Day 313/365 - Not a Work of Art

For this week's self-portrait, I took a shot of myself with my D90 and then ran it through the watercolor effect on an old version of Microsoft Photo Editor to give it the look of a painting rather than a photograph. This is me tired after a busy day at work.

(Taken with my Nikon D90)

Day 311/365 - Everyday Art

I had an art-filled Saturday today. Although I didn't plan it that way, all three stops on my impromptu art tour focused on everyday rather than 'high' art and, fittingly enough, all three were free. I started things off at the Corcoran Museum, which has free admission every Saturday this month. They are currently featuring a very cool photography exhibit by William Eggleston entitled Democractic Camera. His shots aren't of celebrities or of beautiful, exotic landscapes. Instead, he shoots regular people, ordinary places, and average objects, but the way he composes his shots is what makes them artistic.

It's easy to make an eyecatching shot of an intrinsically interesting subject. It's much harder to do that with a nondescript subject. Eggleston excels at it, however. My favorite photo in this exhibit is a shot he took of the back of a woman's ornate 1960s up-do at the next booth over in a restaurant or diner, but all of his stuff is pretty striking. Next stop on my everday art tour was the National Geographic Society's Explorer's Hall, where they have an exhibit entitled Kodachrome Culture that features photographs taken by American tourists traveling in Europe in the 1950s and 1960s. These are not your average tourist summer vacation photos. They were very well done and the place in time they depicted was equally as interesting as the place in the world they highlighted.

Last stop was the all-day Mural Jam that was going on at the Rhode Island Avenue Shopping Center. There is a long concrete retaining wall that runs in back of that strip mall and an organization called Albus Cavus was sponsoring a public art project wherein several local artists were collaborating on painting a massive mural that stretched the length of the wall. A few of the artists were using brushes, but most were wielding spray cans. As you can see from the shot above, however, they weren't just the typical conception of graffiti artists. The things they were able to do with spray paint were absolutely amazing.

Never mind the bread and circuses, give the people art!

(Taken with my Nikon D90)

Day 265/365 - Warhol Self-Portrait

For this week's self-portrait I decided to do an Andy Warhol-style piece. I took a self-portrait with my Nikon D90, used the stamp effect on an old version of Microsoft Photo Editor, ran it through Picasa to add the tints, and then put the four versions together with Microsoft Publisher and saved it as a jpeg. Voila!

Day 228/365 - Art and War

I Amtrak'd it up to Philadelphia this morning for a day trip to tour the battleship USS New Jersey and check out the Cezanne exhibit going on at the Museum of Art. It was an interesting juxtaposition of the power of destruction and the power of creation, not to mention the machina and the deus.

When you think about it, creation and destruction aren't opposites as much as they are different points along the same continuum. They're both forms of affected change, ways of altering the world either through addition or subtraction. That being said, art generally doesn't kill or maim anyone -- so the world could do with much more of the former and considerably less of the latter.

(Taken with my Nikon D90)