Tag Archives: Whiskey Monday

Second Life Photos: What I Like #15

A Short Film About Long Things

A Short Film About Long Things by Whiskey Monday

I like A Short Film About Long Things by Whiskey Monday. It defies gravity and our expectations. I also think it sold more HPMD grass than all their marketing combined. It’s a play on perspective challenging our expectations which is what art should do. Ernst Gombrich said, “Art is an institution to which we turn when we want to feel a shock of surprise. We feel this want because we sense that it is good for us once in a while to receive a healthy jolt. Otherwise we would so easily get stuck in a rut and could no longer adapt to the new demands that life is apt to make on us. The biological function of art, in other words, is that of a rehearsal, a training in mental gymnastics which increases our tolerance of the unexpected.”

Well, that’s what Whiskey is doing, increasing our tolerance of the unexpected. In terms of composition, you can see the light pole follows the Rule of Fifths, the line from Whiskey to the bird and the edge of the grass follows the Rule of Thirds, and the subject follows the Golden Ratio.

When I was six years old I broke my leg. I was running from my brother and his friends. Tasted the sweet perfume of the mountain grass as I rolled down. I know I've grown... I can't wait to go home.

When I Was Six Years Old by Chel Glitter.

I like When I Was Six Years Old by Chel Glitter. Here is a delightful story-telling photo from Chel Glitter. I enjoy her photostream for all the stories she gives us in story. This one just made me grin…but you should click through for the whole story.

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All that is solid melts into air

Snapshot

Art has many purposes; one is to make us think. If the greatness of art is measured by how much we think about it, Whiskey Monday is a great artist. It is difficult for a virtual artist like Whiskey Monday to get first life recognition for Second Life® art, but it is not impossible. I certainly think her work merits exposure in the broader world beyond our pixel borders.

Meanwhile, it is good to know that the powers that be in our world recognize her importance and have granted her LEA10 – one of the Linden Endowment for the Arts sims, to create art for the coming month. She’s working away and generously allows people to go there and use her builds in their photos.

Snapshot

Where I first saw this build, I thought  of “Things Fall Apart”, the title of the book by China Achebe that a lot of us read in high school. By the way, if you have not read it, you should. I thought of coming undone, falling apart, coming apart at the seams; metaphors for the fragility of life. I do get the sense that Monday is tackling the big questions with her work.

Then I thought of creative destruction and Karl Marx’s quote, “All that is solid melts into air.” Marx believed the cycle of innovation, recession, then innovation, the boom and bust, would lead to the eventual collapse of capitalism. Free market fundamentalists love creative destruction believing it always leads to innovation that will always lead to more productivity and more wealth and so on. The computer destroyed the typewriter industry, factories closed and people were laid off. That is creative destruction. All that was solid about the typewriter industry has certainly melted into air. Even on a massive corporate scale, there is fragility.

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I wonder about creative destruction at the personal level. Is there something freeing about coming undone? Can losing it spark personal innovation, re-creation and growth? Probably, for some people. But not for all. Even the strongest person has points of fragility.

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It’s Only Art #7

It's Only Art In preparing these columns, there is always an embarrassment of riches. It is actually a difficult limiting my weekly gallery to only fifty pictures and it takes as long to choose five as it takes to write the entire column. Be sure to check out the gallery for many great works. There are some that are NSFW in case you have to look later.

Homage

Homage by Vaki Zenovka

Screen Shot 2014-10-17 at 8.23.02 PMVaki Zenovka appropriately named her homage to Patrick Nagel Homage. Nagel was a fashion illustrator who would strip away every non-essential element, leaving basic forms and solid blocks of color. It is a successful homage, true to the style of the original. It is also an excellent composition on its own.  The Rule of Thirds is used in composition as a rough and ready approximation of the Golden Ratio. The Golden Ratio is a naturally occurring geometry found in the shell of the nautilus, in leaves and branches of plants and trees and even at the atomic scale. It is aesthetically pleasing and a powerful tool in composition.  Continue reading