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11-27-01
A rt calls to me, like a siren song or a sultry woman
she stands in the shadows of my memory
swaying slowly to a song only she and I can hear
I've tried to resist, put my paints on a shelf, my mouse paints now
...but still she calls to me
Leave it all behind she whispers, I will take you to places
you've only dreamed about. It's not too late
leave the advertising world with it's souless zeros and ones
come with me to a better place. A place where your heart can be young again,
where your spirit can impregnate the fertile soil of an unborn artist.
...remind me not to go in art galleries, it makes me crazy.
11-25-01
I've been listening to a tape an old friend of the family made about the adventures my great great grandparents had as missionaries in China in the 1860s. I've never gotten into the genealogy thing much, but after listening to the fascinating tales of my ancestors living in China with the "unwashed heathens", I got on the net and searched around a little. There appears to be a huge interest out there in family history. I wallowed in it for a couple hours until I realized what a time intensive labor it would become. The people who make the most interesting ancestors are the ones who really do something with their lives and leave behind written letters, stories or works of art describing their lives and times.
Other than the adventurous missionaries in my family, we also have a noted painter. It's probably not coincidence that our most legendary ancestor, the missionary to China, was the sister of our other legendary ancestor: the painter Florence Carpenter. My grandmother (1882-1991) knew both of these people and was very pleased when I began painting since I was the first serious painter in the family in 130 years. Most of the family members have inherited at least one of her quiet watercolors. Family legend has it that she sold most of her work, so the pieces we have must be the left overs. Like me, I imagine she also had a box under the bed full of unsold paintings.
Our family history survives in the form of old black and white photos, daguerreotypes and handwritten letters. My paintings will add very nicely to the family legend, but this web site is another matter. It's a lot of information about one families life, but is it worth saving? And in what form should it be saved? How can I know what kind of browsers will exist a century from now? Any print outs I make on the printers of today are unlikely to survive that long. When I save up enough money to buy a burner I can burn it on a CD and call it good. If we can still read the wax cylinders from last century, I imagine my descendants can find a way to read my CD. While it's wonderfull to paint, I also need to have a day job. To that end I've been working on a new flash intro for the front end of this site. I could be out in the garage painting, but, considering the unstable economy, improving my day job skills is a better use of my time.
11-23-01
Spent Thanksgiving with the family yesterday in Olympia. Lisa enjoyed seeing her cousins so much we let her stay down there until tomorrow. I suppose we could have stayed as well, sleeping out in the garaged motor home, but we chose to come home after dinner. Sitting in the old family living room on the furniture that hasn't changed (or worn out) since the sixties, I watched companionably with my brother, my sister, my parents and associated spouses, as the "Webster Cousins" trouped through the room in a long line heading for another adventure in Grandpas house. Their favorite is sliding down the stairs in sleeping bags, like toboggans. Never mind that some of them are 14, it's still fair game. They are growing up into little people, leaving their childhood behind at an alarming rate.
We adults look at them with bittersweet memories. I can remember being almost the same age, in the same house when my generation was the "Webster Cousins". One of the things they don't warn you about when you first have kids is the fact that a time will come when your kids will be growing stronger, better looking and healthier as you grow weaker, uglier, and unhealthy, almost in inverse proportions.
For years I never had much to say to my brother, since we didn't share much in common, other than both having kids. But the last two years we have had quite a lot in common. He is heavily involved with computers in his job at the Spokesman Review. He built a database that is somehow connected with the "letters to the editor" section of the paper and automates the process...he explained it to me, but most of it went over my head. He is involved with the papers web site and is on a committee planning the future of same. We had a lot to talk about in the areas of html, asp includes and the feasibility of giving away their product for free online.
He said the economic downturn has recently caused the paper to lay people off for the first time in its history. I am a perfect example of why "old media" institutions like newspapers are in trouble. Several times in the past I have subscribed to newspapers. The latest was when I was looking for a job for a few weeks 14 years ago and wanted to get the want ads.
As soon as I got a job I dropped the paper. I felt bad about all the wasted paper, and got annoyed with the hassle of recycling. Also, the news just seems to repeat itself, with the murders, wars and fatal crashes on the front page making the world seem like a much worse place than it really is...at least here in middle America. But, I digress.
I get my news from the headlines on my homepage, usually msn, but lately cnn.com. If something is breaking, I will turn on our old beater secondhand TV. My brother explained that the web site is a money loosing proposition for newspapers. Their only sellable product is information. They make money from their advertising clients who pay for page space. He said it was extremely hard to get those same advertisers to buy click through ads on the web site and that many papers across the country are facing the same dilemma. They want to have a web site as a service to their customers, and as a way to reach a broader audience, but the bottom line just doesn't pay. Some papers are starting to charge a subscription fee for access to the website, just like the paper version. It makes sense to me. It costs money to gather the news. Reporters, photographers and editors don't work for free, so why should you and I be able to read their stories for free?
11-21-01
On my bike ride at lunch today I felt my fugue of the last few weeks begin to lift. I knew there was a good reason to be out bike riding, I just wasn't sure what it was. I thought perhaps it was to get my heart pumping, no...it was more than that. Okay, it was to see some pretty old houses and lovely views out across Puget Sound. No, that wasn't quite it either. I realized, as I pedaled along the crest of the hill, searching for an old vaguely remembered road leading down through the steep bluff to the waterfront, that it was a search for a way to return to innocence.
It all started with a flashback to 15 when I first realized how cool it was to simply pedal along through new neighborhoods or to explore never before seen country roads. With the callousness of middle age, I almost passed it off as simply one more irrelevant memory. But the day was very fresh, and I was so hungry for a change, that I let the memory wash over me. If one has the right mind set, as in innocence, everything is new and wonderful. It can be enough to simply be alive, feeling the light wind and the warm rain on ones face. With time to kill, I explored neighborhood after neighborhood, secure in the knowledge that I could get back to work easily before my lunch hour was over.
I took some pictures at work today of one of the guys for a newspaper article he is submitting about the company. I tried some new tricks with my digital camera and got a couple excellent shots. The camera (Olympus D-460 1.3 megapixel) can capture 4 meg tiffs. I manually set the ASA to 125 and shot a slow exposure on my tripod using natural (North) light only, manually underexposing for the white wall behind the subject. Both pictures turned out very nice, quite suitable for print in the 3x5 inch size. I was so encouraged that I went out and bought the 64 meg smart media card so I can shoot 16 tiffs before I need to "reload".
11-18-01
This is a picture taken with my antique SpeedGraphic. It's the antithesis of the modern digital camera. It was built back in the fifties and saw service in Korea. The technology is state of the art 1950: nothing electric, not even batteries, no light meter and lots of springs and exquisitely crafted miniature steel connecting parts. It was the standard camera used by newspaper photographers during the Roosevelt and Eisenhower eras. I bought it 5 years ago to take pictures of my paintings back when I thought I might sell prints of my paintings as posters in those poster shops one sees in shopping malls. To get a good quality print in the huge size sold in those shops, you need a large negative. Actually it's called a transparency and is similar to a slide, except the dimensions are four inches by five inches. In mega pixel terms, that may be around 260 mega pixels...take that Sony!
Old SpeedGraphics can be found for around $150 and up in the used camera stores. They don't have light meters, so I use my old 35 mm Pentax to measure the light in the scene, then set the SpeedGraphic to those numbers. This camera came with the Polaroid attachment that lets me capture instant images. The Polaroid film is loaded into the holder one sheet at a time, exposed, pulled through the squeezing rollers and developed for a minute before pulling the two halves apart. This "peel apart" Polaroid film is still used today by professional photographers as they compose lighted set ups for advertising clients. I can also use all the other film types: transparencies, black and whites and even medium format 120 with the adapter. I got it out to see if I could capture a better close up than my disgusting digital can manage. I love the way this antique camera lets me compose and focus the picture on the ground glass.
Taking a picture with a camera like this is a slow, thoughtful process. Similar to a digital camera, you can see the picture before you take it, except the viewing screen on  this camera is 5 inches wide, and it's not a computer screen you are looking at, you are looking at the actual objects after their reflected light has gone though the lens and been projected onto the ground glass in the back of the camera. I focus the camera by examining the image on the glass with a magnifying loupe. If you've ever seen a photographer bent over under a hood mounted to a huge camera on a sturdy tripod, you have an idea of what this is like. On my vacation this fall, I saw a photographer with a camera even bigger than mine (looked like a 5x7) lugging his gear out to the lighthouse I was painting. It's hard to say whose gear weighed more. Certainly my exposure was longer...about 5 hours compared to his quarter second.
I read some great advice for aspiring writers today. It was from an interview with the actor, author and playwright Ron McLarty on how to be successful as an author: "Write first, get inspired later." In other words, don't do like I do and avoid your creative activities, whether they be writing, painting, animation or music because you don't feel inspired. Sit down and write, even if it's tripe. You have to get the tripe out of the way before you can get to the good stuff.
11-16-01
Friday is finally here. It feels good to sit here and know that I don't have to get up in the morning. Our company won an award from the Chamber of Commerce and got our name in the paper. We were recognized as one of the top 10 technology firms in South Puget Sound. We were the only web design firm on the list. Ironically, the firm that designed the Chamber of Commerce's web site is one of our arch rivals located only a block uphill. They won last year.
I've been trying to keep my spirits from sinking underground as I wait for the ringing in my ear to die down. In the past, my symptoms have run in waves, almost as predictable as the tide, if the tide changed every 9 days. From symptom free to a very mild, almost imperceptible dizzy spell, I've been riding the waves for several months. In a way, I almost prefer it to this. At least I know I am guaranteed a few days without symptoms on a regular basis. This latest variation is a new twist: constant 24 hour ringing and an almost imperceptible sense that my balance is not quite 100%.
It's predictable in a sick sort of way.
I got out for exercise twice at lunch. Thursday I rode my bicycle around town, then today I walked the hills above the office. I love the way exercise makes all your problems seem insignificant. Sit down jobs are ok, but there is something to be said for a "run around" job. Too bad run around jobs are usually a dead end.
On my walk today I stopped by a camera store downtown to see the latest digital camera. The best one they had was a $1400 dollar Olympus E-10. High end digitals like this are beginning to resemble the old 35 mm film cameras. They are using traditional knobs and dials so users don't have to wade through menus on screen, sucking up valuable battery power.
They also feature the ability to operate in a totally manual mode: aperture, shutter and focus can all be controlled by hand. Computer control is handy, but photography is enough of an art that the human eye and mind can still make the difference between a ho hum shot and a great shot. The clerk mentioned an interesting fact: film cameras have an effective resolution of 13 megapixels. Even the high end digital cameras still can't come close to the image quality (at least for print) of a cheap single lens reflex (SLR) film camera. In another 2 years they may be there, but for now I'll keep using my Olympus d-460 for snapshots, with my film cameras in reserve for the quality stuff.
11-11-01
Sue got her old yearbooks out of the attic this morning. Lisa needed to look at them to get ideas for school. Lisa is one of only two experienced kids working on the yearbook this year in her eighth grade class. She complains that all the seasoned yearbook talent moved up to high school this year; even the teacher is new. I've been playing around with some illustration programs, learning how to use the tools and pushing pixels around without producing anything worth showing. I talked to an artist friend of mine yesterday who has been very supportive of my efforts to develop as an artist since I first walked into a meeting of her art club 13 years ago. The Peninsula Art League is an active organization with monthly meetings, juried shows several times a year, paint outs, life drawing groups and a huge art festival with live music in July. This Art Festival has grown over the years to the point where the city closes down two blocks of main street to accommodate the packed crowds thronging the artists booths. I happened to make a trip to the hardware store last summer during the festival. Parking was nonexistent, with people walking for a mile to get to the booths. I wandered down the main road between the booths, watching all the tourists gawk at the paintings, photographs and knickknacks displayed under the white tents. A live band played top forties songs from the roof of a gas station. Under the band, my old art club had a large tent showing paintings of the members. I recognized a few of my old friends, but didn't stop. I don't enjoy crowds and soon moved on to the hardware store where the locals were shaking their heads over the chaos outside.
Why am I writing about it now? Talking to my old friend got me thinking about the club and it's influence on changing the course of my life. When I walked into that art club meeting by accident, (I was checking out some books at the library and wondered about the crowded side room) I had recently begun sketching in pencil again for the first time in 15 years. I showed a few drawings to the friendly members and was welcomed like the prodigal son. That club led to more clubs and soon I was entering juried shows region wide and approaching galleries. When I got laid off from my printing job I thought there might be a chance to paint full time for living. I soon discovered that, while I had the talent, I didn't have the cash flow. Starting any new business requires a cushion of cash for the first few months, maybe even the first year. I didn't have it and fell back into printing to pay the bills after only 6 weeks. Two years later I planned my escape from printing more carefully, working my way through a technical college learning web design.
I'd assumed that a more creative field would make going to work everyday easier, especially since my new career was day shift. I do love my new career, it's creative and challenging with tons of new things to learn, all of which are very visual. You learn a knew trick, write the code or push the pixels around correctly and get an instant reward when sophisticated design looks back at you. When I used to run press, other people made pretty pictures and I was just the night guy who printed them. Now I make the pretty pictures...so I should be happy right? I woke up with a headache, a ringing ear and a guilt trip over not painting, just another Sunday.
11-8-01
I learned how to build a calendar today with pinline dividing borders around the days of the month, the calendar itself and a knocked out solid bar across the top. If you don't write html, this means nothing to you, but if you've ever tried to make a calendar in html and been frustrated by the lack of control across browsers and operating platforms you will understand. It's part of a timekeeping application I've been beautifying lately. We have programmers who build the database functionality,
then the project is handed to one of us artsy types for beautification. Internet Explorer allows pinline table borders, outside and inside, without too much trouble. To get it in Netscape I had to create and save tiny background images and tile them in the table data cells using a class applied to the data cell (<td class="blue">, where the class blue was defined in the linked stylesheet as {background-image:
url(0000ff.jpg); } . This little table has the look I was after, but the code that makes this one work would not function in the dynamically generated .jsp environment of a calendar where there are varying numbers of days in the month, with overlapping months highlighted in different colors. I apologize to those of you who don't write html for a living. This must be incredibly boring to read. I went for a nice lunchtime bikeride yesterday. The sun was out, the sky was blue and Mount Rainier looked fabulous seen from across Commencement Bay. Today my ear is ringing pretty badly. Symptoms have been cycling up and down about every 9 days. At their worst, it's a heavy distraction, but not disabling. Never a dull moment.
11-4-01
We went down to see my parents today for the first time in a couple months. We talk on the phone now and then, and Sue drove down to see them while I was climbing not too long ago, but this is the first time all four of us have driven down together in a long while. Actually there were six of us; Clint brought 2 of his BMX buddies and headed out riding as soon as we pulled into dads driveway, not to return until it was time to drive back. I can understand how they feel and remember how boring it was to hang around with my parents when I was their age. Sue, Lisa and I walked up to get our flu shots. I'd considered taking our usual long walk around town, but my knees are sore from all my lunchtime exercise last week, and it seemed rude to drive down to see them, and then leave for a walk.
Dads house has lots of cool old stuff to look at an reminisce over. Our family has some deep roots and a long, if not especially noble history on display at his house. Most of the "artifacts" are from dads side of the family and trace our families involvement
in the Christian missionary movement of the last 2 centuries. Dad has a collection of old bibles and books dating back through most of that time period. I picked up and marveled over some of them today. The leather covers are breaking away from the pages, and they smell pungently of old mildew, but the printing is still legible, the pages are all there. Most interesting are the personal notations on the end pages, where the original owners of the books, early family members whose names I recognize, have written inscriptions, or made simple notes.
Several generations ago, I think it may have been my grandmothers grandmother was involved in the effort to convert the unwashed heathens in China to Christianity. She was a doctor, and her husband was a Presbyterian minister (or missionary...is there a difference?). They traveled to China from America on a clipper ship. This was around the time of the Civil war, give or take 30 years. There my great, great grandfather learned Chinese, became the first Westerner to translate the bible into Chinese and self published a book about the whole experience on his return. Dad has a copy of the book. Most interesting is their handwritten letters describing the exciting voyage to China on the ultra fast clipper ship around the horn.
I didn't actually see all of that stuff in the short time we were there today, but I know it is all there if I wanted to look. Their house, and the memories it triggers for me make me feel very grounded. Sue has been going there as well since 1976. It's a home away from home for us. I used to think it was boring, especially if I went there a lot as I did when grandma was alive. Sue and I would routinely skip Thanksgiving and the family gatherings on the other holidays...we had important climbing trips to make. But now that I am older, I can see that family, and the ties that bind us together, have a limited life span. We are all getting older and I'd like to make the most of the time we still have left to us.
11-2-01
Bought a new video card for my 3 year old Pentium II. The fan on the old video card had begun making some bearing noise. The new card has almost 4 times the RAM at half the cost. I plan to slowly upgrade the old Pentium 2, 350 MHz to a 1.4 Gig Pentium 4. Every other month or so, finances permitting I'd like to put a hundred dollars into it until it's new again. I've already put in a new CD ROM player, a new power supply and replaced the intake and processor fan. The hardest part will be putting in the new mother board. The friend who helped me build it several years ago has moved far away. I'd love to learn how, but there is only so much one guy can do at a time. In lieu of the sudden appearance of a new guru, I'll simply pay Computers and Things to do it for an extra $60. I wish I could upgrade the laptop. I prefer working on it due to the excellent clarity of the flat screen. Plus I can take it with me if I am obsessing over a project.
One of the artists I used to know is doing phenomenal work. I am wondering whether all the creative work I've been doing at work is draining my need for traditional art. Not that I need an excuse to get an art block. I once went 15 years without painting. I did some nice work this summer, but I can't seem to get to excited about it. I thumbtacked a few of them to my bulletin board. They're nice to look at...
This weekend is a typical illustration of why I manage to avoid painting. Tomorrow I get to pay bills and run errands with the family. Sunday we will spend some time with my parents. Clints job finally ended so we are free to be mobile. Lisa and I've been doing the math thing most nights after work. She pulls up a chair with her math book before I've finished eating dinner. It's a chore, but also a joy. I wasn't able to help the kids with their homework until last year when I got my first day job in 9 years. She has a good mind, just needs to have her math explained in a manner she can understand.
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