art – Page 2 – JWNPhoto.com

Articles Tagged with: art

Kulture Klash 7 Recap

How do they do it? The organizers of Kulture Klash, the low country’s festival of art, dance, & music have managed to top themselves again. For the 7th installment of bi-annual event, the stand-out attraction for me was the live wakeboard demonstration provided by Chuck and Chalice to coincide with the festival’s water theme.

OK, lets rewind a bit to yesterday afternoon, when the site of the festival was freely opened up to the public to view the art installations.

In addition to art for sale, the show featured artist interpretations of the quintessential Surf Shack:

This photo is all about BadJon, his framed art, and his giant Alien Bees ring flash:

Moving along outside, as the crew put the finishing touches on the wakeboard pools, the kids and dogs took advantage of the opportunity to get as dirty as possible!

What better way to cool off in the hot Charleston sun than with an all-natural snow cone from Rena Larch and her Happy Camper Snoballs?

Artist and the man behind (and in front of) the scenes at Kulture Klash, Scott Debus presented my kids with the coveted Blue Power Ranger, which also squeaks. I know this because I was woken up this morning to the sound of a squeaking Power Ranger!

The free art viewing was the perfect place to check out local art with your family. The kids were able to run around and be kids, people brought their pets, and the atmosphere was very relaxed. We also had a good vantage point to check out some of the Charleston Air Show, which local photo buddy Montwerx was covering from behind his lens.

Now it’s time for the party! I returned to the Klash a little after 8:00PM to an already packed house.

There was live music, dancing, and hula hoop girls all around! So began an adventure in low and no-light photography.

This works to my advantage, because the best way to tell the story of a party like this is to show the motion of it.

Also on hand was the newly founded Girls Rock Charleston, who performed an interpretive dance to live drumming:

The roar of the guitar and beat of the drums reigned in the alleyway next to Storehouse 10 as the band named Cusses took the stage.

As with past Kulture Klash Arts Festivals, there were live works of art being created during the course of the night, including a giant surfboard and this huge canvas:

Over in the next alley was the Urban Wakeboarding demo as well as another stage. The wakeboaders started out on one end of the alley on the back of a pickup truck. On the other end was a winch that pulled them across two pools joined by a rail jump in the middle.

Needless to say, nighttime action sports photography is not the easiest thing to do! That didn’t stop the throngs of cell phone videographers that lined the barrier broadcasting to their Facebook friends the watersports event of the evening. Sometimes I feel we’re all the stars of The Truman Show. So says the guy with the camera…

On stage was the dub sounds of Charleston’s Dubplates:

It was time for me to depart. The amazing thing was that at 11:00PM, a whole new crowd was coming in through the gate to experience a whole other set of performances. It’s an amazing festival that truly is whatever you make of it, and I couldn’t be more impressed by just how much awesomeness is packed into one evening. I’d love to see everybody’s photos and hear their stories about the evening, so please share!

As usual, you can check out the full extensive set of photos I took on my Flickr Stream.

Kudos To Miller’s Professional Imaging

I wanted to write a post just to share with you the work that I’m contributing to Kulture Klash 7, but I need to first share with you my account of the great service I received from Miller’s Professional Imaging (who are the people behind Zenfolio/MPIX which is who I use for all of my prints).

I’m quite the busy guy, with a family to support (I’m writing this post as I tend to my daughter who’s home sick from school today) and another business to run. Although I knew that this weekend’s KK7 Arts Festival was this coming up quickly, I failed to note that the artwork drop off date was today (April 5th)! I had ordered my prints over the weekend and when I got a reminder email from the organizers of the festival about the drop off date yesterday, I had a mini panic attack because I wouldn’t have my work ready in time. I quickly sent an email to Zenfolio’s support people and explained my screw-up and asked if I could bump up the shipping to overnight. Not only did they get back to me quickly, they rushed the processing of the prints and upgraded my shipping at no extra cost! I was prepared to pay whatever it takes and they just took care of me at their expense – In my opinion that is simply amazing customer service that goes above and beyond. I’m so proud to have them as my printing partner for JWNPhoto.

The work I’m showing at Kulture Klash was really not what I had originally planned on showing this time around. I had planned on keeping a musical theme with my photos and to have a relationship between them all. When the organizers announced that the theme of the festival for KK7 was going to be water, I threw out my original idea and started thinking about water themed photos. I have a lot of shoreline photos but I didn’t want to come off as kitschy, especially in this festival’s environment which tends to cater to a more underground art scene. Don’t get me wrong, I love a classic sunset photo and I truly love trying to differentiate myself from the crowd while still creating a photo of the same sand, water, and sky. I thought of some of the common traits in my favorite shoreline photos that I’ve created recently – bold color, portrait orientation, & negative space. I remembered that unlike a photo competition – there are no rules to an art show. I could present a triptych of three different images that share a common theme and make an even stronger presentation.

The images at the top of the post are three 20″x30″ prints arranged intentionally in order and placement by the time of day and horizon. The first image was made from the Pitt Street Bridge of the Charleston Peninsula at sunset. I love the crimson color of the sky and the two cranes that look almost like they’re worshiping the falling sun. I remember a seemingly intoxicated lady who walked by while I was making this shot and she commented that the sunset was not very nice. I guess that’s why they say opinions are like asses… everybody has one. The second photo was made at Shem Creek from the bridge. I zoomed in tightly to capture a very golden sky – I love the contrast of the blue shrimping boat and the reflections of the boardwalk lights in the water. This shot also has a diagonal line formed by the dock and boardwalk that is something I tend to look for in a lot of my landscape photos. Finally, the third photo is of the recent Supermoon. I wanted a simple and bold graphical image of the water and the color and shape of the unusually bright moon. It’s very interesting to note that local photographer Robert Donovan (and a host of other local photogs) were all in the same area taking pictures of the same moon, but with very different results. Robert’s image is very similar in composition, but his focus on the detail of the moon made for a completely different image! He’s exposure is very different, so the colors are radically different as well. It just goes to prove that there is a lot of artistic interpretation going on when you get behind the camera and develop the finished product.

Another piece that I’m showing is this diptych that I made for a Gizmodo.com photo challenge. I wanted to show a picture featuring a person, because I don’t want to be typecast as a landscape photographer. I love the feeling of this photo – The saturation and contrast are very expressive and the Elmo T-Shirt is begging for your eye’s attention, much like the subject’s (my daughter) body language is longing for the attention of the waitress.

I hope to see a lot of friends at the festival this weekend – don’t forget to get your tickets early and save a few bucks!

More Than One Way

robo-rainbow from mudlevel on Vimeo.

I saw this video this morning (via engadget.com) and thought it was really interesting. As I read through the comments on Engadget, there was one troll on there who was complaining about the uselessness and inefficiency of the machine. I had to chime in and “feed the troll” as they say because it’s apparent that some people don’t see something like this for what it really is. There’s always more than one way to interpret art, and for something like this, the end result is not the whole point of the piece.

As you watch the video, which was carefully filmed and edited together, you see a man assembling a machine attached to a bicycle. You get close up shots of the metal work, the fitting of the electronics, and the movement of the gears and chains. Each shot isolates a feature and is dramatically demonstrated until we see it all in action – which is shown with a wide shot of it painting a rainbow on a wall. Now, to someone who’s not paying attention, the art was in creating the machine and the filming of the assembly of it. The rainbow itself was just a mere punchline to a well setup joke. If this was about painting a perfectly symmetrical rainbow, then it would be nutty. There are plenty of ways to paint a rainbow without going through the effort that was put into this.

The art is in the creation of it all. The steampunkish contraption itself, the storytelling in the filming, and the final execution all work together. It’s the act of creating something because you can. The message I took from this was that the journey is always more important than the destination. What’s your interpretation?

Street Art On Film

Tonight I finally got a chance to catch the Banksy film “Exit Through The Gift Shop“. Not since the Wilco film “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart” have I enjoyed a documentary so thoroughly for starting as one interesting topic and then morphing into something completely different and just plain awesome.

Exit Through The Gift Shop seemingly starts out to be about Thierry Guetta, a Frenchman living in LA who runs a thrift shop, and his obsession with filming up-and-coming street artists such as Shepard Fairey and Invader to create his own documentary about them. At one point it is revealed that he’s got boxes and boxes stuffed with raw footage that he never planned to edit. This is where the movie starts to turn into something else – although not sharply. It took the eventual friendship of the famed British street artist Banksy for someone to really call out the Frenchman on his endless journey behind the camera. What happens after that is truly unbelievable. I don’t want to spoil it for those of you like me who have to wait for most movies to come out on Netflix (because the theater is the place I take my kids on the weekends these days) and may not have seen it yet. Go watch it on Netflix – or buy the DVD.

Another fairly recent documentary that I watched was “Jean-Michel Basquiat The Radiant Child“. This movie is not the comedic thrill ride of Exit Through The Gift Shop. This is more of a tragedy – the rise and fall of one of America’s greatest artists who got his start with street art by spray-painting on buildings with his tag “Samo” and quickly growing his desire to create into a multi-million dollar career. As you may know, this story doesn’t have a happy ending. Don’t worry, I didn’t just spoil the movie for you, the movie is not so much about his life as it is about being a fly on the wall as you watch film maker Tamra Davis’ footage of Basquiat in action. For those of you not familiar with Basquiat’s work, this movie does a great job of helping you get it. For him, it was not about color, texture, or composition. It was all about his vision and voice. His work seems downright child-like to most because he had little-to-no filter to hold him back. The guy was a master in defining just what art could be (not what it was) at the time and who knows if that was really his intention, but it certainly was his work’s effect.

Robert Donovan Check's His White Balance

1/250th of a sec f/2.8 11mm ISO 200

As photographers, we can learn so much from the other art forms. The same themes run though all of the creative processes, and some of the best and brightest stars of each generation are the ones that redefine what we once classified as art. How can photographers take a medium that for all intents and purposes was created to capture that which already exists and create something new? People are doing it every day. The secret is to take your vision of what you see around you and to capture it as you see it – not with your real eyes, but with your mind’s eyes. By drawing the onlooker’s eye to the points you want take them through in a photograph, you can paint the scene with your composition and exposure. By exploiting the shortcomings of cameras you can turn a realistic scene into one with motion, or extreme contrast, or strange colors. By knowing how to properly use the camera, you can make something rather ordinary look extraordinary. I could go on and on, but hopefully you can see why the camera is much more powerful than just a tool to take snapshots of family events. It is our brush, our piano, our pen and paper.

So to wrap this up, can anybody recommend a good film about Keith Haring? I remember going to see a show of his work when I was a kid and his work has really stuck with me since then.

Raw Talent

I got to witness some really talented kids today. My children are lucky to attend an arts-infused school, and my daughter is part of the school’s chorus team. Today, they performed two showcases in the area and included dance and painting as well as singing in their performances.

The three painters that were participating started with a blank canvas and were given the duration of the performance (which was only about 20 minutes) to create something. I was particularly interested in them because I love to see a creative challenge like this. I’ve posted previously about the occasional benefits of boundaries, and I think it really separates the people who love their craft from the excuse-makers who aren’t quite there yet. These kids did not disappoint.

The painters were positioned right up front with the vocal performers, and the onlookers who were curious enough to walk around to take a peak were treated to an evolving trio of paintings. I can guarantee that if they were not forced to finish, they would have kept going and would have ended up with totally different paintings than what they created this afternoon.

It was a great display of raw talent. These kids are all about 10 years old, and are at varying levels with their arts, but they are mostly uncorrupted. There’s no agenda, just the urge to make something and say, “look at what I can do”.

I have to give the faculty members of the school that came out to participate on a Saturday great praise. They are an example of the right kind of educators that our children need to grow up in an enlightened and progressing world. A place without creativity would be a frightening one because it screams to be set free from the minute you begin to connect with the life around you.

I put up a set of photos from the events on my Flickr.