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Last night I went to see "Waiting for Hockney" the story of a young man who spent 8 years on one piece of art and went to great lengths to meet David Hockney who he was convinced would understand and appreciate who he was and what he had done. At the end I told the director and producer that I thought they had done a wonderful job telling the story, it was suspenseful and engaging and fun. While the story was centered on the world of art, the underlying theme was the need for validation for our endeavors. At one point one of the people said, everything we produce is valued somewhere between worthless up to priceless. Now anyone who has read my writings you know that I spent a great deal of time wondering about my own validity by looking to image views and views of my body of works. As if numbers could provide the measure of the quality or worth of my product. Well that was what this young artist was caught up with, though he had higher aspirations than me, actually finding a way to have David Hockney take the time to view his piece of art and relate his views on the work itself. I won't tell you how it turns out, though if this movie comes to a theater near you I would urge you to see it.

I haven't sent out any postcards lately, I am nearing the end of the school semester and I am working hard to finish up my school work so I can get good grades. As I have said before, I love school, especially my art classes. I even went to the length to write the head of that department to let them know how much I have appreciated the instruction and intellectual stimulation I have gotten by members of the art department. I have enjoyed my computer classes but it is the art class that really rocks my boat. Even if I don't always feel confident to be able to do the work.

If you visit my pictures here or on flickr, (same name by the way larryosan) you will notice that I have lots of flower pictures. The winter here was not hard, but it was long and it seems that spring has just exploded with trees loaded down with flowers, large swatches of color along the roads and in all the planters near public spaces. I have just loved all the color so I have been snapping away, I use a particular technique pushing my camera zoom all the way to get those in the flower pictures. It has been pretty gray outside for this week, but it is still beautiful with lovely soft white diffuse light everywhere. Even the most mundane of views seem wonderful to me right now.

My sculpture teacher gave me a bunch of art magazines a small box of old postcards and stamps and we won a couple more tickets to movies from the Tribeca film festival so life is good.

ta ta for now

I am a very lucky guy, so far I have gotten cards back from Amiko and now from TomSwift46. One set were fascinating in their artistic intent through painting, the others very smart and funny through design. I am both honored and happy to have begun and have been the recipient of this artistic dialog. I see lots of very young talented kids at school doing their art and go back and forth about my offerings. But it really doesn't matter whether or not I ever decide that question, as my teacher says, in the creation it is the art, the finished work is simply a piece of artistic work. The value of my "art" is somewhere between worthless and priceless. For now it is all priceless to me, primarily as it is what the process of creation does for my life. That is truly right now where the value of art is for me.

ta ta for now

I have taken a bit of a break on doing my postcards to the point that Amiko thought I was stopping. I had to write that in fact I wasn't but just having other things to do right now. I am very happy and pleased to find out that I got an A in my flash programming class, something that I felt was beyond me but wanted to try it out anyway. I find it hard to think like a programmer, or at least like my buddy who is one at work. But the way I wrote my programs was to think of each part as a little machine that I linked together to build the bigger machine. I kept thinking in terms of types of circuits that I learned about when I studied to be an electronic technician. And it worked well enough to get me through the class and do very well. Now I have to finish my sculpture class which has also been a challenge as I don't really think in three dimensions and it is extremely difficult for me to envision that way. I have two more projects to have finished and one class to do it all.

I hope you like my latest offerings on my photostream. I particularly like my self portraits with the postcards sent to me by Amiko and TomSwift46 both of which were very interesting and I wanted to show how much I liked them in a way that had my larryosan stamp on it. I think I did that and got what I wanted.

I also have some stuff from a dance performance done at the World Finance Center Winter Garden which is celebrating its 20th anniversary with art projects. This piece was done with local people one of whom I know so I went to the last two performances and quite enjoyed the work. I posted a few more pics up at flickr than I did here but put more thought into the titles here and posted my video here, I probably won't at flickr.

I look forward to the summer, I hope to take more outdoor pics, make some more postcards and in general spend this time in some form of creative activity.

ta ta for now

Done with school, summer is now in session. And if you look at my pictures I now have up pictures of my final art project, the "thingasaurus" which is my representation of some type of animal creature. I was told that is was truly a larryosan type creation. There were some real kick ass creations from the kids but as I used to say about my acting, "I may not be a "star" but my acting is definitely my own". So this may not rock the art world but is truly me. A certain whimsy factor and some different approaches to the subject matter.

As I said before I got an A in programming and who knows how I will do in the art class, but as I said in a letter to the head of the art department that this part of school has been the most gratifying. I really love how the art classes have made me feel so good, full filled and happy. In fact the last conversation with my previous art teacher Mr. Haske who by the way can be googled, "Joseph Haske" is really interesting. He said when you go to art school you join another family that includes Rembrandt and van gogh, you may not be as famous or even talented as they were but you are now part of that legacy and part of that conversation. they are now one of your families. It really stopped me and sent a shiver up my spine. I told his how important it was to me to be able to talk to working artists, no matter what level my involvement was, in that it gave me a sounding board for these issues that are common to all artists. I needed that element in my life. As I do here, to express the things that trigger new thoughts or problems I want to address in my art or writing or however I wish to express that element of creativity that resides in me.

ta ta for now

Those darn medical numbers again

That is how long it has been since I quit smoking, now this may seem to be very good but I haven't even hit my usual 3 year quit cycle. I am hoping and working on this being the final cycle and I have written about this before but I thought it was worth noting if only as a marker in my life.

I am very happy to report that I have now sent out poster size pictures to parts of America and to Australia where I am happy to say they were well received. To me size does matter at least when I am envisioning scaling things up or down. My fantasy is to have one of my pieces up on the side of a building in one of those major sized murals. But for now I am content with what I have been able to accomplish.

My goal for this summer is to visit a number of museums and galleries if possible. I need to see more art to recharge my batteries. And I have a wonderful book on photography that was a present that I should start seriously going through and studying the elements of the works inside to help me absorb some of the issues involved in creating something I like in this medium. Even photoshop works usually for me have to start with an interesting image, I don't really make up stuff from scratch though there are some great digital artists I have met that can do that. But for me I still want or need to have something that catches my eye.

You know I wrote this whole post about asking you the readers what you are about, of course the usual suspects answered and I got one new response from someone I hadn't heard from before but it is frustrating to me to not get some dialog going though it could be argued that we are indeed having a dialog through our images and videos and audio file. Still I am left a bit frustrated. I also had lots of ideas for posting this week and almost all of them have left the building.

Oh those of you who still dabble on flickr I am having lots of fun exploring my statistics which is an interesting feature they have, primarily from the referring URL which for me is primarily flickr and images.google.com so I look up the search terms that are used to find my works. I wrote before I showed up heavily on some pornographic search terms though that is not the nature of my images, it was due to comments left by one of my contacts. But now I find that if you search for "top ten male models" one of my images shows up, or "male beauty or male model" and again there I am. Pretty good for a middle aged guy who feels a bit flabby in life.

ta ta for now

So now I am walking everyday and you can see my route which doesn't change., So I walk past the same places see the same things everyday but I don't. The river changes depending on the weather and the time and tides, boats come and go, the people on the promenade come and go and the flowers are blooming at different times. But best of all I notice the slight changes in the light as the season changes and how even with small variations of my starting time the light hits the buildings and the water in slight variable manner. As the old philosopher says, you can never go into the same river twice. So I start off with deja vu but in fact I am not seeing the same thing everyday. Photography has changed my perception of the world and the sensibility of light around me, and I look for those variations in the world for me to soak in as I travel. I want to see the differences I concentrate on the sensual experience of my walk. Yes health and exercise are at heart of my walks but it is the sensual experience which drives me. Sometimes I carry my camera sometimes not, though even there I take pictures again and again of the sunsets which still manage to move me. I feel a spiritual connection to those first plaine aire artists taking their easels out to the world to paint the light and the world around them. Those old guys who sat in the South of France to paint the light and harbors over and over again just to find the quality that moves them even if they have to paint the same scene over and over again calling them study number x through study x +y if you know what I mean. You keep diving into the moment just to see if you can find just one more element. Like sitting at a meal just licking the plates or sipping the dregs from the cups to see if you can get that last bit of taste or perhaps some new little taste. Isn't that what we do, taste the world and then describe the world to others through our pictures our writings our paintings, the list goes on. My teacher would say we are answering questions posed by the art, I don't know I am still learning.

Don't you sometimes wish you had that neurological disorder where you could taste the colors perhaps having beef sunsets or broccoli sunrises. Your dinners tastes blue or the chicken feels like it has spikes on your tongue. I would be interested in scrambling my sensory apparatus for short periods of time, and please don't mention drugs that was a time and life ago. And I am a drug tested employee, but theoretically I would find this fascinating.

Oh on the news is another crane collapse in New York City, it is bad enough that the greed has creating a soulless new New York which will only be the playground for the wealthy but they have to kill us to get there.

ta ta for now