fire, water, walking trees and other things...

{me in the cascades}

cheers, 

me

Shark Infested Waters

A friend turned me on to a magnifico way to share tunes & playlists -- Grooveshark{!} -- it's free, and doesn't infringe anybody's copyrights, for those of us who care, like me, cause I'm an artist & stealing sucks.

Come hear what's in my ear with my playlist "...lately..." 
{you don't need an account to listen}

If you do sign up, come post your username here in the comments so I can 'follow' you and hear what rocks your world ;)

cheers,

me

Visual Culture

Bacterialized “Petri Glasses”  -or-  A literal Culture of the Visual

an interpretation by tracy yarkoni

First let me begin with a confession: the rust on my ‘art speak’ is enough to make a tetanus-shot-happy-shootin nurse squeal with joy. Second, I hadn’t realized this lamentable fact until reading Mitchell’s article.

But I digress, before I've even begun. My apologies. I will give Mr. Mitchell the benefit of the doubt that he was not intentionally trying to alienate and torture me personally; but that he really wanted to share with the world his critique of this fascinating concept called “Visual Culture” -- a subject which he taught for almost ten years, at the time his article was written. Also, he promises to describe his method of “showing seeing”, but only at the conclusion. I am intrigued by the idea, and like many-a-news program that I never meant to watch, I determine to stay tuned through all sorts of horrors, be they bloody, boring, or bloody boring, to get to the good part.  ...continue...

after the deluge...

{last december}

...Gods, An Epidemic... (a work in progress)

Chapter 0: "The Fool"
illustration by Tracy Yarkoni Odell
the fool symbolizes potentiality;
the pregnant pause, when anything is possible

working title:
Gods, An Epidemic

tagline:
An Epic Comedy Drama with Apocalyptic Tendencies

A novel in progress by yours truly {{me}}

detail 1:
the club/heart/spade/diamond fusion denotes the fool's potential, the wild card;
the lily represents spirituality and the fool's appreciation of beauty,
its white color speaks of innocence and purity of thought and action

the plan:
Wrap this up and send it off to publishers before I head back to University in the Fall (fingers crossed on both counts), posting chapters and illustrations here for your amusement.

detail 2:
the fool is seemingly unconcerned or unaware about walking off the cliff's edge,
a supreme act of idiocy/trust/faith, the first step of any adventure;
the dog can represent animal desires or the call of the 'real world' biting at her heels

sidenote:
Each of the 22 chapters corresponds to the major arcana cards of the Tarot - basically, it follows the hero's journey from 'The Fool' to 'The World'; so I'm kind of starting out of order here, with the Chapter 0 illustration of the fool (what? zero is a number too. don't hate on 'zero') but giving you the Preamble to read instead. Nevermind, a little chaos is good for the soul...

detail 3:
 all the possessions the fool might need for the journey are few,
symbolizing the significance of the spiritual over the material

{All comments/critiques gladly welcome!}

Gods, An Epidemic

In Hebrew there is a one-letter difference between

the words “wonderful” and “f ****d.”

…

Liminality is walking the line between two states of existence;
In other words, it is the holding of that aforementioned letter for ransom. 

…

Preamble

Gods can be forgetful too. You try living forever, and see if you’re memory doesn’t overload and short circuit once in a while; and not the kind of memory lapses that result in missing a dental appointment either. No. Think bigger. Wider. More… infinite. Brain farts of colossal proportions.

Like, forgetting that you exist.

…

Gods make sense of things. The natural state of our universe is complete chaos. Things naturally don’t make any sense at all, until a god gets a handle on it. The earth really did used to be flat until a god figured out that it didn’t make sense.

Gods and Goddesses are, as a general rule, immortal. But they can hardly be expected to maintain the same form of existence in perpetuity. It is incomprehensibly boring to be infinite and all-knowing all of the time – one must do something to while away the hours, and what better way to entertain oneself than to experience life as a mortal? Little else gives life more value than death itself; or at least, the certain knowledge of impending doom that shadows all living creatures of non-immortal persuasion. The promise of death kills boredom and meaninglessness like nothing else can; except perhaps for falling in love or having really good sex. The gods had a firm handle on the love and sex thing, so it was only natural that Death was their last bastion of intrigue.        


{{Click Here to continue...}}

NOBODY FREAK OUT

NOBODY FREAK OUT
(photo by rachel wright, 2010)
[mucked around with by me, 2011]

This has been my favorite phrase for a while now. It all started one day, with my family riding in the car down a highway in Israel. To our right: desert. To our left: desert. Ahead: desert. Behind us? Yep, more desert, and an occasional mountain or two. And lo and behold, a road sign approached us from the right. It looked just like the kind that tells you to slow for an upcoming curve, or to watch for falling rocks - only this one was rather existentially challenged and/or challenging (we haven't really decided yet.) I wish{!} I had a picture. It was a simple triangle shaped sign, trimmed in urgent-red, with a single, large, black exclamation point in the middle. That's it.          No words.           No other supporting imagery.        

Considering the signs intrinsic *emphatic-ness*, we felt it was probably in our best interest to figure out what, exactly, this sign could be warning us about; and with the hope that we'd do it before the thing we were being warned about found us:

1. warning: falling punctuation - be careful what you say and hear, as random commas, semicolons,  question marks and such could insert themselves into the conversation creating severe communication chaos; for example: Pass me! that bag of rasp-- berries oh a camel where's?! the cam;era, when you need. it oh! i never! lik,ed camels raspberries. are too seedy?

2. warning: rampant paranoiac activity ahead - entering an area, or vortex, where anything and everything could happen - so just watch out, you know, generally - for everything and anything; you have been warned. be warned. go forth in a constant state of being warned. may the warning be with you. the warning is strong with this one... {ad nauseum}

3. a road-sign makers cruel cruel joke - maybe they sometimes sit further down the road just to watch people's perplexed faces as they drive past; wringing they're hands and laughing maniacally 'mwah ha ha'


4. Or maybe it was a simple piece of advice - that in a world of uncertainty (the proverbial, infinite-in-scope, exclamation point that we all live in) - one should remember to keep calm. Know that there will be exclamation points around you, and the best thing one can do - is to not only remind yourself, but everyone else (in an !emphatic! tone of voice):

NOBODY FREAK OUT


Which brings me nicely to two of my favorite songs of late - that juxtapose so nicely as to completely refute what I've just said, that I felt it necessary to post them here - because it reminds me, to never be too serious about anything because once you think you've figured something out, the opposite of that thing will present itself to you... rather boldly... and wearing a smirky grin.

{warning! contains some strong language}





and because the funny thing about writing a blog - is that there's no one to stop you -- I'm going to negate myself again:




1.17.11, update

Found a pic of the sign:

And found out that it means: "dangerous place"
So our musings still apply.


But more intriguingly, is this new perplexity of a sign:

Notice, though, it's not a dot, its a hexagon.
Beware floating hexagons!
or... 6-sided things in general!
or... you are now entering the 6th dimension...

I'm glad we didn't see this sign; though it would seem to connote less possible danger - it's exactly that discrepancy between something seemingly innocent, yet required a warning sign all it's own, which makes this sign truly the more nerve wracking of the two.

Up to Something: Part III, Clown Vs. Monkey!!!

It's all coming together... for the last year(?) or so, I've been drawing backgrounds for the soon to be released Clown Vs. Monkey .

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been a machine - knocking these puppies out left, right AND center... here's a few, or you can click here to see the whole album (you may need to hit 'refresh' if you've seen it before).

enjoy ;)

jungle fever

starship bananaprise

tear jerker

oh, and for an extra treat - here's one of my backgrounds in action:

cheers,

me

Up to Something: Part II, It's All Irish to Me...

I did the following short story using characters from the book I'm writing (Yes, a book. What is it, you ask? I call it an "Epidemic" = An Epic Comedy Drama with Apocalyptic Tendencies) to relay my Ireland experience. It was more interesting than *me* telling it, for sure, and it was a great chance to practice writing dialogue (my absolute least favorite aspect of writing a novel) and an opportunity to build some back story for these characters. It even ended up with a nice twist at the end, that I didn't see coming till I got there ;)

click here for the story... go on, i'll wait here for you.

{goes to get coffee...}

done? ah. So now you can see I rather failed at the 'exercise in dialogue writing' part, hehe... I promise my book has more actual dialogue and less soliloquy. (Though not necessarily between these two characters; awkward tends to be their norm, at this point anyway.)


cheers,
me

Up to Something: Part I

A friend recently scolded me for 'making' her follow my blog, but then my not having posted anything since she did. True. I've been bad. but busy. sooooooo...

What have I been doing?

Let's start where I left off by looking at those polaroids I promised in my last post. It was exciting to finally push the capture button on my vintage SX-70 (see previous post) and have something actually pop out the front. The film I got from The Impossible Project, "TZ-Artistic, Paul Giambarba Edition" for Polaroid Type SX-70. I must say, I'm a little disappointed in the quality. Though occasionally the overexposed, unsaturated aesthetic works -- it made getting a good shot difficult. Here's the best I've got so far:

 for comparison's sake, here's a photoshop enhanced version (though i didn't remove the linear artifact that runs through the middle. these lines showed up on several prints, though not all):

I happened to take this camera with me to Ireland, as well as my shiny new Sony NEX-5 (love love love - it has interchangeable lenses, fits in my purse, lightweight & is almost as good as a pro dslr) - how's that for diametric opposites? While riding the train to Dublin, I got antsy waiting for some sheep to show up on the endless farm lands that whooshed past us & decided to experiment a bit. The following were shot holding my NEX-5 in my right hand, pointing it through the viewfinder on my polaroid which I held in my left hand, pressed up to the train's window glass.... I love the painterly quality that these images have in person (don't know if it is obvious in these lower resolution images here) - but I'm excited about this series and am looking forward to taking my time getting good (BIG) prints of them eventually:

cheers,

me

ps- be back w/ more of what I've been doing soon... (next up: Ireland & a short story)

Oh The Impossibilities... or, Dusting Off the Old Polaroid SX-70

I purchased this beautiful Polaroid SX-70 over a decade ago, thinking that one day I'd search out some film for it. Which I never did. And then Polaroid went out of business. grrrr & double grrrr

October 2008, Enter: The Impossible Project

From what I can gather, a couple of artist/photographers got together and bought a Polaroid plant & then made the impossible happen - they started producing polaroid film. And not just the standard 600 kind either - no no, they started with film for the SX-70 (produced from 1972-1981).

I bought the TZ ARTISTIC Paul GIAMBARBA edition (EXPIRED) for $24.50
I only get 8 shots.
That's over 3 bucks a pop.
But I don't care, in fact
I get something even better...
I finally {cue angels singing} get to pull my Polaroid SX-70 off of the mantlepiece, and for the first time in our relationship - get to see it for more than just a pretty thing.... I get to push it's freakin buttons... oh yeah baby... and it's love from first click.... I'll post images soon ;)

Now go shop for your own Impossibilities here:
http://www.the-impossible-project.com/