postcards from the edge

In the 1990's I was in a funk and was making these postcards from a xerox machine in my office. The people where I worked were uncomfortable with taking money for my personal use of the company xerox machine but they were ok with it if I made a fair trade, and brought in supplies that they didn't have to use, in return for about ten cents a copy to set them up. Their machine was not sensitive enough to show the tape as in the scanner I use now, you can see the tape and of course that is unfortunate. So I have a box of old postcards that look slightly better than these images, but that I have not used fully, have not sent anywhere.

1994-1997 were the years that my marriage fell apart. My wife for inexplicable reasons became violent and had to get out; ultimately I split it up. I couldn't bring my children up in a war zone. But her unhappiness was probably both of our faults or at least something I didn't know how to do anything about. Nowadays I look back at that time and say, no wonder I had an edge when I got to work.

Before Illinois (1994), I had lived in Kansas, and that's where I'd started xerox art. It's actually a whole phase of my pop art production. Nowadays, I'm into Kandiskied impressionism, but then, this was it: black and white, xeroxed, intended for the snail mails.

Quaker pop

Most of the pop I do these days is for the Quakers. In fact I will show it to you. Go to the Cloud Quakers site, click on photos, and there you have it, my production for the last month or so. It's kind of my role in Quakerdom. I'm the Andy Warhol of Quakerism.

For a while I took just any old picture, and made it into pop. It was fun, because there are so many pictures out there. Some people asked me if they could have them, though, and I didn't know what to say. Finally I said no, I can use these pictures, since I'm not making money off of them, and since I've doctored them, but I can't give them away, because they aren't mine. Now I do pop only (or almost only) on my own photos. And I keep them coming.

The problem is, I'm locked down, and the lockdown isn't going away. In fact we are feeling more trapped. For a while we let our kids run around town, relating to other kids, doing their thing, but they have no concept. To them, the idea of a mask or social distancing is kind of a joke, imposed on them by grownups with their twisted fears. But anyway here I am, I have a phone, I take pictures of the country, and the road into town, and I make pop out of them.

Not that I expect anyone to notice.

Now my pop art site, which I tell you about a lot, is rolling right along. I put stuff on it whenever I can. Lately I was flirting with another demonstration exhibit, as you can see, but I backed off. There wasn't enough of it. Going back to the Quakers, you can see I've drifted there too.

So, in pop, I have several problems. One, I have to keep cranking out Quaker pop, but don't quite know what to do (I would like to keep them original too). Two, I don't really like the "skin" of my pop blog; it's not displaying up to my standards. And, it has the only link there is to this one, but it's hidden. So it keeps people away from stuff I say about pop.

The only reason I mention it is, I'm looking hard at my blogs these days. Might do some blog marketing.

The death of Christo

The Atlantic. (2020, June 1). Photos: The Works of Christo https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2020/06/photos-works-of-christo/612484/.

OK I'll admit it. I haven't been posting much here. I am a pop artist. I have a fairly active rate of production, but I don't put it all on my pop site because I don't really like how the blog presents it. I put a lot more on Facebook, or on Twitter.

This site is about my awareness of being a pop artist. In that regard, a guy like Christo is my hero. I'm not crazy about everything he does. But he went for the big potato, and he got it. The world is aware of him. He did art on a grand scale.

It was kind of sad, how it all ended. He had a great building in SoHo. Everyone stopped going out. As a place to be trapped, there was probably no better place, for him. But he reminded me of all my friends in New York. They live in the cosmopolitan center of the world, with fabulous interesting people everywhere, and they can't go out, can't talk to people.

I'm out in the country in a place where it hadn't rained for three months until just briefly yesterday. Now everything smells great and there's this cool air as the grasses breathe and everything comes alive. This by the way is normal, as far as I can tell; it's not extreme drought, it's just the dry season. We have one more month of dry season. The "monsoon" starts in July.

I've got a fascination with an old collection of Barbie dolls that are painted up, tattoes, messy. Their hair has never been combed. I want to line them up with an eight ball and with an old Campbell's soup-can cup.

That's a report; that's what I'm up to. I'll keep you posted.

imageshack disaster II

I like to look at it this way: I am not a wealthy artist, I'm more like a street artist. I prefer not to write on other people's buildings, but I write on websites wherever I can find them, and I take my pictures, store them as I can, and use them with my writing. Over time, I've become better at posterizing, or sharpening, or altering photos, but mostly I do it for effect and don't really consider myself a professional.

Ah but one of the problems associated with my style, pop art as a hobby, is that a site like imageshack can offer you indefinite free storage of photos, and then simply retract the offer. Who can blame them? I wouldn't offer anyone free storage of photos indefinitely, and have trouble even with the junk my kids store on my computer. But I also have to admit, I enjoyed having all those photos out where I could see them anytime I wanted.

I have a curious relationship with flickr: some of my best photos are there, but they stopped after a hundred or so, and I didn't want to compound the dependence with false or manufactured e-mails (I actually have a few anyway) - so my flickr site, I've left as it is. But I had three imageshack sites, and spent the holidays taking back the photos. Putting them in a dropbox. As a yuppie, and a professional at that, I do have a dropbox. Actually it's my wife's. But it doesn't seem to mind all these photos.

I'm beginning to adopt Andy Warhol's philosophy, or at least two of them. First, I am what I appear to be, I'm not hiding anything or giving you a subtle, hidden message. Second, everything I've got, it's out where you can see it. It's right in front of you. I plan to be out there, everywhere, recognizable. That's my modus operandi.

But, it's come down to a number of blogger ports; I don't do static webpages very easily anymore. The SIU personal webpage server blithely made it so you had to use dreamweaver to use it, as all webpages had to be encrypted, so I'm no longer able to change or update my pages there. Same with TTU, although I have a slightly better chance of taking lessons, learning dreamweaver, and getting back on my feet here. That's a long-range plan, though. for the moment, I have a number of blogger sites, and people seem to visit them regularly, but online click-through web traffic doesn't seem to be a lucrative trade. I keep up my pr campaign; I do the best I can. But what I need are bold images, and billboards on the major streets of major cities. That campaign, I guess, will be next.

Imageshack disaster

Disaster! Imageshack is revoking its free service, and it's all over the e-mail telling me to take my pictures off or else, the orelse being pay $3.99/mo. It's not that I don't have the money; in fact we invest in dropbox, and most of the pictures may already be in there in some form or another. It's more that I like them on the web where I can see them, and if they're not there, it's kind of like they don't exist.

I have three accounts, so I consider myself a heavy user. Some is pop, lots are personal. I'm packing my bags. Google seems to be ok although I'm exploring other options. Flickr is good but very limited. These blogs have been the most consistent, self-organizing thing I've been able to find, really. Guess I'll be moving soon...maybe what I should say is, keep the organization horizontal, don't bury them.

Long time, no write; what am I, a pop artist? These days I'm more of a fiddler and a standard book author. I see stuff; I see it all the time, but I haven't been making pop art out of it. It was hard to posterize there for a while; one had to go out of one's way to do it. So, I lost my drive, I lost my spirit, and I took a break.

But it was only a matter of time before posterize came back. What really got me this year was a very wet spring for Texas, and a veritable explosion in colors I had never seen. This one plant, Texas sage, seems to have all kinds of colors, with leaves the traditional sage kind of colors, and the flowers being any kind of pink or purple. Bluebonnets came out also, even in the neighborhoods where I walk; I wasn't sure what I was seeing at first, but it was an intense and beautiful color, and I was sure I loved it. The brilliant displays of color set me back to seeing things I hadn't seen before in the intense sun.

As the summer wore on, though, the sun got more intense, and I went back to deliberate blindness, hat bill pulled over my eyes, trying to keep that darn thing off me. I'm happy this posterize function has come back; by the way, it's a simple on-your-computer function, not as good as some of the ones I used in the past, but certainly good enough to get started again, get inspired. I need to play a while, see what I can come up with. I make all the covers for my own books and I need lots of covers. I have also lost the ability to upload a webpage easily; both the server at SIU, where I am retired, and TTU, where I now work, require encryption that can not be written in by hand. So a person has to learn Dreamweaver, or whatever, to proceed with uploading web pop art, which is what I'd like to do.

Thirty years ago, at my first ESL job, they moved a copy machine to the hallway outside of my office. I should have been overjoyed at the convenience of being so close to the machine, but it was early in my career, and I had to figure out how to make a lesson, sometimes three or four that I would teach on that very day. The sounds of other teachers coming by making ten, twenty, thirty copies at a time began to drive me to distraction. Finally, in desperation, I started making xerox art out of it. I'd slip in there, master the enlarge and shrink functions, and photoshop the pieces together with scotch tape. I say "photoshop" because it implies putting images together that ordinarily wouldn't be seen together, but basically, that was my start in the image business. I admit, I'm an amateur. I've gone years and not done much with it. But I'm still at it, and even if it, for the most part, has other functions in my life (maybe making memes?), it's worth maintaining. More important, for my spirit, than ever.

Check out the latest at the pop art gallerie

got my pop back

Around May 2011 a free photo-hosting site, Fotopic, disappeared from the face of the earth and, try as I might, I could not find them. They had a lot of my pop art, though I think they had thousands of other photos as well; most of their victims were in the UK, and not much was said about what happened to the pictures or what they would do. I was devastated. A lot of my pop was on one of my computers anyway, but it was really more organized on Fotopic, though that's not saying much because I'm not incredibly organized. It's a psychological thing, though; losing that thread of organization almost cost me the whole collection.

Got an email about a week ago claiming that the company that had taken it over intended to restore everything, but then found it too costly, so they were returning them, giving us a chance to download our photos. I was grateful that I still had my siu.edu e-mail, because I received the message, and planned to grab them as soon as possible. By the time I got around to it, a week later, they were gone, but I found them again this afternoon and quick grabbed them all. I'm grateful that this company and its new owners found their way to doing the right thing.

My plan is to display the best of my pop over the years. Much of it appeared on calendars: a Kumakura one (or maybe two), several castlepark ones, etc. These deserve a permanent home, a set of galleries. I'm not Warhol, but I have a body of work. It's been published, in my own personal kind of way. It will rise again! The galleries, as they have stood for about a year and a half, empty (I'm telling you, I was devastated; I didn't even remove them)- will slowly be restored. At the moment they start here and are mostly empty. But keep checking: I intend to display it, step by step.