Woah, check out the “Thursday Edition: Trey Speegle” print for sale on the 20×200 site!
I really like this one. I was just thinking a few weeks ago about how rad paint-by-number is, and how I could incorporate some into my illustrations. Don’t you hate getting scooped?
(Actually, after seeing so many artists doing things that I really like, thinking about their works, “Hey, that’s what I was thinking of doing!” I have resolved to not care. I’ll do it anyway. Copying ideas is highly awesome and necessary in art, I believe.)
So hey, if you need some collage-graphic-retro-ness, go buy this print, because it’s awesome. Alternatively, if you are looking for something different, you could buy one of my four photo prints from my pay-what-yoo-want project. ;)
Dear readers of my blog who reside upon the binary ebbings and flowings of the internets:
I would like to introduce something exciting and experimental– a limited run of my photograph prints, made available for purchase for whatever you decide they are worth.[1] Yes!
I’ve chosen four photographs that I love. I had six 8×10″ prints made of each. They are printed on Kodak Professional Endura paper– this gives a silver halide print with light fastness rated 100+ years before fading. They’re printed full bleed (all the way to the edge of the paper). They are interesting and moody and awesome! See the bottom of this post for full previews of the photographs.
Here are the guidelines:
United States addresses only (sorry!)
First come, first serve (I’ll update the page as often as I can with how many prints are remaining)
Only one print per person
Click on one of the thumbnails above to be taken to a Paypal link to “donate”. Make sure you’re on the page that corresponds to the print you want!
“Donate” however much you want
Make sure that you specify the correct mailing address in the “notes to seller” section
Also let me know if you want me to sign and date the photograph, and how — front or back, which corner, dedicated to your mom, etc.
I’ll get the prints shipped out as fast as I can and let you know when yours goes out
I can take only Paypal payments right now
If you encounter any problems, shoot me an e-mail at jhirsch ~(ponies)~ gmail.com, or comment on this page
Sad breakfast, 2007
Dahlia, 2008
Impasto, 2007
Crow, 2007
Thanks for being a part of this and experimenting with me. I have been inspired by the donation payment model, used, for example, by Radiohead with “In Rainbows”. I just wanted to see what would happen if a photographer did this– especially a photographer like myself who is not widely known, and can not surf safely on a wave of fame that precedes them.
I’m intrigued by the idea of art being “worth” what people will pay for it. I personally think art has intrinsic worth, and is not devalued by what people will or will not pay for it. I also ultimately want to be able to make a living off my art, since I finally feel that painting and photography are my “true callings”. I know there’s something novel and interesting in here, and I’m trying to ferret it out…
In the formal art education I’ve had, we were taught that people will value your art according to how you price it. I think this is a tricky statement and it doesn’t quite sit right with me, although I understand the psychology behind it. Also, undercutting is anathema in the art world, and some people would say that is what I’m doing now.
Anathema is exciting… so let’s see what happens!
-Jess
[1] Please know that I know this is a tricky definition to pin down. Often we receive things for a price that is far less we think they are worth, and vice versa. If you really like these photos a lot, I don’t want you to come up with some incredibly high price in your head and then decide you won’t buy one because you can’t afford to pay for it.
I’m right in the middle of a nicotine craving. I don’t smoke that often. I’m in the “mooching” stage, where I just smoke socially and steal from friends with cigarettes in that really annoying, sad way.
I’ve quit and started again multiple times, over the years…
When I was little my mom made me promise that I would never ever start smoking. I promised her. What a silly thing to ask a child to promise!
When I’m in the “mooching” stage, I may break into the “owning” stage if I experience stress extreme enough to derail my itinerary and head me into the nearest smoke shop. It almost happened a few days ago when I was on my way downtown to meet Richard to watch the debates. But I just let my eyes bug out, and told Richard over the phone that I was on the verge of buying cigarettes, and saying it out loud broke the spell somehow.
I think I have a lot to say about cigarettes and nicotine. This is just the beginning.
Nicotine cravings are bizarre. For me, the worst is when I step outside of a coffee shop with a fresh latte, into the cool morning, breathe in the rich smell of coffee, the sweet new oxygenated morning air, and then… man, it sure would be nice to have a cigarette to go with this coffee!
So bizarre. So irritating. So shaming!
If you know anyone who’s trying to quit smoking, don’t make it worse for them by telling them how much it stinks and how gross it is. They already know what other people think. It just makes them feel bad. To lay the collective hatred of the clan of non-smokers on someone who’s already in the weird state of trying to beat an incredibly strong chemical addiction is just cruel. Keep the issues separate. You don’t like the smell. They are battling an addiction.
If you tell me how much smoking cigarettes stinks, I will tell you how much your car exhaust stinks. Really, people. It smells so bad that when I’m stuck in traffic I want to die sometimes. If you don’t drive, I’ll tell you how much your perfume or your shit or your B.O. stinks. Maybe it’s your logorrhea that smells. Humans have to deal with the noxious effluvia of other humans all the time.
Seriously though. When I realized that my struggle could be just a battle between me and the cigarettes, it felt so much easier– it didn’t have to be a battle between me and society, too. Screw society! I’m battling the drug first.
Today is the three-year anniversary of the taking of one of my favorite photos of my cat Newps. The taking, by me. Of the photo. With my camera. (Paragraphs like these are just one of the ways that you can tell I was not born in this solar system.)
What?, 2005
We used to have these little photos of Newps and Nips by the door, and when he wanted to go outside, he’d hop up on this old rolltop desk that came with the house, and paw the hell out of anything hanging on the wall. For years he would knock these photos down, and we would keep hanging them back up. In the photo above, Newps had just made the first swipe at his own portrait, and then turned to look at me expectantly.
I finally got around to reading the copy of Little Brother by Cory Doctorow that I bought when it first came out, in June, I think… and it left me all weepy and inspired.
I guess I should say first that the writing itself is not stellar, the plot being kind of blocky and awkward in some places, but it’s such an interesting, rousing, sad tale that I didn’t really care. I feel like Doctorow proselytized through his characters, all of them taking on the same tone, rather than developing their characters fully and letting them hash things out authentically. But, I imagine that when you have a very clear agenda you would like to communicate, namely, education about constitutional rights and security, it’s probably hard to strike a balance between proselytizing and letting characters speak and act naturally.
The novel is narrated in first person by a high school kid, a sassy hacker boy, who is pretty much exactly how I imagine my husband was in high school. I guess that is what endeared the book to me. It was super cute to read about kids running around being hackers, using hacker language, doing hacker things. It made me wonder what it’s like to be a teenage hacker now. Hell, I’m almost 30. (Ruh roh!) “Don’t trust anyone over 25!”
The novel started to remind me so much of 1984 that I began to be terrified of what was coming– and rightly. It’s kind of like a young adult version of 1984. It’s really horrifying, in a good way, I think– it brings home very contemporary issues in a way that young adults can relate to. For this, my brain forgives him any awkwardnesses in writing. I would give this novel to my kids (if I had any), to any young adult interested in computers, in freedom of speech, in hacking, to anyone asking “WTF is going on in my country?”, and to anyone splooging a bunch of their personal data out onto the internets via Myspace.
I also love the discussion at the end of the book on the hacker mindset, written by Bruce Schneier. He says,
So when you’re wandering through your day, take a moment to look at the security sytems around you. … Pay attention at airport security. (How could you get a weapon onto an airplane?) Watch what the teller does at a bank. (Bank security is designed to prevent tellers from stealing just as much as it is to prevent you from stealing.) … Look at traffic lights and door locks and all the security systems on television and in the movies. Figure out how they work, what threats they protect against and what threats they don’t, how they fail, and how they can be exploited.
Holy shit! He just suggested that children try to figure out how get weapons on airplanes! Arrest him! Oh wait, he’s a well-known security expert. What’s going on here?!
I remember sitting in DFW airport with Richard, inside the security perimeter, at some stupid restaurant, looking at all the very metal eating utensils, the glasses hanging in the bar, thinking about how easy it would be to wrap a glass in a napkin, pocket it, and then quietly crush it on the airplane, using shards of glass as weapons. So easy. What an outrage. We also talked about how much trouble we thought we could get in for even saying something about that, for walking up to a TSA official and pointing out that someone could do it. Certainly we’d be detained, maybe arrested. Such bullshit.
Later Schneier says,
Trading privacy for security is stupid enough; not getting any actual security in the bargain is even more stupid.
So close the book and go. The world is full of security systems. Hack one of them.
Yeah! Go kids!! Go get smart and save the world, seriously! We have royally fucked you and we’re very sorry!
No seriously though. I was so happy to read this book. It’s not a jolly lark to read (I cried in some parts!), but I highly recommend it to everyone. Everyone!
Here’s a recent photo of a relevant sign, so you don’t get disappointed that there were no pictures to go with this post:
I like the north area of the University District because much of it is run down and trashed by college students, and that yields microcosms of amazing texture.
Consider what I saw during a single walk home recently:
These photos were all taken with my little Canon PowerShot, but they are still pleasing to me. I’ve been practicing framing the shot so I don’t have to crop (none of the above photos have been cropped during post-processing). It’s hard. It requires more staring at the LCD display and holding perfectly still. It’s less sneaky than seat-of-your-pants street photography.
Anyway. I am seriously tired today. Seeking more coffee now. (Or perhaps a wee nap in some secluded corner of the Health Sciences Building? Yes?)
I’m really excited about some paintings I finished for part of a Moleskine exchange I’m in right now. (A group of artists each buy a Moleskine journal, make art on a set amount of pages, mail it to the next person, etc, until finally you get your own Moleskine back, filled with the work of all the other artists.)
I took inspiration from old alchemical symbols that I found in my awesome Taschen book Alchemy and Mysticism (Amazon doesn’t have it in stock, but the version I have is the 25th Anniversary Edition that I linked to). I also used found paper from a very old copy of Kipling’s Kim. First I laid down a wash of walnut ink and salted it, for texture. Then I pasted paper in select places with “Netural pH Adhesive” (basically bookbinding glue), and illustrated over it with gouache and Micron pens. The patterns that make up the backbone of the paintings are taken from aerial shots found through Google maps. My favorite is the first one because I managed to slip in some crop circles. None of the paintings really mean anything… or do they?
I have a funny story to soothe your debate-battered hearts…
Last weekend Richard and I were out in the backyard, and somehow a sweat bee got in his pants, and bit him where nothing should ever, ever bite a man. We caught the bee in a glass. This is it:
I took it yesterday morning on the way to work. I caught her in the act, carefully dancing along the spokes of her web, pulling and touching her spinnerets to the proper places. I wonder if she needs all eight legs to do it or if six would suffice. It looked complicated, but the motions and rhythm reminded me a bit of knitting.
I like how spiders keep house; how they cut out parts of their web stuck with garbage and rebuild it. I read that webs lose stickiness after a day, so the spiders eat their web and spin a new one every day. I recently had to knock down a web in my garden so I could pass through some trees, but I took it down carefully, one guy line at a time, leaving the top two intact, and watched the spider gather all the silk up in her legs, climb up to the top, and eat the web, shoving the minute tangle of silk into her mouth with her front legs. So thrifty! So efficient!
by Cory Doctorow that I bought when it first came out, in June, I think… and it left me all weepy and inspired. 
(Amazon doesn’t have it in stock, but the version I have is the 25th Anniversary Edition that I linked to). I also used found paper from a very old copy of Kipling’s Kim. First I laid down a wash of walnut ink and salted it, for texture. Then I pasted paper in select places with “Netural pH Adhesive” (basically bookbinding glue), and illustrated over it with gouache and Micron pens. The patterns that make up the backbone of the paintings are taken from aerial shots found through Google maps. My favorite is the first one because I managed to slip in some crop circles. None of the paintings really mean anything… or do they?
