The Ghost and Phoenix Knew that Icarus had not been quite right since his close encounter with the sun he was suffering

so they didn’t panic and they decided to take

They saw some

and decided to eat them.
They wandered through the park and saw a

at the

as they watched the

the fell asleep and tumbled into the

they woke with a start and had a

and found themselves in an

to be continued?

Last week or so I started this little fable not knowing if you’d think it was too pompous and self indulgent. Some of you wanted me to continue so here is Part 2. If you missed part one it is Here

The Ghost in the Machine and The Phoenix having seen

were a little confused and hungry . They decided to go to the local art museum/cafe for a bite to eat, a cup of mocha latte and some stimulating works of art.

The Phoenix fell in love with

“This is close to my heart” said the Ghost. ” It was made with Apophysis just like I was.”

as they studied they listened to a

that was playing on the sound system.
“I think we should catch a”

“and visit the Wizard” said the Phoenix.

The Ghost didn’t like that Idea because he had seen the

and it scared him.

They were just about to leave the cafe when

appeared from nowhere and shouted “it’s the”

To be continued?

The

woke up from it’s

and decided to go on a


the Ghost’s first stop was to invite his friend the

to come along. While there he noticed

which was a new addition to the Phoenix’s collection.
The Phoenix was staring at

which was propped up against the wall. He said,” I just can’t decide where to put this”.
Suddenly a

opened and they went

and saw

the fairy invited them to the

To be continued?

People have asked my about my fractal work and why I think that the output of a piece of software that produces fractals is art. After all they say, what did you put into it? Where does you feeling and intent come into the work? One response I give is to ask how is it any different than taking a photo and apply some fancy filter software or “auto paint” tool, and of course they say it’s not and that those programs output is not art either. I have to agree to the extent that if all you do is take the raw output of some random generated parameters or the raw output of the filters then you have put nothing of yourself into the “art”.

I have never really done those things. I admit that a very few of my fractal pieces have had little effort put into the parameter selection, the output from the program is usually cropped, tone manipulated, cut up and used in pieces to create an image very different from the output her is an example or two of very little manipulation

And some with a little more

This one took a lot of work

Try getting a photo filter or auto-paint program to do this!

How much work do you think I put into this?

Ok I have probably put most of you to sleep by now, but I needed to demonstrate that Apophysis can be a tool for creating as can photo filters and auto-paint programs. Sure in some case you can take the easy way out and use the raw output…. SO THE QUESTION is… does raw unaltered output from tis type of software constitute art?

2010 has not been kind to me so far. I find myself questioning the amount of time I spend on my art and especially its online presence, my mother is getting older and sicker and requires more of my time, and I have also been informed that the state may not be funding the Group I work for , so I may be finding myself unemployed and engaged in the very much despised job search routine at the end of March.

Maybe it is just the mid winter blahs, and tomorrow is another beginning, and only the now is real anyway. Who knows being unemployed may be the chance to learn to market myself or at least develop the confidence to believe my stuff is marketable .

I find I can’t decide on a direction to take my art. Since I discovered Apophysis I have been using its output in some form in 99 % of my works. I guess I was a little obsessed with it and discovering new things to do with it. I will continue to play with it and use it in my works but I think I will give it a break and try some of my other methods again . I am starting on some space scenes and doing a little online organizing also this week. I have the latest version of Bryce (the beta 7) so I will be playing with that also.

See the new works tab at top of page for my newest efforts.

Click the image to go to the site and get all the info..

The host of the blog site, Beth Edwards aka 1st Angel, started this project last year as a way to raise money for an Green cause. After alot of good Ideas and suggestions it was decided that Greenpeace would be the beneficiary.
The word has been spreading slowly for artists to sign up and create a small painting that will be sewn together to make a BIG statement. The finished work will be auctioned off on Earth Day 2010.

This event is not limited to artists only. Poets are also encouraged to be a part of this event. A poet’s written works once submitted; will be placed in a book being made especially for this event.
The artwork collected as a whole will be called “Art Around the World”. The date of completion will be April 22, 2010, also known as Earth Day and it will be auctioned online with all proceeds, minus the commission for the auctioneer, going to the charity.

A DVD of music will be included in the auction, and musicians are invited to donate a track for that DVD.

This is a worthy cause and I hope all my creative friends will help out.

Here are my small efforts to help out.

That’s all for this week. My new works for the week are bing posted under the new works tab at top of page.

Peace One World One People

Brrrr. Its been cold and snowy since the start of the year. I wish I were here.

Not much new in my life. Routine it is. I think I’m in a rut when it comes to creating images. I can’t leave Apophysis alone. I also think I need to stop grinding out so much stuff I’ve posted over 250 images in the last year. I’ve posted the stuff I’ve done since the last blog on the new works page. and my web site has an upgraded look. Still working on it
Click here to see it.

Hope the new year is going well. Remember … Comment random acts of kindness ! Peace One World One People ..Buddha Dave.

Wow! Where has the year gone? Its been a good year artistically for me, I feel I have grown quite a bit.
I want to wish you all a safe, prosperous,and healthy new year. May it be the year we wake up as a race and learn to live in peace and truly understand we are one people on the one world we have.

New Apophysis fractals on the new works tab!

Anyone who is familiar with my work on various web sites (see the links on the links tab) above, knows that I do a lot of abstract stuff. They also know that I generally do not give titles to most of my works because I don’t want the viewer to have any preconceived notions about what they should see in the piece.

Yesterday on  Fine Art America I posted the following image

and asked for help giving this a name or if it needed one. I wanted and hoped that I would get a sampling of what people saw in the piece. I am happy to note that I received many responses from people who saw different things in the image. I wish now I had asked for any emotional response they may have had also.  While I am sure towards the end some people may have been influenced by the earlier response, I think most people saw the image with the thought of what would be a good title and then read the previous post.
Click Here to see the discussion

After reading all the responses, I have decided that my philosophy for not naming this type of piece is valid. I will leave it untitled so future viewers can see what they will in it.

I sometimes I feel a title is necessary because, while I am fortunate to have a large 26 inch monitor to produce my works on, viewers of my works who, for internet security reasons, must see my works as smaller low resolution reproductions, often miss the full impact of the image. For that reason I try to give a name that resonates with me and relays something of what I see in a piece. As an example

This piece in full resolution just screamed The Christian devil on his throne in hell to me. So Lord of the Flies it had to be. Of course as we all know, state of mind and body have a large impact when viewing something so ……

Links to new works created this week are or will be soon on the new works tab above.

Till next week… I leave you with this Won’t you join Paul McCartney and have a meat free Monday?

11-26-09

As the year winds down and the time for reflection and future resolutions is upon us, I would like to take this opportunity to wish all of you inner and outer peace.

This past month has been filled with anticipation and joy of connecting with old friends, some I haven’t seen or heard from in 20 years or more. I am in the process of getting a new computer and home network set up.  I am excited because the new system should be many times faster and more reliable.

11-29-09

This weekend has been filled with setting up my new computer. It’s a 3 gig Hz quad core with 8 gigs of memory. It is running 64 bit windows 7. I was a little worried that as most of my art programs are 32 bit there would be problems, there have been none.  Microsoft appears to have got it right this time!

Apophysis Unleashed

One of the first things I tried on the new system, Apophysis 2.09 runs like a champ. As it is 32 bit program I expected  it would be limited to  4 gig of ram and  perhaps  2 of the cores. I was right about the ram but it does use all the cores. Here are some screen shots I took while playing around.

The Image above is the CPU usage for one flame being rendered to disk  ata quality of 4000. See third image for settings.

This image is for six instances of Apophysis open at the same time with two flames being rendered at the same time. Using almost all of the 8 gigs of ram.

As can be seen the computer can handle many instances of Apophysis being open at once, as they are not doing anything they take little resources.  As expected the big resource hog is rendering to a file.

As can be seen the rendering of a large flame at a quality of 4000 takes a long time, around 10 hours.

That may seem slow but on my old system it would take far longer. I Have a rough estimate that this system is at least 4 times faster at rendering to disk simply because of the CPU speed. The Apophysis renderer is not very efficient. I’m sure it will get better, and I hear from one of our fellow members that an external renderer that uses the GPU will be coming!

I am not an Apophysis expert so I may not have done very good comparisons, but I am impressed with the speed while creating flames and the faster rendering is great.

Bryce 6

I also played with Bryce 6 and the rendering times faster as expected and in the same % range of speed up as Apophysis. The following rendered at max size and superfine resolution in less than two hours.

All in all I am so far very pleased with my new system. Everything is so much faster, I’ll be able to spew out more of whatever anyone chooses to call what I do.

I was scolded this week for posting to much to Face Book, well scolded is to harsh, it was suggested that I don’t post so much because people just start to ignore it or block me. As few click through anyway I have decided to Post once or twice a week , links to this blog and not much else. I am adding a new page to this blog that will contain links to new works. It will change often, so if you want to see what I’ve been up to look there.

Peace.