Where is Tate?

Dear friends of Tate and the advent calendars,

I had hoped to do the calendar story again this year, but it’s just not possible for various reasons, including serious computer problems at a critical time. I have sent Tate and Pierre on vacation for some much deserved rest and relaxation - you can see their postcard at catwholaughed.com. I am very sorry to disappoint those who have been counting (so to speak) on the calendar, but I do hope to see you next year! Have a lovely holiday season, and best wishes for 2008.

–Penny

fun with fonts

This is a tiny sample of my new handwriting font. I’m finding that the kerning aka letter spacing is a bit problematic. In the sample above, I’ve had to move the capital “T” way over toward the “a” using Photoshop for instance, there was too much space around it. This is not really practical for large amounts of text, so I may need a workaround. Ideally I would be able to edit the letters in the font myself - I might look at tools that allow you to scan in your own letters and edit them. This is still pretty cool though. It wasn’t terribly expensive, and is a good start. The hardest part was writing the special characters that I never write - and will probably never use!

Getting ready for Artweeks again

Yes, it is that time of year again - Oxford Artweeks approaches in May. I am enjoying it already. Well, everything except the awful smell of the vinyl banner sitting in my studio, it must have been fresh from the printers when I picked it up. The proprietor of our neighborhood bakery is demanding more brochures than I gave her this morning. More, we need more! I have fallen behind on my comics project, but have not forgotten it. In fact, I am working on getting my handwriting made into a font to use for the lettering. I just have to work up the nerve to fill out the form - it’s a little daunting to write characters that you’ll have to live with. At the moment I am uploading impossibly large image files to the Giclee printer (a person, not a device) in Southsea so that I have some additional unframed prints available for sale. New, better postcards are (in theory) on their way in the post. I took three prints to the framer in Headington today, and brought along one that he did last year so we could match it exactly. This to me is a sign of getting older - the willingness to take trouble over details because you have personally experienced the many different and exciting ways that things can go wrong. What seemed like unbearable fussiness when I first left school now seems like a good idea that may preserve your sanity. Even if you do find yourself carrying around a framed picture in a blanket like some flat, angular baby.

I should mention, in the Web 2.0 spirit of “what are you doing right now” - I am listening to a song by the 80’s Irish band In Tua Nua. I’m not sure why I have a lingering affection for this group - but I went to quite a bit of trouble to obtain a used copy of their CD “The Long Acre”. Those who are horrified at such retro listening habits - I can only apologize.

Night lights

On Saturday night we went into the City Centre for the final night of Luminox, a public art piece in Oxford by Ted Dewan. The atmosphere was amazing - it felt medieval. Kudos to whoever managed to get approval for this event, in a regulatory environment where the office toaster is sometimes deemed a hazard.

Installed Vista, survived to tell the tale

Yes, never one to hang back from trying the latest technology, warts and all, I have installed Vista Home Premium on a part of my hard drive. I do still have the option of booting into my old XP setup, which allows me to sleep at night. So far, the transition has been surprisingly painless. One big exception: Second Life. I am a virtual exile from SL until my video card manufacturer (Hello ATI) releases drivers that don’t make Second Life crash when you launch it. At least they’ve released Vista drivers for my card (Radeon X1600 for those playing along at home), unlike NVidia who are getting lots of grief because they haven’t. I can sync my ancient Handspring Visor Edge organizer which is a lifesaver - I only found out that there was a Vista compatible version of the Palm Desktop software by consulting this helpful list, the palm site doesn’t make it clear. Anyone else in the same situation wants Palm Desktop version 4.1.4E.

On the graphics front, Photoshop CS and Painter 9 seem to run well. I am working on Page 1 of my comic and should have a b/w version of the first page ready to post in a day or two. Without text yet - I’m going to see how much of the story I can convey in pictures, then add text as needed.

In the garden, some of the 50 Free Bulbs I planted recently are starting to appear which is quite exciting. I’ve also planted three white agapanthus that were starting to grow in the plastic bag they arrived in… I took pity and put them in the ground over the weekend.

Back to work

Just as I was building up a little post-holiday momentum - reworking the JT Agapanthus story, blogging, reorganizing my studio - I came down with a flu that reduced me to shuffling around the house and coughing for about a week. Today we had significant snow in England, so I walked to work rather than riding my bike. I hadn’t walked along the Cowley Road (our main drag here in East Oxford) for a while, and I really enjoyed browsing. I went into out a Brazilian shop/art gallery, a middle eastern grocery and a retro old-style pharmacy where I found a German liquid iron supplement called Floradix that was recommended by a colleague when, post-flu, I was looking a bit pale. Here is a *partial* list of the ingredients: Carrots, nettles, spinach, quitch roots (?), angelica roots, fennel, ocean kep, aftican mallow, orange peel, pear juice, grape juice, blackcurrant juice, cherry juice, orange juice, red beet juice, lemon juice, carob extract, apple juice, yeast extract, honey, and MORE. I should be leaping tall buildings in a single bound any day now. This is just one more stop on my tour of European health tonics - at Christmas I had the novel experience of imbibing a French herbal remedy delivered in - I kid you not - individual glass pipettes that taper to a tiny sealed point on each end. You are literally supposed to *snap the glass ends* and shake out the contents into a glass. It may keep the contents sterile. It may be great for the manufacturing process. But if you delivered something this way in the US you would be sued before the first batch left the plant. I was really careful, and still managed to stab my finger. And this was a standard product, recommended in two different pharmacies for a common complaint. I’ll try to post a picture of one of these things so you can see what I’m on about. Anyway, I am not abandoning my comics storytelling project, and will post some more sketches ASAP.

Reconfiguring Tate

It’s quite interesting trying to retell this year’s calendar story in comics format. I’ve been using a rectangular animated image with text below it for so long that the thought of working in another way is a bit mind-boggling. What I’m figuring out at the moment is how much information I can convey without any text at all. Also, I realized this evening that I have been using the wrong digital tool. Here I have limitless virtual tools, and still struggle along with something inadequate - doh! - it’s not as if I have to run out to the store to replace it. I was using a very small “2B” and the lines were not satisfactory at all, they looked, in a word, pathetic. I’ve switched to a much thicker 2B now, and it is really fun to use. I’ve uploaded the sketch of panel 1 (click on thumbnail above) so you can see the line quality. I still wrestle with Painter. Case in point: tonight I needed to crop the image to get rid of excess white space. I drew my rectangle with the crop tool, pressed return, and - nothing. I was actually forced to consult Help, and it turns out that once you get the rectangle you want, you *click inside it* to complete the cropping. Like so many aspects of Painter, this seems to come from some other universe of user interface design. Hello? The standard parlance for “Let’s do this thing” is the Enter key. But I do like those lines…

New project

The first post of 2007… and my first as a (gasp) 40 year old. This fact really hit home when I was using my 1966 edition of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and realized that the book was 41 years old. Just one year older than me… I’m currently reading a very enjoyable book by Julia Child that I was given for Christmas, My Life in France. It was written with her husband Paul’s grandnephew and published posthumously. She recounts her move, with Paul, to post-WWII France, and her adventures learning to cook French food in Paris. Perhaps the most appealling aspect is the way she clearly found her true calling - once she got started, she pursued this passion with incredible dedication and gusto (as was obvious in her television appearances). Her account of her sister’s take-no-prisoners approach to the French language and Paris traffic is also hysterical.

For those following the calendar saga, I’ll bring you up to date on my latest idea. Before doing this year’s story, I read some of Scott McCloud’s great writing on “comics”, an increasingly varied and evolving storytelling method. I find it quite fascinating - it seems to sit in a space between video, drawing, storytelling and lots of other things that interest me. I know that “comic books” may not appeal to everyone, and I find the term “graphic novel” too precious for words, but I hope you’ll bear with me while I experiment a bit. Currently, I am trying to retell the JT Agapanthus story in comics format - it may be two or possibly three pages. When it’s done, I plan to upload it as a pdf file so people can download it and see what they think. Watch this space.

Oh - and I’m also trying to set up an art gallery in Second Life. More on that later…

My alter ego, Julia Pegler

My alter ego, Julia Pegler
Originally uploaded by bgaloot.

I’m starting to wonder if the recent security breach at Second Life hasn’t actually helped them by bringing them back into the media spotlight. I had tried this “virtual world” application some time ago, but my graphics hardware made it a rather slow and unappealing experience. I decided to try it again with on my new machine (having just logged on to change my password as instructed). All of a sudden, very interesting things seem to be happening there… university courses being taught, politicians giving stump speeches, and today Reuters openend a Second Life bureau with a real reporter… Meanwhile, I am learning to construct humble objects with the tools provided, and avoid inadvertently attaching them to my head. This snapshot shows me on the little plot of land I purchased. It seems to be way out in the hinterland, but since you can teleport everywhere that’s not such a drawback. Now I need to build a house. I do think participating in what seems like a huge 24-hour story could become addictive. I’m finding that, like travel, time spent in Second Life makes you view everything around you in a new way. It’s also nice to spend time in a place where nobody seems to be doing any housework.

I’ve recently upgraded to the latest Painter software, version 9. I had a copy of the first version, way back when, the one that came in a paint can. The performance, while sometimes impressive in its ability to mimic real tools like chalk, paint, etc. never quite lived up to expectations, but I think they’ve nailed it on this version. The brushes are fast and responsive, and the interface is a little easier to understand. The fact that I have a faster processor than before undoubtedly helps, and I’m hoping to use it for the drawing in the calendar this year. Kudos, Corel (the most recent owner, it has been through a few).

Artweeks at last

Artweeks at last
Originally uploaded by bgaloot.

Several liters of white paint later, our front room has been transformed into an approximation of a gallery space. Kudos to Geoffrey and my mother who have been very tolerant of the furniture being moved to unexpected places in the house. Also a big thanks to my mom for sitting with our dog while I hold down the fort. I post this photo that Geoffrey took of me not for self-promotion purposes but to remind myself that occasionally, I can appear in a photograph without a weird smile or semi-closed eyes. Also, so you can see what the prints look like on the wall. I’m pleased now that I took some trouble to determine a good size for the prints and their frames, as they just fit around the room nicely.

Artweeks, which began on Saturday, has been enjoyable despite the truly awful weather we’ve had. Yesterday Oxford experienced some torrential downpours. A number of brave souls have found their way to the house despite this, and some have purchased framed prints from the 2005 Tate story which has been very nice indeed. All six pieces are still on display through the end of the City portion of Artweeks next Sunday. Today I stopped in at another Artweeks site on the Cowley Road across from the Tesco, three artists have taken over a large vacant three-floor commercial building for the duration. Unfortunately I won’t get to see too many other exhibits because I’m manning my own, but hope to visit some of the South Oxfordshire sites in coming weeks.