Blog | Tom Hubbard's Digital and Photo Images | Tom Hubbard

Mermaid, what she means to me.

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 11:41:59 -0500

Early mariners saw mermaids as beautiful women. We know they were seeing big fish. They'd just been at sea too long, enough time for big fish to become beautiful women in their imagination.

I'm trying for something equally symbolic but more serious. My Mermaid represents a concept, not an anthropomorphized fish. This idea applies to any concept. As we think, reason, fantasize, muse, our vague concepts become rigid. Concepts get so precise in our minds it becomes convenient to dismiss further consideration. Concepts become beliefs which limit our thinking.

My mermaid is not pretty, but she has redeeming features. She has a delightful, empathetic smile. Can I be bold enough to suggest Mona Lisa smile? She seems happy in her aquatic environment. We can reflect. Are we making the most of our environment? Do we accept strange people for what they are, rather than some preconceptions? Do we routinely review our concepts?

Click the Mermaid picture to see an enlarged version.

Dogs and art

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 21:40:16 -0500

In my extensive research of art, mainly watching the Discovery Channel, I’ve learned that humans discovered dogs and art at the same time, about 20,000 years ago. I see the connection. Dogs and art represent an awareness of something outside the human psyche. Accounts vary but dogs and humans got together for mutual benefit. What a tremendous leap, awareness that we could co-exist with another species.

Art was also a higher order of thinking. A primitive hunter’s spear became more than a weapon. It was a mystical tie with prey. It represented death for one and life for another. This mysticism was explained through ornamentation. Ornamentation grew into art, a projection of the human spirit into, onto, something beyond. It represented aspirations beyond surviving.

I have a loving relation with dogs and art, so this resonates in me. I do art in the most modern way, on a computer, but I have this 20,000 year old relationship laying at my feet or nudging my elbow.

If you love dogs and art or not, remember this. The relationship is 20,000 years old. The oldest city is about 8,000 years old.

Fifty prints...

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 18:53:57 -0500

A good piece of visual art says something important before the culture is ready for a word version. This perception is something appearing faintly on the horizon. Everyone can see it but few can understand what it means or foretells. A visual artist sees it subconsciously, and this vision flows through to the media of stone, paint, pigment or pixels.

Were you with me until I threw in the last one, pixels? The word “pixels” comes from combining “picture” and “elements.” What a fine neologism. On the computer screen, they are fleeting, but far reaching. A pixel created on my computer can be viewed around the world in an instant.

Digital imaging is to the fine art world what the printing press was to the written word around 1500AD. The printing press introduced multiple copies, the key to increasing human understanding.

Allow yourself this fantasy. Imagine yourself running a bookshop in 1500. You deal with a handful of book creators and another handful of book buyers. If you are successful, it’s a cozy little enterprise. You deal in books but your real product is scarcity. Your world is a handful of people, on the supply side and on the consumer side.

Now, a guy rolls a hand cart into your shop, filled with books! He’s got 50 books and they are all the same book!

What does this do to your marketing strategy? Your business is no longer elite to elite, it’s from one author to the masses. You wonder, are there 50 people who can appreciate a book, or, even read in your community? Who are they? What are they like? Will they appreciate owning a book that’s owned by 49 other people? A book goes from an isolating thing to a connecting thing. What do you say to the guy who spent five years copying a manuscript?

Now, imagine you run an art gallery today. A guy comes in with 50 prints…

Ancient Art

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 09:48:58 -0500

My work has a strong resemblance to Paleolithic cave art. I know, I’m using a computer but, I feel akin to these early humans scratching on walls. The Paleolithic period covered approximately 30,000 years. What we call civilization is about 10,000 years old. Modern commercial/industrial times are only a few hundred years old. Our bodies and psyches have adapted to this modern environment but, a great part of us resides in Paleolithic times. Humans were Paleolithic people longer than they have been anything else. Modern humans are recent.

My art appeals to this Paleolithic sensibility in us. When we suspend the modern thought pattern we live with, my art appeals. I come to this conclusion from watching the public at galleries and art shows. My art appeals most strongly to two classes of people, adults with some art orientation and, most surprising to me, a cross section of young people centering around nine years old.

By “art orientation,” I mean an appreciation of art beyond mass media. Mass media concentrates on art expression that moves or sound that blasts. Art orientation teaches you to appreciate something that is quiet and static, inviting a deep introspection. The art orientated and young are my home demographics, the people who stop, look and chat, and sometimes buy. I can see it in their eyes and hands as they flip through bins of prints. Their Paleolithic sensibility is thrilled at what they see. They often express it. I’ve abbreviated the most frequent comment. I call it Complementary Comment on My Color or, CCMC. CCMC comes every time anyone spends more than 60 seconds looking at my prints.

This was the common orientation for most human moments until a few years ago. Our psyche demands this reflection/introspection and, our bodies rebel if it’s absent. Medication works but, it’s like using a sledge hammer crack a peanut.

The appreciation of young people is understandable. They haven’t been fully orientated to the demands of our culture, which appreciates and rewards doing, not reflection.

Young people and the art orientated appreciate color. Color sensitivity was first a physical survival skill, later transformed into a psychic survival skill. Our North American culture sees excessive color as a symptom of naiveté. It’s evident in our love of the clown. Clowns ignore this cultural restriction, fulfilling our fantasy.

I live in the modern world so, I have a classic marketing problem. People want my product but, they don’t know it.

Help!

Timeline

Sun, 30 Dec 2007 14:57:10 -0500

You can find "Timeline" in my digital work. "Timeline" explains history in a visual way. On the left is the past and on the right is the future. Past and future are large but we live in the instant between past and future. This piece is my reaction to something I heard throughout my careers in television and newspapers. I was formed professionally when I was local television director in the 1950s. (Norfolk Virginia and Atlanta, Georgia) We might do two to five hours of local shows. Looking back, it wasn’t very good, but we did it without writers, often “back to back” local shows. We were setting up the next show while one was on the air. I couldn’t express it until later but I developed a philosophy, “Now just passed.” It wasn’t a forgetting of history but a recognition that whatever we were doing now was just that, what we were doing now.

After ten years of recently invented television, I moved to newspapers. In television we began every day with, “What are we going to do today!?” In long established newspapers, new ideas were met with, “That’s not how we do it.” I heard an implied “now” at the end of this. I used to annoy people with my “Now just passed,” response.

So, “Timeline” says the future will not be the same as the past. In the art, the future is less chaotic than the past. This visualizes that ideas and trends, history, synthesizes the past. This is my personal myth.

Transition

Wed, 26 Dec 2007 10:40:18 -0500

This is my first entry. I made a transition from photojournalism which strives for objectivity to digital imaging, which works in the realm of subjectivity. Digital imaging is the new kid on the block, so it needs some explanation in its formative years. Photography is a reaction to light. Digital imaging may or may not begin with natural light. The final product is an array of pixels combining the artist’s psyche, and his or her fingers playing across the computer keyboard.

It’s new technology, but aesthetically, it’s a throwback to the primitive potter molding clay, or a Renaissance painter discovering oils.

You may say, “But the computer does it.” Well, early photography was dismissed because, “The camera does the drawing.” It took many years for photography to be recognized as a creation of the photographer, not the camera. What counts is the inner passion of the artist, as manifest in the work.