I won't be updating this for the next few days, and I haven't had time to write anything Thoughtful lately anyway. I am preparing for my art show at Balticon, the yearly science fiction convention in Baltimore. I will have an art booth in a showroom with about fifty other artists. The artists in the show will range from high school aspirants, to amateurs good and bad, and some professionals including myself. My own selection is not so spectacular, since my art priorities are changing and I have not committed myself to anything "important" while I am still thinking about what to do. I don't expect to make much money. But I will have two new pieces done this month, though they are small. You can see one of them here, titled "Cometary Nucleus and Particle Shower." Acrylic on illustration board, 9 inches x 11 inches.

This middle of 2004 finds me in transition in both art and mathematics. I continue to move away from "conventional" fantasy and science fiction art, the kind that is familiar to anyone who looks at fantasy book covers, movie illustrations, comic books, or many advertisements. I am not expecting any new artistic revelations at the Balticon art show, only the same tired old motifs of babes and dragons and barbarians. Gone are the days when I could go even to a regional s.f. convention art show and marvel at spacescapes or alien worlds or mystic visions of romantic faerie. I don't know whether it is the decline of the art field itself, or whether it is my own boredom that has caused me to lose my sense of fantasy art wonder.

But then from a "fine-arts" point of view, my work is still on the facile and commercial side, and even my Deco-geometric stuff is hardly original. At least I am borrowing from the right people, art heroes of mine like Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, as well as Charles Sheeler and the American Precisionists. So I am now moving in between the kitsch of fantasy art and the Serious Stuff of "fine art." It's a place of transition, but I am making progress. Four months ago I wasn't making any art at all.

As for math, I am just about done with basic trigonometry, and I am currently visiting some of the areas of "pre-calculus" which I didn't know or didn't have enough of. Right now I am solving problems about inverse functions, that is, turning them backwards, and finding their domains and ranges. After the convention action is over, I hope to review an introduction to imaginary and complex numbers, and then move on into Logarithms. At the convention I expect to meet and talk math with at least one of my Friendly Mathematicians. They are impatient with me because I don't want to start Calculus yet, but I want to make sure that I have fully covered precalculus before I do anything derivative. I will leave the "derivative" aspect to my art.

Posted at 1:41 am | link