Tuesday, 23 October 2012

A ramble about art, photography and video


Last week I put up a post about The Turner Contemporary art gallery in Margate and their YouTube account, see http://thanetonline.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/the-turner-contemporary-gets-youtube.html

A couple of the videos they had published there left me uncertain if they were supposed to be some form of contemporary art, or if they had made a mistake and hadn’t intended to publish these videos in the public domain. As the videos have now been deleted I can only assume that they weren’t some form of contemporary art, that I didn’t understand, but were just what they appeared to be mistakes.

I suppose there is another possibility which is art could happen by mistake, or to extend the “I am an artist therefore it’s art” theory to, if a major contemporary art gallery produces a film and publishes it on the internet, then it is art, even if they did it by mistake.


Anyway I thought about the art video business and decided I would have a go at producing one myself, so this is a video of a painting of videoing the painting of the picture of videoing painting. I guess you know what I mean, but I failed to express this properly verbally, can you? My children had a go at expressing what both are about, the painting and the video, they didn’t find it easy either.

 Here is the painting, well more an India ink sketch with some added watercolour.

Mostly I don’t paint and draw from photos, I either paint what is there and happening, in this case the camera and light on my desk, the equipment filming me paint (obviously if I do this more often then the equipment becomes part of the business of painting, so in a sense ceases to be there) or I paint what is in my head. Sometimes I paint a mixture of the two, which causes trouble sooner or later.
Over the last few days I have been playing about with the technology behind blogging, looking to include more in the way of videos and enhancing the way I can publish from my smartphone.



Technology moves on a pace and it is possible to set ones phone so that all of the pictures and videos you take with it are automatically sent to the internet. This technology still needs considerable tweaking, finding the balance between high enough definition and the time the files take to upload and suchlike.


An HD video like the one above takes quite a long time to upload and in many cases the quality isn’t important to make the point.     
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1 comment:

Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.