=joefuckingjudd

Loki's Children

Who woulda thought babysittin a snake and a wolf would be such a pain. Goddamn dog's chewin' on the moon again.

The Craft of Art

It's a traditional palette layout. All the colors grouped together, light to dark, whites in one corner, blacks cat-corner. I do blues and greens on the top, yellow to red down the side, violets and earths on the bottom, but this is more a function of the size and shape of your palette. The main thing is like next to like, color wheel order for colors adjacent to each other.

There's actually a good reason for this, it keeps the colors from affecting each other, red next to blue is different than red next to green, and neither is the actual color. red sandwiched between orange and violet is just red and is very close to the real color (which is something you may never see).

When painting flesh-tones each color has its own tint (mix w/ white) above (or below) it, and that's what the flesh tones are mixed from (Old school, anyway).

I've used this palette for 20 years. It's made from clear plexi, but although I scrape it down I haven't been able to see through for at least a decade.

And very heavy metal. I paint with real paints (and that means oils with real pigments), and although they make a big deal about lead white, the cadmium and cobalt, to name two heavy metal pigments, are both just as dangerous as is EVERY heavy metal, and should only be used while taking appropriate safety precautions.

Because your skin is oil based metals in the paint can pass right through into you, and once in they do not leave but settle in, poisoning your internal organs. The damage to your nervous system will drive you insane (and not the fun kind) This is the same disease as hatters used to get from the mercury in real felt, the disease characterized by Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter.

Latex gloves do NOT cut it, metals pass through these and most other gloves. What you want is a water based barrier cream. You can by this at art stores, but the kind made for make-up works just as well and is generally cheaper.

And that’s enough pedantic bullshit for know

X^2 - X - 1 = 0

and

X^2 + X - 1 = 0

Solve and discuss.

Ok, don’t solve. These are the equations that produce the “golden ratio.” The solutions (numerically) are X = .618034 and - 1.618034 and X = - .618034 and 1.618034. Like Pi, e, or any other irrational number both numbers trail into the distance without ever repeating. We call the first X by the Greek letter Phi, and using the exact solution, φ = ½ + sqrt(5)/2. This what we mean when we say the golden ratio.

These numbers interest the fuck out of math geeks like me for a number of reasons, most not worth going into here. But one reason is that the two numbers are inverses, .618034. . . x 1.618034. . . together you get 1.

But both sets of these numbers are difficult to use, and who wants to memorize a quadratic equation. I don’t, I just know how to come up with it.

Good thing artist don’t need to know them, there’s a better way.

Involving rabbits. Immortal rabbits.

Leonardo de Pisa came up with this idea.
First month, Starting with two new born rabbits
New born rabbit start breeding in the second month
Each pair of rabbits produces two more every month

So counting the pairs of rabbits produced you get:
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21. . . Each new number is the sum of the previous two, i.e. 5 + 8 = 13. This is called the Fibonacci (Leo’s nom de math) Sequence. And it shows up EVERYWHERE in living things


The ratio between successive numbers, 2/3, 3/5, 5/8, et cetera, continually approaches the golden ratio, each one closer than the one before. In fact most of the manmade example of the golden ratio uses one of these approximations (Parthenon, Pyramids. . . ).

And these numbers are easy to use.

So try them,
Go golden

One question guaranteed to elicit a smart ass answer is:

What is this (insert artwork) about?

Always gets answers like

About six feet long.
About two years old.
About dry

Read a book, get a clue, or worse a long, rambling, incorrect, derogatory about what the picture isn’t

Which is funny. If you ask me questions like, who is this? why is that there? or even, what’s the story here? You can’t shut me up.

I think the reason it pisses me off is that it is a lazy question, it ask both too much and too little.

Too much, because what the picture is about is the business of the viewer, the picture could possibly mean anything, and I ain’t tellin’ what it meant to me.

And too little because the question is completely vague, poorly defined.

And I stand by one of my philosophical mainstays:

Art is as Art does
And means what it means
Art is non-verbal communication

If I wanted to use a thousand WORDS I would have wrote a story.

Here’s the deal on the songs:
A couple of years ago someone was foolish enough to break into my house. I almost felt sorry for them. It was even shortly after Christmas, so there were even a lot of new electronics lying on the surface of the mess, where I would have thought anyone could see them but the burglar completely missed a brand new i-pod setting on top of its box sitting on the coffee table, as was my laptop. I think was it just too much for him, too much valuable crap lying, some of it, literally on the floor. Ignored my guitars, ignored all entertainment the stereo and TV and all their offspring, ignored the bikes, ignored everything except approximately 50 pounds of change (which he carried back out the window and down the ladder), and my wife’s laptop, which had recently been my laptop, which held the last electronic copies of my songs, which I am slowly retyping.

The best thing about the burglary was getting to live an actual New Yorker cartoon.

In the cartoon a cop and a “home-maker” stand in the doorway, looking into a house that looks pretty much like mine. The cop looks shocked and the woman says, “No, it’s pretty much the way I left it.”

The cops almost didn’t believe that the burglar had not, in fact, trashed our house.