"The language of modern painting is thus far a secret language, and it must be learned anew for each painter."

Robertson Davies; Painting, Fiction, and Faking

"La couleur est par excellence la partie de l’art qui détient le don magique. Alors que le sujet, la forme, la ligne s’adressent d’abord à la pensée, la couleur n’a aucun sens pour l’intelligence, mais elle a tous les pouvoirs sur la sensibilité."

Eugène Delacroix

“To the very young child any block of time seems infinite.  Tell her that supper will be ready in three minutes: desperate wailing will signal her conviction that you have sentenced her to starvation.  Tell her to hurry because time is running out, and she will not know what you are talking about.  How can infinity run out?  Only two units of time exist for the small child: the now and the not-now.  The not-now is infinity.”

Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds

I’m rather fond of this concept, and have included the more of the passage for context.  In the course of my personal research on mental wellness, I’ve been exploring Maté’s writings, and appreciate the beauty, simplicity, and depth of: the now, and the not-now.  I honour my present, and take joy in all.

So my sis finished this sweet crafty bantha for her friend tonight, and we decided to give it a proper photo shoot.  The bantha we photographed on a towel with her phone, and composited it with footage from my recent assignment in Sossusvlei, Namibia with Ryan Faubert.  The piece-de-résistance is the twisted typographic gene splicing that turns a pony into a bantha ;)

This picture was recently selected as Open File’s Photo of the Day, and is making the rounds on tumblr thanks to Zoey and Gabrielle.

I’m grateful for everyone’s kindness in visiting and sharing.  Let there be love and good vibes to grow and inspire your dreams on this plane and beyond.

Forced Packet Loss: Number Three, Ka Ho Karl

Flash video on Tumblr, Macintosh iBook G4.

01:25 - January 21, 2012

Wonderous things are abrewing.  Enjoy.

Ben, forced packet loss on video screengrab, Ka Ho Karl, 2011

2011-11-21 at 11.00.18 PM

Lartigue, though having lived and worked in the infancy of the Modern Age, harkens back not to Victorian optimism, but to what M.H. Abrams called the Romantic “Natural Supernaturalism.” Within his photos, we glimpse creation in reverse, or the body pulled by its toes back into the emanating light from which it sprang. A woman is stopped, mid-summersault, as if to be rolled back to her girlhood. A boy is hooked by his heals mid-dive. A dog is launched across a ditch but has come to the end of the invisible rubberband to which he is attached. The creatures of Lartigue’s photographs verge on being jerked back to that original joy of the imagination before the act.

What it all comes down to is the miraculous response of the body to the human mind—an energy propelling nature’s cycle forward from origin to experience and back to origin. We leap and fall and spin over and over again because the joys of our bodies refuse stasis. We are not trees. We are not stones. We are what Wordsworth describes as “transitory Beings.”

"Eisen follows the radiation trail (metaphorically speaking) left behind by digital imaging, creating photo-based works that resemble the Northern Lights, brainwaves, and the glassy interiors of icebergs."

R.M. Vaughan, Globe and Mail (yay!!!)

(Source: barph)

Last night, my good friend and fellow photographer Ryan Faubert, introduced me to some stunning work by Brian Oglesbee, whose fractaline matrices encapsulate and reflect the endless beauty of the self-organizing universe.  Created in a single moment with no contrivances of the darkroom or Photoshop, Oglesbee reveals an enlightened mind “too rare in today’s dryly observational art photography” (Jeff Wignall, American Photo, March 2007, p77).

An inspiration to many, he recently was asked by Julie Taymor to collaborate on the making of The Tempest, a film I know I’ll be watching soon!

Edit: We skipped through scenes of the film today, and felt that Oglesbee’s influence on the film was nowhere near as striking as that of his solo work.  Save for a few literal allusions to Aquatics, the heavy use of CGI made it rather unclear where he was asked to leave his mark.

(Source: fotoritim.com)

“All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”

Pablo Picasso

(Source: yuvalcadmon.blogspot.com)

“It is no meaning to create art work by one’s own aesthetic and concepts.  However, when people take photos, one’s aesthetic and memory are always included.  This is a kind of everlasting contradiction.” Daido Moriyama

tokyo-camera-style:

Shimokitazawa

A GR signed by Daido Moriyama.

Araki Diptych - forced packet loss on video screengrab, Ka Ho Karl, 2011

“The photographer had been a slave of the camera for a long time.  Good camera, lens, Leica, etc.  These were the masters of a photographer.  But in a way, Daido Moriyama is a photographer who started to make the camera his own slave.” Nobuyoshi Araki