Day 2

We didn’t do the Power 90 last night… and I also didn’t do any art. I did go in to the ‘art room’ last night… which is our second bedroom which is currently used as a storage room in half of it and I have a few tables set up for art in the other part of it. It was extremely cold as we have it blocked off to keep the cold air from the rest of the apartment to save on heating costs, etc. I tried to set up an encaustic painting area, but got a major headache. I played around with taking the feet off of a skillet in there since they are partly broken. I re-arranged quite a few things… However, after that I think the stress from being in there mixed with the cold and the thoughts of how little I’ve been in there, etc. just sort of gave me a migrane headache… I was in there a couple of hours probably, just re-arranging things… shortly after I left the room Tekla got home since she worked last night. After that we went out to eat at a Chinese buffet across from Golden Coral. It’s a nice place… and it’s fairly cheap. I think it’s usually about twenty bucks between the two of us. I was really feeling ill during the meal. I think it was the cold from the room mixed with some sinus problems I’ve been having as well stress from being back at work the first day in many days dealing with very complex system issues (adjusting some hold bills are tricky – have to queue claim, print to screen to create an Account Receivable Counter on the Plan, then manually adjust off the balance, and note the visit – a very multi-step process that should only take 30 seconds but really takes about 5+ minutes per claim, and I had quite a few of those to deal with the last hour of work… among the many other things I did the rest of the day – have to jump through hurdles to just get the system to do what it should do automatically but never does as it was not programmed to do things the right ‘smart’ way of handling EVERYTHING… )… Tekla rubbed my head to try to help the migraine a bit, but it only helped so much. Needless to say after the dinner we pretty much went directly to bed shortly after that… Today, I did write some more in morning pages. I also did practice midi about half an hour, but only about 15 minutes of it got recorded since the computer ran out of memory or something as some error message popped up about virtual memory running out. Not sure why it worked yesterday in recording half an hour, but not today?.. Here’s today’s recording. I tried to practice more of the C-scale. It’s very difficult to get my left hand to do the transition when heading back down the scale. My middle finger just doesn’t seem to land on E all the time since it’s such a complex wrist movement… It also doesn’t help that the keyboard is probably on a desk that’s a little too high compared to where the office chair is at maximum height. Elbows are probably about even or a little below the keyboard, and they should be above for optimal use… might have to get a new desk or chair someday down the road?… might need a new keyboard too someday as this one has a lot of static in the sound coming out of the speaker in the earphones (I use earphones since it’s so early morning and I live in an apartment)… so here’s the short version of what did actually record. I was hoping it would be the full 30 minutes, but the computer thought otherwise.

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B5pC9Gwr9zBIOEgxbVlpdzA2aXM

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Day one of 2013 goals

Goal 1 of the day – 3 single space ‘morning pages’ – complete.

Goal 2 of the day – half hour practicing on the midi keyboard – complete. Mostly practiced the C Scale using 123-12345 fingering. Prior to watching a piano practice app/youtube video the other day I was always in the past following the 12345 way of fingering the keyboard that is taught in some entry level books. It’s far more difficult to do the 123-12345 way of fingering the keyboard, but it is more professional and it seems like it will ultimately be an easier way of doing things and learning the full keyboard eventually. With 123-12345 you put thumb on c, index on d, and middle finger on e, then thumb goes under those to f, and so on up to the next c. With the other hand it’s little finger on c, then ring finger on d, middle on e, and then move middle over those to f… that move with the left hand is more difficult, especially on the way back down the scale since fingers are going under instead of over… I did a little bit of ode to joy in the middle in this practice. I recorded the practice just so I can reflect back on it later at how bad I was just starting today, and to see improvement over time, etc.
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B5pC9Gwr9zBIZC1QWEhsSG93OEk

Goals for this afternoon/night: make some art, and do some working out. Tekla and I are going to try to re-start the Power 90 from scratch at the beginning… but this time we are doing it together. I am so very happy that she will be joining me this time. I really think that will help motivate me to keep going.

I’m hoping I can help motivate her too.

We bought new yoga mats last night! That was an exciting purchase we made together. The mat I was using prior to now is really a ‘camping mat’ so it didn’t have trenches in it, so it created a bit of a suction cup effect on a sweaty back if when doing crunches, etc. if there was no towel or tee shirt on top of it… this new one should avoid that problem since it’s got some breathing trenches in it.

I believe that “The Age of Aquarius” has now begun… The new calendar has begun now that the Mayan one has ended, and it is a new one of love, peace, prosperity, and many blessings.

http://allartists.wikispaces.com/

http://allartists.wikispaces.com/ is a new wiki I started today. I plan to add more to it on a regular basis, and grow it to be a gigantic list of artists both future and past, both greats and lesser knowns. Since it’s a wiki anyone can edit it. Feel free to add to it at any time. This is growing a project I’ve started because I think places like wikipedia, and most art history books are a bit biased in what and who they include and do not include.

The point of this is to create a list of every artist that we can find anything about. Since visual arts is my thing, I’m starting there, but over time it might be highly possible to add musical arts, and other art types there. I want this thing to be come a hugely comprehensive list that will be usable by the masses for various purposes. Art students and art historians doing research papers could use it as a starting place for doing research. Art collectors could use it to find up and coming artists. Art galleries could use it to find artists and ways to contact them. Artists themselves can use the wiki to link to their home pages, study trends, get inspiration, etc.

Symphony Society extends reach to younger audiences

The new symphony directors are finding ways to keep classical music alive. http://bit.ly/cozgcn

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Mixing colors… It’s not what you think it is.

There are two color spectrums that are important in the arts. One is real light and how it mixes in the real world. The other is reflected light and how it works in the real world. Real lighting is visible in Stage Lighting, Computer Screens, TVs, and just about anywhere that there is a real light source – light bulb, sun, window, etc. The primary colors of real light are red, green, and blue.

The primary colors of reflected light on the other hand are red, yellow, and blue. In the print world, black is also added to that to arrive at a spectrum that is abbreviated CYMK – Cyan (Red), Yellow, Magenta (Blue), and BlaCK – CK is used for Black so that it’s not confused with Blue.

Mixing primary colors in real light results in white where the colors overlap. This is easily demonstrated in stage lighting by simply aiming 3 lights at the same area, where each one has a filter on it that matches the 3 primary colors – red, green, and blue. Where the three colors overlaps on the stage or wall or whever the lights are aimed together, there’s white that shows up in the middle.

Painting and other forms of art where color is placed on an object utilize the reflected light spectrum since the paper, canvas, or whatever else is typically not a light source itself. What is really weird about reflected light is that the science behind it does something completely different from what you think it’s doing. The color we see on an object is really what’s reflecting back at us off of that object when the real light hits the object. In other words the “colors” we see in everything that is not a real light source is really an absence of that particular color in the object itself – all the other colors of the spectrum are “absorbed” by the object, so what we see is really the opposite of the color that the object really is. We see the color that bounced back at us and was not absorbed.

Because of that weird way that things work, mixing primary colors with paint usually results in a muddy brown mid-tone color with low intensity. That’s completely different than what happens when real light’s primary colors are mixed.

That means that most stuff that you see on screen will usually look a lot darker than it did in the computer when you print it, especially since printers add more than the primary colors, and throw black in too.

It also means that when you go to mix colors as a painter, you have to think completely differently than when you mix colors with real light, like when you are thinking about interior design issues in stage lighting, or just picking out lights to put in to your bathroom, kitchen, bedroom, or living room.

What gets very interesting is that some sculptures and other forms of art mix and match both light spectrums through backlighting, integrating tv screens in to the artform, adding lights to sculptures, etc. Sculpture is actually a whole different baseball game all together since it can incorporate time and space in to it through relationships of shadows in the real world, locations of the sun at various times of the day and year, etc. Video and painting can do that too on some levels depending on where the painting is placed, what the environment the painting is in, and of course one of the primary elements of video is time – the 4th dimension to 3 Dimensional works so to speak.

With painting, drawing, and other reflected light art forms, there is also a lot going on with how elements of the painting work with one another. Layering colors together is sort of one of the main things painters do. We create depth and dimension to a 2 dimensional plane by placing brush strokes, and other elements next to one another, on top of one another, underneath one another… There’s literally a ton of work that goes in to this sort of stuff sometimes to make a “realistic” artwork. What’s sad though is most viewers of these things that may have taken hundreds of hours to put together typically only view the work for 3-10 seconds at the most unless something in partcular catches their eye or interest in the work.

Big sculptures and video have a little bit of an advantage over painting in that regard – the viewer is forced in to watching looking at those types of things for longer periods of time, leaving more time for the work to create an impression and message. However, painting has a “presence” that exists longer sometimes, in some works. It is a visual thing that can haunt you over time as your brain echos seeing the patterns on the image over and over.

Creating works of art is a bit like wandering through a maze. You have tons of decisions to make, and each one creates subsequent decisions to make. The painting with the most “potnential energy” might well be the blank canvas… just as the work of music that might create the most interest and cause you to think about things is complete silence…http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUJagb7hL0E

Art is life. Life is art. Neither are a reflection of one another because both just are. They exist not in parallel to one another, or as a mirror to one another, but coexist, sometimes peacefully, other times in chaos. Out of chaos comes creation many times, and creation usually does eventually lead to some form of chaos.

The entire universe was created with a major big bang explosion of chaos, and from that came the beauty that we call life.

Old Blogs… and websites…

Just for reference and historical information, I’m going to list my old blogs, and possibly old websites here if they still exist. This right here that you are reading now is my real blog for today and going foward in time, but I’m going to link to my old blogs from here for my own reading and for yours too if you want. I am going to do that so that there’s a link back and forth between here and there so that you can see where my thought processes have been in the past, and I can too… since there’s a lot of themes and ideas that I come back to over time…

http://oldnewsstories.blogspot.com/ – the idea with this was to edit public domain news stories in the archive since the text that came from the scan was horrible…

http://midnightmoonrunner.blogspot.com/ – this was a highly cliche’ identity thingy for me a long time back…

http://paintstorm.blogspot.com/ – When I get creative I become like a storm… it starts slow, then speeds up and goes hyper with thousands of ideas crossing my mind silmultanously… but there’s a constant quite in the storm… sort of similar to the search for IT in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road

http://role-playing-onion.blogspot.com/– I used to role play a lot back in high school, college, and some after that too, at least in my mind and online…

http://poet-traits.blogspot.com/ – I envision poet-traits as more or less portraits created with poety describing the individual or quoted by the individual where the lines of the poetry are shaped with curves and splines and things to create the face of the individual. I used to do a lot of drawings like that back in college somewhat in sketch books… sketch books are probably best for it, or something like illustrator or inkspace… but sketchbooks are best because of the immediacy of the work and the fact that it’s easy to just keep turning the book and the drawing instrument..

http://satelliteman.blogspot.com/ – I’m in to FTA Satellite…. It’s a neat hobby.

http://entropia-delight.blogspot.com/ – this was my first Entropia Blog…

http://jeffthomannart.blogspot.com/ – This was my latest art blog…

http://haikumostdays.blogspot.com/ – I like writing haiku sometimes

http://mariasgoods.blogspot.com/ – this was another Entropia blog from the days when Maria did not own a shop yet and did street trading in Port Atlantis and Twin Peaks.

http://jeffthomannsart.blogspot.com/ – This was another take on an art blog…

http://obscuremissourilaws.blogspot.com/ – This never went far… but studying the laws, there is a lot of loopholes and plainly stupid things going on, not just in Missouri, but everywhere.

http://photogametry.blogspot.com/ – 3d math and the stuff behind 3d animation is fascinating.

http://harm-onica.blogspot.com/ – I have a harmonica but have not ever learned to use it yet. I was going to learn a while back since my wife and I carpool and worked different hours. I was going to try to practice the harmonica while waiting in the car for her, but never got too far with it because, as you can tell by reading this post, I’ve got a lot of hobbies, and so never found the time to master the harmonica (yet)

http://jeffsdoodles.blogspot.com/ – This was another art blog – based on quick little works…

http://spameaters.blogspot.com/ – I was going to try to copy spam, but decided not to go on with it after a few posts since lots of other websites are out there and it’s stupid to actually make that stuff popular.

http://three-d-news.blogspot.com/ – 3d industry is fascinating. I read 3d World, HDRI magazine, and a lot of other various publications sometimes… also visit lots of forums related to the industry.

http://publicdomainremix.blogspot.com/ – I love public domain stuff and editing it.

http://grababeat.blogspot.com/ – I was going to try to do some music since I own a midi keyboard and a voice recorder, but never got too far with it. I still like the idea of mixing things up like that.

http://720x480doodles.blogspot.com/ – I was going to do doodles that were 720×480 pixels… but never got far with it really… sort of a silly format to go with…

http://knowledgeyoucanuse.blogspot.com/ – this was a good idea blog, but I never did much with it. This blog will likely have good ideas mixed in with various posts as we move forward in time.

http://jeffthomann.blogspot.com/ – real original… lol… almost as good as jeffthomann.wordpress.com, 😉

http://makesomemoneyrightnow.blogspot.com/ – My wife and I are in to online businesses. I was going to try to explain to people my experiences with all of that… I still probably will in this blog since this is my ONE blog moving foward…

http://5×7-doodles.blogspot.com/ 5×7 inch drawings and doodles… I love that format since it’s a size that can be used in postcards on cafepress, and is also a size that fits in 5×7 inch picture frames, and also can easily be shrunken down to artcard sizes.

http://archaicsymphony.blogspot.com/ – this was going to be a music and public domain remix blog, but someone else already was using that same basic name on a website, so I gave up on it quickly.

http://great-quotes.blogspot.com/ – I love reading quotes, especially from artist and other creative individuals. I may do a few quotes in this blog moving foward in time since this is the only blog I plan to keep moving forward…

http://publicdomainartbyjeff.blogspot.com/ – I love public domain works and was thinking about creating some of my own public domain works. I might still do this in the future.

http://hackinghealthcare.blogspot.com/ – I work for a University Hospital. I was going to use this blog with a false name since I may have revealed some basic info that some might see as trade secrets, or at least things that would make the organization I work for look not so great since there is a lot of little dirty secrets out there that most folks don’t necessarily know about in the public. I may still do a tidbit now and then but will be careful to word things so that I am not putting my job at risk… especially since this blog makes it very apparent who I am by the name on it…