Can You Identify the Original Photo Contents of These Seven Digital Extrusions

When I was growing up in Cleveland and later New Jersey, my mom had a deep fryer and a device that she used to turn potatoes into square shaped extrusions that would be dropped into the hot grease to become French fries. Last night I was able to find a picture of this vintage kitchen device here, a Redware Fry Cutter. This picture here shows a similar device in action.

Essentially it's an extruder. We've all seen extruded metal or extruded plastic before, though we not have thought much about or understood the process that created it.

The word "extrude" means to shape by forcing something through a die. The literal meaning, as a verb, is "to thrust, push or force out." The words appears as one possibility in a whole slew of creative menu options in one of the tabs on Adobe Photoshop®, an illustrator's tool for enhancing or altering photos. Other choices include spatter, emboss, bubble wrap, mosaic, etc.

Now here's where it gets interesting to me. When I was an art student in college 45 years ago I attempted to paint this vision of an extruded reality that I had imagined. That is, in my mind's eye I had performed a sequence of steps that went like this. First, what if you take a snapshot of 3-D reality -- it could be a room, a landscape, a sunrise -- and convert it to two dimensions? It's what cameras do every day, of course. Next, what if you place this image on the flat end of a block of soap or rectangular potato or whatever. Then, for step three you thrust this through an extruder that, voila!, makes unusual splays of color.

My effort to reproduce this effect in a painting was hindered by my lack of talent. Had I the skills of a Vermeer, Dali or Frank Holmes, the painting I created -- which still exists and hangs on a wall next to the billiard table in my mother's home -- would have been much more interesting.

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OK, so here is the game. See how many of these extruded, exploded images you can identify. That is, what did the original photo look like? No one will get all seven, but there are a few here you should be able to sort out. Good luck!

Top to Bottom

1. The Petersen Auto Museum in Los Angeles
2. The cover of Jeff Beck's first album, Beck-Ola--based on a painting by Magritte
3. Our gaggle geese
4. Portion of a large abstract painting from my senior year at Ohio U.
5. Abstract painting with snakeskin in the center
6. Cloud design created by means of inks and denatured alcohol on canvas
7. Guitar player and drummer from the Fractals

Some of these would make interesting illustrations for an article, book cover or blog post, don't ya think?

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We live in an amazing world. Make time to explore it. And have a great day.

Impossible Objects

While doing background research for a story I'm working on I revisited one of my interviews with Portuguese artist Margarida Sardinha regarding her project, Symmetry's Portal. Like artists in every field we have influences. Ms. Sardinha is transparent about hers, freely pointing backward to those whose ideas have been reconfigured in her multifaceted expressions. The January interview ended with a reference to Roger Penrose, whose fascination with geometry resulted in some interesting conundrums.

I remember being a youngster looking at a Mad magazine that had a grinning Alfred E. Neuman with one of these impossible designs. I immediately set about to trying to draw this, which is not really that difficult. Yet the effect is mesmerizing. Such simplicity, yet mind-boggling optical tom-foolery.

By means of basic techniques M.C.Escher spent a lifetime producing a vast array of impossible drawings and optical conundrums. A master illusionist, the Dutch graphic artist took his inspiration from mathematics.

Here's an example of another impossible object, the Penrose Triangle.

But what happens when you build a full-sized three-dimensional model of this bizarre idea? Well, it's not just the illustration that's batty, the real life model is even moreso. As is the composition demonstrated here:

Escher is not the only artist drawn to these kinds of optical puzzles. Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte produced some stunning visual effects of their own.

No wonder magicians have so much fun fooling us. All too often things are not what they seem. It both puzzles and entertains us, and frequently leads us to contemplate life's greater mysteries. I'm thinking here of the concept of the Trinity, a unique feature of orthodox Christianity.

Meantime life goes on... all around you, within you and without you. 

Magritte on the Old Question

The old question, “Who are we?” is given a disappointing answer in the world in which we have to live.
We are, indeed, no more than the subjects of this so-called civilized world, in which intelligence, depravity, heroism and stupidity jog along happily together, and are extremely topical.
We are the subjects of this absurd and incoherent world in which arms are manufactured for the prevention of war, science is devoted to destroying, killing, building and prolonging the lives of the dying, and where the most insane activity is self-contradictory.
We live in a world where people marry for money, and where great hotels are built and left to decay on the sea-front.
This world hangs together; but are the signs of its future ruin not already visible in the night sky?
Rene Magritte, La Ligne de vie, November, 1958

Rene Magritte, 1898-1967, is another of the great painters of the modern era, an artist whose surrealistic internal spaces explored all the inner that we inhabit, and by this I include the caverns of the mind and recesses of the soul, as well as rooms, gardens, and hats.

He lived through a period of great change. As a young painter he had been taken up with the Futurist movement in Europe, but he is most well known for the surrealism. Hence, my own interest in his work when I was a young painter.

This weekend I borrowed a wonderfully immense book from the library with over three hundred pages of drawings and paintings. It also delves into the man himself.

I doubt there are very many of us who have not seen some of his work since many of the images have re-appeared in various ways in pop culture. Jeff Beck used one of his paintings on an album cover in 1969, and several movies make reference to his painting, "The Son of Man", which features a man in a bowler hat with his face obscured by an oversized green apple.

A Belgian who lived through two world wars, he never lost his wit. The opening lines of a lecture he gave explaining the roots of his current work show that he never lost his sensitivity or keen perception. While creating work that at times is absurd, there was an accessibility there as well, and it helped him achieve success within his lifetime. His work had a context and the paintings reflect this man's response to that which was reverberating about him and within him.

At least two of my own pieces have been tributes to Magritte. You can find out more about the man and a few examples of his work here. You really should check him out.

Jonathan Winters Interview, Part 2

Jonathan Winters appeared in more than 50 films, has authored books and produced an impressive collection of original art, some of it available in his 1988 book of paintings titled Hang-Ups.

This is part two of the interview we conducted in 2004.

en: Tell me more about your studio.
JW: Little candy cash register that sits on a box that my grandfather had, a kind of a big square chest. The cash register is from NCR. I’ve got things I’ve collected from Dayton… a picture of the art institute. I’ve got pictures of guys I’ve worked with... Art Carney, Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, and paintings that Native Americans have done. I’m a collector.

It’s a little bit of everything. I don’t work on an easel so much as a big drawing board. I’ve got a radio, and I paint to music, mostly from the 40s -- Duke Ellington, Count Basie. And I have a desk. I do my writing there. It’s a comparatively small area that I paint in. You go up a series of stairs, almost like a loft. I’ve got a little table there with my acrylics, and I go to work.

en: I also was a painter when I was young. In recent years I've set up a studio in my garage every summer.
JW: What kind of painting?

en: Abstract expressionism, impressionism, surrealism.... I read that you were into Dali and Magritte.
JW: I love Magritte. I’m working on a painting now. It’s a hearse, and behind it there’s a trailer with a U-Haul label on it – it’s like a cartoon really – and the caption is, “You can take it with you.” I’m very influenced by cartoonists. I’ve done some cartoons, had a couple published, one in Playboy, one in the old Saturday Evening Post.

Charlie Adams, Peter Arno, George Price, those are my guys. I’ve done a couple serious things. I’m not an activist of any kind. I mean, message stuff. There was one you saw, A New Member... It didn’t play too well in the south.

en: How did you get interested in screen printing?
JW: Joe (Petro) is a guy who knew my boy. We’ve put together some stuff. I did a
book of short stories. Put some artwork in that.... Joe’s back in Kentucky.

en: I have Kentucky roots. I’m a descendant of Daniel Boone.
JW: Southern Ohio, once you get into Kentucky....
>>> breaks into southern dialect<<< played football against Hamilton...

en: What are you doing to promote what you do?
JW: I just finished a picture this past September. It will be out in late summer. We’re in touch with each other. I’m working with Joe. I just sent him some books and he’s putting them in a shadow box kind of thing.

en: What makes your work unique?
JW: Well, that’s an interesting question. All I ever hope to do with anything is try to be a little bit different from the guy on the wall. As I mentioned earlier, I look for style. A woman turned to me the other day and said, “How much is your largest painting?” The biggest I get is about 18 x 24. And I said $25,000. And she said, “Oh my God! I never dreamed it would be that much.” Well, I said, “The painting’s a joke. The idea is worth $25,000.” And she didn’t get that, so she said, and I get this a lot, >>> alters voice << “If you weren’t Jonathan Winters, you couldn’t ask those kind of prices.” And I said, “But I am Jonathan Winters.” Why would I put Henry Walker, or Lyle Davenberger on my painting?

Sink or swim. I get annoyed very quickly. If you don't want to pay that... Now the woman is wearing heavy jewelry, pulls up in a brand new Jaguar... You’re talking to a guy who’s 77. I see these assholes coming in with all this glass on their hands bringing in a Delta flight, dickering with me... and I say, “Look, let me tell you something. You’re best bet is to go to Tijuana and get something on velvet. That would be tops $35 and a picture of Elvis.”

I’ve only painted 150 paintings in my life. They’re not all 25,000 for crying out loud. My drawings are like $500, framed pen and ink things. Red Skelton, for an 8 x 10, gets $45,000.
But you’re dealing with people. People say, “After you die do you think these will be worth anything at all?”

“Well, I sold my clothes for 200 dollars after they were worn out. Collectible people, they will collect anything. I don’t know. I can’t tell. I’ve bought paintings I never heard of the guy, he wasn’t famous. I buy things I like. I don’t care what the name of the guy is. If I like the painting, and I see some interesting strokes that he’s done with his brushes and his subject matter, I’m gonna buy it. But a great many people >>voice change<< “Unless it’s Kuniyoshi, or unless you’re talking about Magritte or Reginald Marsh or Winslow Homer, uh, I don’t know. Do you think your stuff measures up to that?”

No, I’m not in any museum, except possibly the Dayton Art Institute, and probably in the basement there, but no... Look, if you don’t like the painting, get out of the place right now. Take a walk. I just don’t have time to go back and forth with these people.

en: Is your work in galleries
JW: Not now. A guy has been on me from a gallery in Beverly Hills. They take such a cut out of you. They want 70 and you get 30. They talk about a cocktail party and some exposure, but what do you come away with? It used to be when I did a show in the 70s, they took thirty and I took seventy. But now it’s just turned around. Automatically most galleries, just 50-50.

TO BE CONTINUED

Jon Winters photo courtesy Christina Bergstrom
http://www.bergstromsphotography.com/

More artwork by Jonathan Winters
http://www.jonathanwinters.com/

Read part one of the Jon Winters interview here:

http://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2007/12/interview-with-artist-jonathan-winters.html