The fauves

 

No, I'm not really going to tell you about the fauves. They were from the country I'm in now, France, and were an art movement characterized by intense colors and wild brush work. Matisse, whose apartment I can see in the hills out my window, is possibly the most famous of the fauves.

Oops, I wasn't going to tell you about the fauves! 

I don't even know if you can say fauves or if you have to always say "fauvism" or "fauvists". So who am I to be guiding you around this early 20th century art movement!

It's kind of neat though, like it goes pretty far into abstraction without quite getting there. It's like a godchild of Van Gogh.

Anyway, I was working on maybe the fourth of my Genoa paintings, today's subject was a scene looking out through the baroque palaces into the old city there. And when I finished my first layer I thought "Well, this is looking rather fauvist!"

But I build these images in multiple layers, so I still had a lot to do!

 After about five versions, a couple of hours, and quite a few layers, I was finished. I came over here to show you it. 

And then I started going on about the fauves!

The thing is, clerkmanifesto has a, let's call it a guiding principle, not a rule. And that guiding principle is that whatever our plans are here, we take the first exit, the first true ending we can get to. I don't always do it. And of course I sometimes have too strong an overall plan to give up on for it. But many, if not most posts come to a kind of surprise ending for me, like, I thought I was going... there, but here it is now. And I'm done.

I missed this opportunity with today's painting. I was really done after the first layer, but I labored on. Fortunately though, because each layer is preserved, I could finally see that and make my correction.

 And so, in one layer only, secretly fauvist inspired, is today's Genoa picture.

Look ma, no hands!

 

I was out at my favorite park here, right by the water, in the open grounds of a villa turned museum. I love this park because really, as peaceful and parklike it is at first glance, at second glance it is an extraordinary garden, featuring without much fuss an exquisite assortment of flowers, succulents, and palms worthy of any botanical garden. The Meditterranean climate offers a hand up for this kind of a thing, but it's only a hand up. Some group is up to something amazingly clever behind the scenes there!

Anyway, things were looking particularly wonderful on the grounds, maybe even a bit better with the Autumn coming in, and I had the unusual opportunity to spend a real span of time taking pictures. Some of them came out quite nicely and I thought "I am just going to show these without any ai shenanagans, let everyone see what I can do with my eye and my phone and a bit of time!"

Plus, I'm really busy with my Genoa series and the administrative paperwork that is likely the bane of any emigree anywhere, but is definitely the case in France. So posting off twenty pictures or so without much fuss here sounded like a great idea!

And that's what I came here to do!

So I opened up my first picture and I thought "What if I just drew right over it instead?"

At least an hour later here I am, with one picture for you, hand drawn in two simple layers, the photo, and my drawing. I think this might change the direction of my Genoa pictures, or divert me into twenty flower pictures. I don't know, but I like this just fine. I am much more satisfied than with yesterdays gambit.

And now I can go do my daily tithe of French lessons!

"Wow, you do French every day?" You ask.

"Yes, yes I do." I answer warily.

"You must know a ton of French by now!"

One would think, wouldn't one?

Sheer cussed doggedness

 

For all the many trips we have been on since the start of August, each carefully documented in photographs, I have long since shown you whatever account or version of those photographs best expressed them. But at the start of all that traveling was Genoa. And Genoa's pictures were another story.

I have shown some pictures of Genoa, but my main idea with my Genoa pictures, influenced by a deep admiration for the city, the thrill of being in Italy, and the success of my photography there, was to make something more like hand-drawn, painted versions of my images.

This is a silly amount of work. An amount I hesitate to take on, but occasional do, and then usual give up on at some point.

I'm just saying I would think that I would have given up on this project at this point, but no, not yet.

Kind of like clerkmanifesto, eh?

We'll call it a hundred photos of Genoa, for simplicity's sake. Of course there was the taking them, and the choosing them. Then there was creating a half dozen or so layers for each of them, independent variations on them working with AI's. Then came the labeling and organizing those layer photos, 700 total pictures all to be renamed and filed appropriately. It turns out that was the shockingly laborious task that has taken most of the last two months.

But I finally finished! Yesterday evening I labeled and filed the last of the 600 layers.

And now the real work begins.

Here I assemble the images in layers, hand drawing/painting with my drawing tablet, erasing through sections, creating new layers, drawing some more, and assembling again, until it seems sort of... finished.

Today I present the first of these (though in August I may have shown a "proof of concept" version of one, I can't remember). Perhaps the next trick is figuring out what to say about any of these, since in all this elapsed time I have forgotten most of what these pictures are of, except the obvious, like here, that it is some kind of fancy lintel above a fancy doorway.

There should be plenty of varied versions of doorways coming up...

if I don't quit.

Here then, is the first:

Does Minnesota still exist

What a funny thing to be running through my color shake up pictures so excitedly. Today we are returning to Minnesota and grabbing from a vast catalog of seen and useen photographs mainly of the Mississippi Riverlands, and then changing them. And while this sort of color randomizing effect has captured my attention for now, it isn't the first time. 

Indeed, my first experiments of image witchery were along these same lines.

Long before AI and maybe even before photoshop existed, I started to have some access to color copiers. I took old photographs of mine, or new ones if I had any, and hand tinted black and white copies of my pictures. I then made color copies of them as overdialed and saturated as I could. The pictures you are seeing now are much the effect I was going for back then, but of a nature I was not technically capable enough to achieve.

Back then I think pictures like these would have amazed you, but you likely never would have had a chance to see them even if I could have created them. Now maybe, amid all the noise and magic of imagery that is created and tossed around the world like it is nothing, these are perhaps not so amazing as they would have been. But here they come, with ridiculous ease before your eyes on your magic device.

Minnesota. Saint Minneapolis?

Of course I miss it! I have a few delicate connections to the people I love most there. I am still made of a life there. And the river still runs through me and always will. I like this style of picture so much because this dreaminess and reality, fading and overclear, wrong and right, tells the story better than...

I don't know.

It just seems to tell the story of that world better. Instead of coming upon a picture and thinking "I remember that place" something else happens. I come upon the picture now and it is a dream I had instead, which really is more like it.

The third color

 

This is my third attempt.

I have been trying for three days now to introduce some assorted photographs in my latest style I call "primaries" because, roughly, basic colors come into it, even if they aren't always the "primary" colors. I applied this technique I'd developed in a new city we loved to some older photos and thought a few were kind of interesting and worth sharing. And also, though I had several ideas for posts I wanted to make for you, or to write from scratch, my time was limited and I thought it might be easier just to show these photos that I'd already worked on and finished.

So I set down to introduce the pictures and commentary came out instead. Twice. It's almost happening again now!

Sometimes I think it might be simpler to, when posting photographs, simply post the photographs. And when I'm writing I can just be writing. 

But then I think of the days like these past few: I like to take the pressure off. To set off under no obligation. 

My favorite plans in clerkmanifesto, are the ones I break.

Back home to what may or may not be home

 

We have returned to something like home after finding a city we adored but where we could not manage to find an apartment to rent, at least as of yet. Our search will carry on remotely for now while we perhaps start to ramp up a personal campaign to love where we are a little bit more? After all, this may be it.

Along with many things to be discussed further, I not least come back with a phone stuffed full of photographs of where we've been for eleven days. I have been posting some of these over the last week, while I was on the road, and I would say that I was fishing (pun intended, um, you know, because several of the pictures were of fish) for a new style to convey my feelings about that extraordinary ordinary French city. I feel this flailing search produced some middling results over the past couple of days here, but working on a phone it was harder for me to see how they were coming up short. 

Fortunately, we went to an absolutely fantastic contemporary museum that was in our neighborhood there, and the wonderful main exhibit was all in green light, from where the artist drew much of its power, and it was huge and immersive, making great use of the brilliant architecture that is all over that city and where the museum was set. Apparently this inspiration was what I needed to kick off some relatively simple ideas about colors that have unleashed a new wave of  image modulations that while surprisingly minimal, are exactly the thing I was looking for but didn't know I was looking for.

Before we get probably too far into all that, I will show you the images that started me down the road and let that be enough for today, an introduction of sorts. To give a fair sense of the space I drew from, I am inclined to tell you that these images are mostly only altered in the selective changing of elements to red:

Wandering a haunted world

 

I don't know what this photographic style I'm obsessively working with says exactly about all these things we're seeing wandering the Europelands of today, but I am not only developing a kind of commitment (though I am aware these are always temporary) to this view of the world, but I am also finding ways to push it to the brink. You have seen these lurid hyper psychadelic versions of my photos a lot lately, but I'm starting to push them closer to the world of my imagination. Yes, of course these are mainly real pictures of four or five different cities I have recently wandered through, but they are also... clerkmanifestoland.

There will probably be more of these, but this is a ruined and wonderful world, with death and history some of its best parts, and the present doing sometimes more to ruin it than make it better.