’s shade to follow. In other translations he does equivalent of in the front door out a close by side one.

If there is ever time travel then there is already time travel. The afterlife too would be a sort of loop, so I imagined it as a vast city not necessarily of the epic poet’s visual vernacular. A dense city which is one part crumbling metropolis from Blade Runner and also the dense urban pile ups from parts of Mumbai and Hong King.

Orpheus must make his way through all this chalking up the weird architecture as merely one more otherworldly phenomenon beyond his ken. The shades are all crying out for help, lamenting all that they have lost or are cut off from, bitterly laughing or trying to cajole him into watching.

My Orpheus isn’t seen though. Maybe he is coming out, alone. Maybe he already left. He could be one of the active silhouettes in the window, finally reunited with Eurydice after having met his savaged fate. She had been everything to him. His extreme joy at their prospect of their initial reuniting and then inconsolable grief at their second separation at Hades’ exit was a powerful cosmic force. Now, reunited, they are just two more silhouettes in a vast city of shades. We are all the main characters in the movie of our lives but longing remains a force to reckon with.

It has looked like mars around me so i have not been able to paint. I am fortunate that I can still draw and collage regardless of light conditions and burning eyes and sinus. This collage is 11×14. As usual there is no digital magic worked. I used scissors & adhesive applied with brush to images which I personally photographed.

by Wayne Wolfson