Friday, October 29, 2010

Ink to me only with thine eyes



Another piece of SF proposal art, this one is my conception of the Great Orrery, a communications device ca. 100,000 AD. The Vacillators scattered around it are part of the same system. The novella is a 1910 work by J.H. Rosny Aîné, a fine work by a sadly neglected author.

The Vacillators have an air of Moebius to them, this sort of mechanical biomorph is an old motif with him and one which I suspect is ultimately descended from the Lions of Delos.

My last posting was a bit of a cranky rant against the growing trend of artistic amnesia, a trend which not reduces the resources available to both artists and audience but also lowers the visual bar, so to speak, and increases the rate at which visual rubbish can be substituted for visual substance, a process driven solely by commercial calculations.

What we have here is really an artistic version of Gresham's Law, bad art drives out good and the only remedy is providing a genuine education to young people to inoculate them as early as possible. The tastes of youth are a great influence upon adult consumption, which is why such vast sums of money are spent upon destroying young people's sense of taste and judgement.

In any case, cross hatching seems to be a dwindling art form, at least until Photoshop comes up with a filter to do it. Until then I will continue with my inky blobs and squiggles and crochets and I encourage you to do the same.

4 comments:

  1. "The tastes of youth are a great influence upon adult consumption, which is why such vast sums of money are spent upon destroying young people's sense of taste and judgement."

    Wonderful sentence. You've won an Internet, sir.

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  2. Nooooooo! I don't want an Internet! I want a glass of scotch and a gamelan orchestra playing along while I ink, over and over, the Carrollian Multiverse.

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  3. Thank you, Hans. Such compliments coming from an artist like you are like Pro-White to my inky, blackened soul!

    Readers should be aware that Han's latest work is being posted on line as it progresses, his Ectopiary

    I cannot recommend it too highly … it is genuinely alien and far superior to almost everything else going on in the USA today

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