Surrealistic Reflections

Reading the whole night through!

2012-01-16T22:28:00.000-04:00

Well, two nights ago I did it again... Indulged my secret addiction and ended up staying up all night to do it. You'd think by middle age it would no longer be a problem!

Nope, not talking about sex, but reading... I have a terrible habit of not being able to stop! I can stop a movie in the middle and take a break, I can stop a game after awhile and do something else, but I get a really good read going on a quality story, and bang! I'm done for.

When I read a great story it transports me into that world, I get connected to the characters and care about what happens. It's almost like I'm there, I literally almost feel immersed into it. I've never gotten that type of experience out of other mediums. Maybe I'm a freak of nature, but ever since I was eleven years old and I read the Lord of the Rings trilogy in a weekend, I've had a problem with moderating my reading habits...

Sure, read before you go to bed, it'll definitely help you get to sleep!

Teresa's Art in 2011

2011-12-31T15:29:00.000-04:00

Rising Through The Wreckage - 2011

Published simultaneously on Surrealistic Reflections and my artist website - www.teresa-young.net.

2012 - At Last!

Twist Towards The Light - 2011

Well, the year is finally coming to an end, on some level, I say good! I managed to paint close to forty paintings this year, and found that my style developed into itself as I had hoped. I feel proud of the progress my work has made this year, I feel more connected to the pieces that came about this year than I did in 2010.
I think it's because I slowed down and contemplated the work paintings more midstream...

Glistening Fringe - 2011

Taking the Time to Figure It Out...

I found out this year that I needed to understand my work more in order to title the pieces and explain them more accurately... In order to do that, I had to contemplate them, painting is like breathing to me, it's something I do naturally. Figuring out what it means is much, much harder. I'm pretty spontaneous (read impulsive!) and don't like to face myself as much as I should. I hate disappointing others, maybe I'm just avoiding disappointing myself!

Chaos Out Of Confusion - 2011

What the heck was I thinking?

I was actually quite disappointed in a lot of my paintings in 2010, they felt as unsettled as I usually did. I guess that's no big surprise!
Maybe breaking an ankle made me sit still long enough to focus where I needed to. Funny how things work...

2011 was another matter entirely, I felt connected to the artwork, and sometimes, I think I came forward and ventured opinions that were not so introverted... Mother Earth Is In Hiding jumps to my mind here, I think that's the first painting I ever did relating to a global theme!

My First Social Statement? (I'm a late bloomer...)

Mother Earth Is In Hiding - 2011: Fall colours dominate this large acrylic painting. The central 'Mother Earth' figure is symbolic, not meant to be truly seen by anyone. The figure is there, but we see through her to the sky behind. She's hiding from us, perhaps because of the way we've treated the Earth?

I've posted a selection of the artwork I created in 2011 as an example of what I'm saying in this post, but by no means is this all there is!

Miscellaneous Artwork from 2011

Seraphic Symphony - 2011

Untitled - 2011

If you'd like to see more of my work, please visit my website www.teresa-young.net or go to deviantART and check out my page there, http://dalifan-teresa.deviantart.com/ (yes, I'm a fan of Salvidore Dali! It's pretty hard to make up millions of usernames you know! At least it feels like millions...)

Path of Intuition - 2011

My Current Fave!

Here's one of the paintings I liked the best that I created in 2011, and I'm adding in the description I wrote up for it, because I think I've finally figured out how to reach for what they end up meaning (to me, anyway!) Enjoy! Teresa.

Description:
In this acrylic painting an explosion of Indian Red rises amid a gentle sea of blue. The woman's face is shown in different poses, representing the facets of her personality, up close, her eye stares outwards towards you, her audience... Her life follows the path of her intuition.

Canadian Artist Teresa Young and British Artist Penelope Oakley’s Collaboration 2011

2011-11-17T16:42:00.000-04:00

Published simultaneously on Surrealistic Reflections and my website blog, www.teresa-young.net .

Teresa Young and Penelope Oakley are embarking on their first collaborative artwork together, after they initially connected through the Celeste Prize network, an international artist’s network at the beginning of 2011.
Their artworks first appeared together side by side at the Camden Art Gallery, London in a Collective Exhibition in January. From there they both exhibited at the Scoletta di San Giovanni Battista, Venice in concurrent exhibitions in May and June.
Their current involvement together in another exhibition in Mississippi, USA with The Energy Art Movement sees some of their pieces coincidentally again next to each other on the same wall. Both artists are involved with the UNICEF Arte Maggio 2012 Reconstructing Childhood project.
Strangely enough, both artists were both born in Surrey, Penelope in Surrey England and Teresa in Surrey Canada. Although separated by the Atlantic, they have a lot in common, age group, backgrounds, love of art and artistic approaches. A true product of our electronics age, they have become fast friends although they have yet to meet in person.
Their idea for a collaborative work was a natural instinct for both. Since Penelope’s flowing style was surrealistic, energetic and dominated by patterns of light, and Teresa’s work was flowing, patternistic and organic, their styles were a natural fit to harmonize together in one piece. With that in mind, Teresa has painted an intricate background in her own distinctive abstract style with Penelope’s artistic style in mind. The acrylic painting is two feet wide by three feet high and the original has now safely arrived with Penelope for her to commence her contribution to the piece. This as yet untitled work will be exhibited when complete. Keep an eye out here for further updates.
Two earlier works by Teresa Young can be seen at the JAG Gallery with Penelope’s work at Madeira Drive, Brighton and will be a part of the Christmas AOH 2011 Exhibition……

Websites: www.teresa-young.net and www.penelopeoakley.com

Upcoming Exhibitions for Teresa Young

2011-09-23T14:03:00.000-03:00

Published simultaneously on this blog and on Teresa Young's main art website: http://www.teresa-young.net/blog.

I've had the good luck to be included in a few collective exhibition coming up in the month of October, so I thought I'd do a quick post so that people had a chance to attend if they were in the area and wanted to see my artwork in person!

The first one I'm going to mention is occurring at the Agora Gallery in the Chelsea district of New York city. Agora has been in operation for many years and I'm pretty excited to be included in this exhibition slated to start on October 7th. There is an opening starting at 6 PM ET on October 13th (my lucky number!) if you want to attend.

The exhibition is called Beyond Borders: an Exhibition of Fine Art from Canada and it runs until October 26th.

Here's what the gallery has to say about this exhibition:

Beyond Borders: an Exhibition of Fine Art from Canada celebrates the beautiful, sensitive and intelligently illuminating art of contemporary Canadian artists. In these artworks viewers will see the results of both spontaneous creation and transformative skill and forethought, as each artist brings the best of what they see, feel and form to their work.

Another exhibition I am participating in is with the Energy Art Movement, an organization I've recently joined. Here's the blurb on the movement, which is pretty cool as far I'm concerned as I've never seen anything else that captures the essence of what I'm doing with my art...

About the Energy Art Movement,

The Energy Art Movement is an international contemporary multimedia art movement, with three primary values: quality, diversity, and evolution – on the common ground of energetic depictions. The Movement's values have been explicitly defined in its manifesto – which is its founding document – and its principles. Members believe that enhancing their creations with energy – either in composition or in subject matter – adds artistic value to their depictions. The Movement strives to follow a progressive trend of forward evolution in the Fine Arts, while embracing both traditional and digital media.

The Movement’s members draw from many earlier major styles – such as impressionism, expressionism, and futurism – while they enhance their work with energetic compositions which – according to their manifesto‘s reasoning – adds artistic value to them, and thus is a new stage of evolution and synthesis for those styles, and so for the Fine Arts.

As Organizer Giorgio Vaselli has stated: “I would like our messages to be revolutionary, yet non-radical. Heard, yet not loud. Influential, yet non-confrontational. Clear, yet deep."

Here is the exhibition announcement, it's in Meridean Mississippi!

About the Exhibition

The international Energy Art Movement (EAM) is coming to exhibit in Meridian, MS, USA at the Meridian Museum of Art (MMA) between Oct. 5 – Nov. 26, with a reception on Oct. 29, 6-8 pm. With over a hundred members around the globe from Romania to Japan and two from Mississippi, the Movement intends to build a multi-span bridge between various parts of the art world.The Energy Spectrum 2011 is the 5th exhibition of the Movement, after successful exhibitions in Canada, Chicago, Memphis, and most recently the annual Energy Art Salon in Russia, all followed by media acclaim. The current exhibition intends to show the breadth of what energy art is able to express, as a "spectrum" of concepts and their depictions, analogously to the scientific idea of the electromagnetic spectrum.
A wide range of styles, techniques, and mediums will be presented at the exhibition, from cutting edge digital fractal flame art, through detailed ink drawings done in hundreds of hours, to the emotive brushwork of energetic expressionism.
About the MuseumThe mission of the Meridian Museum of Art is to promote the visual arts through exhibitions and collections, art education and support of regional artists, and to enhance community life through the celebration of diverse cultures. Museum programs are supported by the City of Meridian, the Mississippi Arts Commission, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Riley Foundation.
The Meridian Museum of Art is located at 628 25th Avenue, Meridian, MS 39301, USA. The Museum is housed in the historic Old Carnegie Library building (constructed 1912-1913). The Museum is open 11 am - 5 pm, Wednesday - Saturday, and admission to the Museum is free.
ContactsMMA Director: Kate Cherry - meridianmuseum@bellsouth.net
EAM Organizer: Giorgio Vaselli - Giorgio.Vaselli@EnergyArtMovement.org
Website: www.EnergyArtMovement.org
Email: EAM@energyartmovement.org

Yet a third exhibition for me is occurring in Paris, France! The Galleria Monteoliveto is hosting an exhibition at the Gallery D'Europe in Paris between October 18th and November 16th.

PARIS PROJECT: Expressions of art GALLERIAMONTEOLIVETO opens a window in PARIS In October 2011, GalleriaMonteoliveto opens a temporary space in rue de Seine, in the area of St. Germain des Prés, the site with the highest contration of art for galleries, collectors and art lovers. A gallery on two levels, one prepared to present personal artist and art events, the other downstairs for group exhibitions. Events that will be proposed during the month of international contemporary art and exhibition fairs and great art events in Paris.

Solo exhibitions and events programmed:
October, 18 to 31: Reves nocturnes, Solo Painting exhibition of ALAIN KUJAWA
October, 28 to November, 6: Legami in…dissolti, Solo Painting/installation exhibition of MARTA VEZZOLI
October 28 to 31: OLGA ANTONENKO Art Event
(date to decide): GIANMARIA GIANNETTI Art Event

Group Painting/Sculpture exhibitions: October, 18 to 31 and November, 2 to 15 with the international artists:
Violaine BLANCHET, Julia CARTER, Hilary ENGLAND, Philippe GENTILS, Denise GRISI, Kerry GRONENG, Kari Elisabeth HAUG, Françoise JARRY, Fred MOU, Gabriella RUSSO, Jean-Jacques VENTURINI, Teresa YOUNG

And the last exhibition I'm in is a local one in Hubbards, Nova Scotia, Canada. It starts on October 2nd and runs until November 5th at the Trellis Cafe on Main street in Hubbards. If you want to know more about the Aspotogan Arts & Crafts Association, please visit their website (aaandc.org) which I recently had the honour of revamping;-) And have a look at my page and gallery there, it was pretty fun to set up!

ASPOTOGAN ARTS AND CRAFTS' MEMBERS SHOW

@ The Trellis Cafe
Main Street, Hubbards
October 2 – November 5

Enjoy the Trellis Cafe's great food, friendly atmosphere, weekend live entertainment and the
wonderful artwork of local artists from Aspotogan Arts & Crafts.

All artwork is for sale.

But What Does It Mean?

2011-08-06T18:42:00.001-03:00

Untitled Glass Art by Teresa Young

I've often been asked that question by people viewing my artwork, and it's a reasonable question which doesn't really have a reasonable answer... Art is such a subjective thing, it really depends on the point of view of the person looking at the artwork, and it's even more subjective when you are dealing with abstracted or surrealistic images!
This conundrum is probably responsible for the unsatisfying answers people get from artists, and me in particular when they ask that question. I can tell you what it means to me at that moment in time, but I can't tell you what it means to you. The artwork could be hitting you on an emotional, visceral level, which could mean you either hate it, or really like it, and I wouldn't necessarily be able to figure out why it appeals to you. (Or doesn't for that matter!)

Fauvist Fantasy by Teresa Young.

I've had eighty year old grandmother's love my artwork, so much for traditional likes and dislikes. And I can never predict who will. It seems to have a pretty broad appeal though, so I take that as a good sign.
Now that I've expressed my opinion on art and how subjective it is, and how anything I say probably doesn't apply to you, the viewer anyway, I'm going to go ahead and tell you with some of my pieces what they mean to me... Which is really just a snapshot in time anyway, depending on my mood, the meaning could change for me as I see something different in an existing painting. Art is just like that, it's somewhat dynamic, which I think is part of it's appeal!

Sunken Treasure by Teresa Young

Take Fauvist Fantasy above, I was experimenting with glass paints and the creative urge took me in a very red, red, and blue direction. I was feeling very happy and enjoyed the beauty of the world around me that day, and I think that carnival feeling came out in the artwork. It's merely an emotional celebration of painting in itself, and how it makes me happy to do it.
Sunken Treasure on the other hand, goes back to when I used to scuba dive in my late teens and how I really loved the feeling when I was under the water below thirty or forty feet. When I took my scuba ticket there was this little octopus less than a foot across that swam near me, I played with it under that water until is squirt ink and swam away!
The ocean has always seemed magical and like another world, sort of a treasure trove of beauty that most of us never get to see. I felt honoured to have been able to experience that beauty, and it really came out in this painting!

Emergence by Teresa Young

This is sort of fun, I'm going to do another!
Emergence is pretty obvious, if you had happened to know where my life was in 1998 when I painted it.

I was in the process of divorcing and the feelings of learning to be independant and forging my own identity again were really at the forefront of my psyche. I like the way the woman is pushing up through a semi-formless muck to emerge into the light!

I was living on the west coast of Canada at the time, and that's why you can see a mountain range in the background. The really interesting thing about paintings is that they are often like the written word. They can have layers of meaning, like metaphor in stories, that I am often not aware of.

Figure Frog by Teresa Young

What I mean by that is the parallel in Emergence about is that on the surface it has a clear meaning, 'divorcing woman finding her identity', but it has a second meaning for me as an artist as well. I was in the process of developing my style, moving away from realism and into abstraction, using surrealism as a sort of intermediate step.

Sunken Treasure was also a 'crossover' piece for me in that it started out as a realistic piece that flowed into abstraction over time.

Cat's Emotions by Teresa Young

Figure Frog came about in the same timeframe, I think I sort of felt like I was leap-frogging ahead into the future. It's pretty nice to realize how bright everything can look to you when you are starting on a new path! I think that why some of my pieces from the late ninties make me nostalgic.
Later on, my art started to change, as everything alive does, it evolves over time, which is why I can say I never paint that same thing twice! I used to be a realistic painter, and did portraits in my youth, but I don't think I could settle down to realism again. It's like being nailed into a rigid box for me, I couldn't do it!

Carnival by Teresa Young

Cat's Emotions, another crossover piece, is actually a surreal watercolour painting with ink drawn into it. You have to get close to realize it's not realistic. I was expressing how much I loved cats and identified with them as a source of love and connection. Cats are pretty independant as well, so I think I admire that in them as well.

Escape by Teresa Young

Carnival is one of my favourite acrylic paintings. It feels like a roller coast ride of greens and blues to me. I see waves of light and joyous feeling, which is probably why the title of the piece...

The Wheels Art Turning

Escape, on the other hand, even though it doesn't seem like it, is an expression of frustration in the life I was living in the mid 2000's. 2003 or 4? I was stuck in a corporate job with lots of responsibility and no voice. I was pretty close to starting a downward trend that ended up with me leaving the job I held for over a decade to start over in a new location. Like a lot of people in the IT industry, I was disatisfied with the pressure and anxiety I experience.

Queen of Thorns

I felt like I really, really wanted to escape. The painting expressed that desire for me. And probably, it also expressed hope for a more serene existence somewhere out 'there'! That meaning applies to a lot of the artwork I did between 2002 and 2009, actually. The Wheels Art Turning was about the feeling of being trapped and powerless in my job. I actually felt like noone was listening to me, and it sure came out in that painting!

Undercurrents

Queen of Thorns, I painted after I put in my resignation and just a few days before I left. I sort of felt like I was letting a few people down, leaving the job and it's responsibilities behind. But I also felt that it was something I needed to do for my personal growth and well being. So I was being a queen, and pretty prickly about the decision!

Pushing For The Sky

Undercurrents was about moving on and the undercurrents and emotional overtones that are never expressed out loud. We sort of swim through these currents and never truly acknowledge what is really going on out there in the 'real' world. I was trying to show the undercurrents of our everyday world with this rather large painting.
Pushing For The Sky is from this year, very recent, and it's about growth, life and moving forward. Reaching for the sky, not trying to be too trite here!
I think I'm back in a 'trying to find my footing' or identity cycle again. I'm not sure we ever really find out who we are, because like the artwork we produce, we are constantly changing. And sometimes, we go through similar cycles in our life as we learn out life's lessons...

How to move on...

2011-06-26T19:19:00.001-03:00

Nikki - 18 years old.

Last year, I wrote a blogpost about my old cat, how she had a deformed voicebox and she couldn't meow very well. The name of the post was 'My Cat is a Mime.'

Since I hate loud noises, I had come to the conclusion over time that this cat was pretty well perfect for me...

The problem with getting attached to any housepet is that they live a much shorter lifespan than we do, and we have to make the decision early on to deal with that loss when the time comes.

Much easier said than done, though. My old kitty died of old age in February of this year. I was pretty devastated, even though I thought I was ready, she was over 18 years old, so I knew the time was near.

When the time came, it was quick, which was good for her and a large shock for me. Her body literally just shut down over a 36 hour period. It's like it wore out and gave up. I had no time to adjust to what was happening, I just kept wanting to find a solution.

Virgil and Misty, March, 2011.

Not a realistic approach, but a heartfelt emotional approach. After she died, I kept looking for her, and I found I couldn't sleep because I was used to having her presence around...

After a couple of weeks of spotty sleep, and missing her terribly, I just knew I had to get another cat, and I felt very disloyal when I made that decision. I also had a certain reluctance to start the cycle over again, which is probably cowardly on my part, I felt like my heart was burnt and I didn't really want to love a new pet, just in case they died...
I think human beings love animals because they are very uncomplicated. Since our relationships with each other are layered with our interactions, we often don't feel free to express our fondness for each other. It's like we don't want to cross a line for fear of offending our friends and family members.

Misty - March, 2011

It leaves most of us without an outlet for warmth and affection, that some of us choose to fill with a pet.
A pet is a simple relationship for most of us. We love them, we care for them and pet them, and they love us back in a pretty straightforward, uncomplicated way.
I went out and got two kittens. I figured they could play with each other and I'd have a good chance that one of them would be a lapcat... No luck on that front, but they like everyone and are very loveable. I really ended up loving them once I got used to the noise, playing and general fuzziness;-)

Misty is a medium hair dilute tortoiseshell, and she's fairly small and into everything. And my love for quiet just got compromised in a big way, she loves to sing!
She sings when she's happy, she sings when she's bored, and she sings when she wants someone to pet her or play with her...
So much for mime kitties...

Anyone know where I can find another one?

Video of the Venice Prebiennale

2011-06-13T16:44:00.000-03:00

Here's a video from You Tube a friend of mine sent me of the Venice Prebiennale I exhibited in in May!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpFL70sk0CY&feature=player_embedded

Abstraction and How Did I Get There?

2011-05-08T18:07:00.000-03:00

Published simultaneously on my artist's website - www.teresa-young.net/blog.

Mystery Surrounds Us by Teresa Young - Jan-2011

It's been quite a long time since I've published blogpost, and I'd like to say that I've been reluctant to slam articles out for the sake of bringing traffic to my website. I've realized that I like to write about things that I've mulled over, thoughts that I feel are worth being shared with others...
Earlier on in the process of my metamorphizing from an IT person into a professional artist, I had researched how one should setup and run an art website. The guidelines for websites usually contain an explanation of SEO, search engine optimization, and how to use keywords to bring traffic in from searches. That approach leads to many webposts with not a lot of content. Or perhaps content that is mostly graphical. I find I have a hard enough time writing an article, without figuring out if I'm tailoring to optimal keywords and phrases. And I'm an artist, I paint because I love it so writing about art or what I think about it should also be a labour of love, not something calculated for commercial marketing value!

Teresa Young circa 1985

I'm a painter at heart, and a bit of a social philosopher, and when reading non-fiction, I tend toward books that examine humanity, society, art and interpersonal relations... Nope, I'm not saying that I read historical romance novels! But I'm pretty interested in how we think and relate to one another.
Recently, I've been reading books by Nicholas Carr, he was in the news last year for speculating that Google has changed the way that we think. I waited impatiently for his book on this theory, 'The Shallows' and bought it online through Amazon. Pretty appropriate in my mind!

I'll probably get more than one blogpost from reading that book, but I'm going to limit myself here to what I'm focusing on at the moment. I'd like to mention that in this book, Mr. Carr theorizes that humanity was hugely changed by the technological advance mapmaking... He speculates that civilization in general was greatly advanced by maps, in that they taught most people to think abstractly. And he makes a really good argument for this, I'm personally convinced that he's got a point.

The Colour Wheel - Another Abstraction

Think about it, a map is an abstraction of reality. You have symbols that represent real things, roads, rivers, lakes, mountains and man-made things like blocks, streets, museums, coffee shops, art galleries... It's quite a lot of abstraction, and if you've never been exposed to abstract thinking or maps before, it would be a hard leap to take.

Watching a toddler trying to understand a map is a very good example of where our ancestors must have started with this new advance. Our society is inundated with abstraction, we've all grown up surrounded by more concepts and symbols than we're ever consciously aware of and we take it for granted.

The Fungus by Teresa Young - August - 2001

I've been thinking about art with this in mind, and my own growth in how I understand and view art generally. When I was in grade school, I liked art that looked like something. It always had to be recognizable, or I really disliked it. My own style of painting and drawing developed along realistic lines, and I was quite rigid about it. Since, I didn't understand abstraction in art, so I didn't do it. I confess that was rigid in my thinking artistically. Forgive me Picasso, for I have sinned...

When I was fourteen years old, something changed. I have no idea what, maybe my brain started making more connections or I read a lot of maps?
I felt a desire to expand myself artistically and I was getting bored. So I started drawing in ink in a surreal style. My paintings were still realistic, mostly portraits and landscapes, but my drawings starting flowing from a different part of my brain.

Dance For Dreamers by Teresa Young.

I have to confess that I viewed the paintings as my 'real' art, and the drawings as something I did for fun. When I was in my teens, I'd often get painter's block, and I wouldn't paint for months. Artwork had to be studied, planned and carefully executed... It really became a bit of a chore and I started wondering what the heck I was doing!

As I grew older, my surrealism dipped over into abstraction more and more consistently. I found that I started enjoying abstract art more. I didn't understand it, but I could appreciate the colours, design elements, and elegance of it. I started letting go of the idea that it always had to look like something or have pieces within it that looked like something. I think I became able to think abstractly artistically. Which for me, was quite a leap.

Unfortunately, I didn't get around to really liking or understanding abstraction in art until after I gave up trying to pursue it as a career path. I dropped out of college around the time I turned twenty, and went off and joined the Canadian military to see the world!

Twirl Over Time by Teresa Young-Feb.2011

I continued painting for fun, but took the pressure off of myself to achieve or produce paintings and just did art for it's own sake.

That was probably the biggest step I took, because my style started to evolve and change in it's own way, without outside influences. Most likely, this is why my style is so unique, I didn't look at other artists and tried to draw or paint like them, I immersed myself in my own art and followed it's path in a solitary fashion. I just read a blog today talking about abstract art in general and how it's usually created by artists that are somehow isolated from other artists. Maybe that's true, you're abstracting and not painting from real life, so your vision is turned inwards somehow.
People have asked me how I come up with what I paint. I actually can't describe my process specifically. It's like I unhook my logical brain and tap into my emotional side, in order to express something... Since I'm never really sure what I'm expressing, it comes out as an abstraction.

Current and Future Exhibitions

2011-01-22T12:35:00.000-04:00

Videogame World-by Teresa Young.

I'm publishing this concurrently with the same blogpost on my artist website - http://teresa-young.net/blog because the art site blog just doesn't have the same functionality and connections to other applications that blogger has. So I think I'll just post in both locations in the future!
I've started writing this post quite few times in the last few months, and unfortunately, I just never seemed to get it together. Probably a real sign that I'm a painter, not a writer!

Since October, when I did my last post, quite a bit has happened for me. I broke my ankle just before Christmas, and I've been hobbling around ever since! I've also been painting quite a bit, but that's pretty well a given for me. I'm very lucky, I may experience writers block, but thank goodness I never have painters block!

Art History Channel

I've finally been getting my artwork out more before the public, and it has seemed to be a somewhat natural process. Messages from people seeing my work online come to my inbox, and it's very nice to have such wonderful feedback!

In November, I was approached and accepted as a selected artist for Art History Channel's 21st Century Artists Website (current) and upcoming cable show starting in March 2011.

Here's the link if you want to take a look at it. It's quite nice! http://arthistorychannel.com/21stcenturygallery.html

I was also contacted by a gallery in London, England, just before Christmas asking if I'd be interested in participating in a group show in January.

It was very cool sending my paintings across the big water like that! Funny thing is, they could end up doing more traveling that I have...

I've never been out of North America, in fact I think I'll have to go out and get a passport soon!

I'd certainly like to see more of the world if opportunities arise to do so...

Seriously though, I do have a good reason to get a passport, I was contacted last week by an art organization in Firenze, Italy.

They had found my artwork on the Internet and put it through their selection process and invited me to participate in an international exhibition in December!

I was wondering if it was for real, because it's hard to believe someone would just find you on the Internet like that, but I checked out their site, and it's definitely valid. http://www.florencebiennale.org/

Exposing Your Inner Child by Teresa Young.

It would be in exhibition with 649 other artists (which is mind boggling!), and it's a celebration week with multiple shows and events. I think it would be a very cool thing to attend! I might have to try learning some Italian though...

The show in London has been going well, apparently, and started on January 7th and goes until the 27th.

I was honoured to be asked by the Camden Art Gallery to join the upcoming group exhibition starting on January 28th that goes until February 17th. It's pretty funny actually, the 17th is my birthday. I'm hitting the big five oh;-)

As for other exhibitions, I am currently in a Projekt30 shows online, the January exhibition of thirty artists that have passed through the jurying process for the final display - http://www.projekt30.com/final_display.php?show_id=98.

There is also a local gallery here, just outside of Halifax, Nova Scotia, that is interested in showing some of my work in the summer or fall, the name is Swoon Fine Art. http://www.swoonfineart.com/ . It would be great to have some local representation!

I've moved this blog to www.teresa-young.net/blog

2010-09-20T12:38:00.000-03:00

Fly Away by Teresa Young.

Helllo everyone who might be reading the Surrealistic Reflections blog!

Since I contracted an artist's website with Foliotwist, I've found that it comes with a built-in blog capability, so I transferred the thirty posts on this blog over there and I'm continuing to blog from one location only.

Feel free to check out the new site, http://www.teresa-young.net/blog/.

Thanks! Teresa Young.

The Speed At Which We Are Changing

2010-09-11T15:03:00.004-03:00

The Laconic Flapper

The Surrealistic Reflections blog has been transferred to a new site, http://www.teresa-young.net/blog/.

Have you ever stopped and thought about the speed at which we are changing? I recently did because of Hurricane Earl popping on through my area and leaving me without electricity for one day!

Just two hundred years ago, people lived without electricity all the time and thought nothing of it...

They had woodstoves for heat and cooking, oil lamps and candles for lighting, plays, books and conversation for entertainment and all sorts of hobbies such as embroidery, horse riding, hiking, bird collecting, stamp collecting and so on.

You get the picture, the hobbies still exist, of course, but there has been an explosion in the last hundred years of change upon change, accelerating at an ever more rapid pace...

Now, we haven't reached the levels of Star Trek or the Jetsons, but we have come a very long way!

Think about it, in my lifetime alone, (and I'm turning fifty in February of next year), I have seen a lot in a very, very short time...

I've seen television go from black and white to colour, when I was a kid, we had those little TV's that you had to squint at and the programming often only ran for a part of the day. When my family moved to Yellowknife, Northwest Territories we only had programming for two hours a day.

And the programming was pretty humble, Mr. Dressup and Canada Film Board mostly, but after a few years there we were quite used to it...

SciFi House

So when we moved back down south, I almost went into culture shock because the advancements kept on coming while we were gone! Colour TV had come into common usage while we were away, and it seemed everyone had to get one... This was around the mid-seventies. That was only thirty five years ago, not a long period of time when you start to consider it.

And the changes that came in during the 1970's seemed to me really are the catalysts that started the acceleration at which the ball rolling...

The introduction of the pocket calculator (My first calculator was a hand me down from my brother, it was huge, heavy and went through batteries at an alarming speed... It cost over three hundred dollars and boy, was I ever proud of that thing!)

They were working on the first publicly available desktop computers, which started leaching out into general usage near the end of the decade or in the beginning of the eighties. Remember the Commodore 64 and the Vic 20?

Think about those two things, a pocket calculator? Wouldn't that start designers thinking along the lines about what else could be handheld? Like phones and computers?

And computers, well, we all know that this was very huge and defined a lot of what came after...

Dragons Do Dream

In a previous post, I talked about how I played Dungeons and Dragons during the seventies, we used many different types of dice, our character sheets were paper which we filled in by hand, the dungeon master used hexagonal graph paper to create dungeons in advance which we used graph paper to move along on our journeys, and we did this all manually, with no computers! There were also books used for reference during the gameplay that we all ordered by mail and someone produced these on an old printing press out of their basement in the states somewhere...

It took a lot of time and we played as much as we could, in basements, unused classrooms at the school, in our living rooms on a rotating basis so our parents wouldn't get fed up and kick us out... There was a lot of furor and press about the geeks who played this game obsessively, and someone even wrote a book about some kid disappearing because of "D & D", so our parents were very concerned about us!

Blue Bobbles

The total irony of that paranoid fear is that drugs were much more dangerous than a bunch of geeky kids playing "Dungeons & Dragons", there were people shooting up in our school bathrooms during the day sometimes for heavens sake!

I personally think that the morals and teamwork taught within games actually helped us become better people on some level;-)

The eighties saw the advent of personal computers that did more, way more, and cellular phones... I can't remember if digital cameras first made their appearance then or not, if they did, noone could afford them anyway! Other things that really took off during that decade were really good sound systems, the use of audiotapes that weren't in an eight track format, and the first gaming systems came into general use. (Sony, Nintendo, and whoever else was trying to capture the market...) Which is where the computer started anyway, but now personal computers were being used for 'useful' things as well, such as taxes, word documents and spreadsheets... Ugh!

Soft and Goldern

Oh yes, and let's not forget the video tapes, the big war between VHS and Betamax was not won by Sony Betamax although that format provided better quality! I think Sony learned a big marketing lesson on that one and spiked the next battle they were in for ascendance (DVD - Blue Ray and the high quality DVD) by creating a gaming unit that was both a blue ray player and a game unit...

In 1990, I was 29 years old and decided to go back to university after five years in the military as a radio technician. I went into computer science because everyone was saying that that was where all the good jobs in the near future were going to be created... And it looked interesting!

Prior to 1990, in the eighties, the faculties in universities that taught computer science taught 'data entry' and programming using punch cards and then moved on up to eight inch floppy disks... (By the way, did you know the very first programmer was a woman (Ada Lovelace)?)

The 'science' of programming was done using Basic and Cobol, which took a lot of time. In the nineties, Fortran (the first object oriented programming), early C, and APL were added, giving more languages, versatility and complexity to the core courses. Of course, very quickly, as the years progressed, we saw newer version of C and Fortran, and the languages became more elegant and ornate allowing recursive programming, logic became more developed allowing us to cut down on the lines of code used to accomplish minor tasks and give more room for expanded modules that did much, much more...

What a lot of people don't understand is that the software developments (programming itself) also fueled the computer revolution, speeding up the rate of change as well! The hardware people were hard pressed to develop better chips and technology to keep up with the demands of the software industry and were under a lot of pressure to provide what was needed.

Like My Ride?

In 1993, I switched from Computer Science to Electricaly Engineering with my specialty in Computer Engineering... I experienced firsthand some of the changes that were going on in hardware. It was exhilarating! And fast, very, very fast! My first 'real' computer was a 486, and that was very expensive, and now it would be a doorstop! Only a decade later...

My bachelor's thesis project was a software/hardware project in control systems. We did a board with gyros on it that took measurements of the X, Y, and Z planes (backwards, forwards, and height) and had a preprogrammed flight path. If the minature helicopter we built the board for and tested it on deviated over a certain percentage due to wind turbulence or other things occuring, the onboard control system would try to adjust automatically and right the helicopter. This was only 1994! We did very well on this project, we won the IEEE prize the controls the year we graduated (1995) in engineering. It was pretty ambitious for a couple of undergraduate students, and then I crashed the helicopter, but it was really cool!

Fear Of The Future

The hardware advances that were really necessary are ones we all know about... The need for faster CPU's (Central Processes Units - the main brain of the computer.), and quicker Buses (not the rapid transit kind, but the internal highways that the CPUs used to pass and access information), more memory, smaller and better components.

The first computer used tubes and discreter transistors, it fit into a huge room and could do math, that's about it... When I was in the military, we had the old computers with tubes and transistors, and I used to help fix them and radios with tubes. Talk about clunky!

One of the big advances for hardware for computers was the advent of integrated circuits. They actually 'grow' these thing on a microscopic scale in order to get all the components necessary into the chips for your CPU's. Semiconductors make the buses possible in order to provide the speeds and chip sizes to allow electronic to become very, very small and much faster!

In the nineties, databases came into play in software, and while you may not realize it, they were very, very important. Relational databases that increased in scope (they were able to make them larger and more complex on the indexing and interconnections as time passed) allowed software programs to store data and make choices based the data they had access to in real time or on central servers they could access... Scripting, UNIX, LINUX, Oracle, MS SQL Server, these all combined to allow usage over the internet to grow and become more 'user friendly'...

For the last thirteen years, I had worked for a company where I implemented configuration initially on a text file that was accessed by the software on a 'client layer' stored locally on their pc and then eventually through something called a 'middle tier' that was stored on a central server accessed via the internet. I saw this change and grow through the years, I was originally trained in ORACLE SQL and moved on to MS SQL server when our company was sold and the new owners wanted to used that.

The software started out as a client copy, which meant it resided on the local pc and only accessed the internet once in a while as a special feature (late eighties) and eventually because wholly browser based. Which meant it resided on the internet in the central servers which the local pc accessed to get at their client specific databases in order to do business or get updates and newer versions of the software.

The Masked Marvel

Databases allowed software to track client preferences, save their choices, search for data (such as real estate listings, appointments, businesses, items, clubs), and in some cases, allowed the program to 'suggest' based on past choices. A weird type of rudimentary learning system, that advanced software quite a bit! We used databases for most software these days, when we know it or not, and database scripting and advances in that area are responsible for part of the changes we see day to day. The 'smart' software I proposed as a natural next step in this evolution would rely heavily on databases to build a profile of the enduser and help that user learn new things. Which were identified in his profile (data in the db) as areas that needed attention for whatever he was trying to accomplish.

A new theory has recently been proposed by a man named Nicholas Carr, that our brains are essentially being 'rewired' by our exposure to Google and the Internet.
I'm not actually surprised because human beings are very adaptable and we learn quickly to adjust to new toys, I mean tools! I've ordered his book to check it out, (I know once a geek, always a geek!) and I'm looking forward to reading up on this topic. It'll help me make up my mind on this issue...

And finally, I recently found a site that discussed how some Calgary, Canada scientists are on the verge of creating a 'human neurochip' that will allow an even newer era of advancements!

Maybe Data from Star Trek is on the edge of being possible after all!

Images by Teresa Young:

1. The Laconic Flapper - Jul.2010, 2. SciFi House - Jun.2007, 3. Dragons Do Dream - Mar.2010, 4. Blue Bobbles - May 2001, 5. Soft and Golden - Aug.2010, 6. Like My Ride? - Jun.2007, 7. Fear Of The Future - Aug.2000, 8. The Masked Marvel - Jan.2000.

More Shots Of Hurricane Earl

2010-09-06T15:54:00.009-03:00

Up and over the shore!

The Surrealistic Reflections blog has been transferred to a new site, http://www.teresa-young.net/blog/.

A friend of mine sent me a ton of shots of the hurricane that were taken by her and other people around the area, and I thought I'd just post them here for others to see!

The waves hit the shore with quite a force.

There was property damage from trees.

Hope the anchor held.

It was as beautiful as it was scary.

Fox Point, NS by Corinne Oullette.

The docks were hit constantly by surf and wind.

More high surf.

Hurricane Earl Hits My Doorstep

2010-09-05T13:49:00.011-03:00

Hurricane Earl Hits Fox Point, Nova Scotia.

The Surrealistic Reflections blog has been transferred to a new site, http://www.teresa-young.net/blog/.

Hurricane Earl just passed us by here in Nova Scotia, and it was pretty intense. I think it's the first hurricane I've ever been in, the closest I had ever come before were some tropical storms I experienced when we lived outside of Fredericton, New Brunswick in the nineties.

Since the storm struck during the day, it was more interesting, as you could see it progress as the day went on.

When I woke up at seven thirty, there was hardly any wind and it was just sprinkling lightly. But within fifteen minutes, you could see the wind picking up (now I really know what is meant by the term 'gathering steam'!) and the rain started to intensify as well.

Sunrise before Hurricane Earl by Corinne Oullette.

About two and half hours later, the power went out... (not so bad in the middle of the day and in the summer, it's been hot and muggy, so the storm is cooling it down a bit.)

One interesting thing about this is that I really noticed the 'calm before the storm' effect that I'd always heard about! There was no birdsong other than the seagulls, and I think they were really enjoy soaring in the winds above the surf... Maybe seagulls are the 'surfer dudes' of the bird kingdom!

Searching For An Exit - Sept.2010.

A friend of mine took a beautiful shot of the sunrise on Friday morning, prior to Earl moving into the neighbourhood, and the weather looked great. If we didn't have meteorologists and old farmer's almanac guys, you'd never even know a storm was coming in!

Well, after I wrote this, the hurricane got progressively worse, apparently, it tracked further east than was expected and hit Lunenburg county, which is where I am, bang on! We got hit with a category one, and there were idiots out there surfing! Unfortunately, I didn't get any shots of them, I thought two fools out there in a hurricane were enough without me joining in!

Online Entity - Sept.2010.

Our power ended up being out for 26 and half hours, which is not convenient at all... You don't realize exactly how much you need electricity to live in this day and age until you have to do without it for an extended period of time.

Mind you, I do one thing that really works very well for me in a non-electric situation, as long as it's daylight... I got a lot of painting done for one day, that was for sure! Have a look, I've also added in one that I started but haven't finished yet.

Photo Images 1 and 2 - by Teresa Young.

Totem Tumble - In Progress.

Flowing Free - Sept.2010.

Photographing Art

2010-08-30T19:03:00.001-03:00

Washed out colour,
curving depth of field,
poor image quality.
Photo from 2004 with Vivitar 3MB digital.

The Surrealistic Reflections blog has been transferred to a new site, http://www.teresa-young.net/blog/.

It's been my recurring nightmare (or mission?) to figure out a way to photograph my artwork so that I get relatively true colours, good flat depth of field so that the sharpness goes all the way out to the edges, and no glare on the piece itself...

You'd think this wouldn't be too hard! But it's taken me years of fiddling around with this that and the other to get closer and closer to what I wanted to achieve here...

I figured I was the perfect person to do this... I'd started in photography in my teens and I'd worked in a photography store when I was seventeen, and I had gotten my first SLR camera for my sixteenth birthday! I wasn't an expert, but I had a lot of background, I was a good problem solver and smart enough to have completed a degree in Electrical Engineering, so why not? (Famous last words!)

Image shot in 1996 and printed, then scanned.

I started out on this particular project in 1996 with a regular SLR (single lens reflex) because that gave the best quality. Unfortunately, you didn't get to see the final result until you got your film developed, so there was a time lag and the mistakes could get expensive. In those days, you couldn't get a digital copy of your photos when you went in to get them developed. so you ended up scanning the finished prints, which introduced a bit of degradation in itself!

The image on the right is something I don't have anymore, so basically, that poor image is all I have left. Sad, sad, sad!

I was one of the people that waited impatiently for digital cameras to come down in price so I could afford one. The time lag was something I really hated! I'd forget the settings for each shot and end up wasting a lot of time and effort on images that I would have deleted if I'd seen right away how they had turned out.

My first digital camera in 2004 was a Vivitar 3Megapixel, which I paid over three hundred bucks for! You can get something much better now for under a hundred... Sigh.

Mind you, at that point in time, Digital SLR's were way out of my price range... So it was better than where I was in some ways, (but it wasn't an SLR so the image quality definitely suffered.) but I still wasn't getting anywhere near what I wanted.

Artwork shot in 2004 with Vivitar 3MB Digital.

Same pieces shot in 2010 with DSLR.

As you can see by the shot on the left, the colour was hard to get close to the real colour quality, it was affected by ambient light in a major way, and whatever compensation it was doing on it's own wasn't helping.
I mean, am I alone in this, but are camera manuals actually written to be confusing? Often, I would find it would take a long time to get an answer to a simple question out a manual, and the internet was even worse!

--> I mean, eventually, I had gotten the hang of the basics, for anyone that is interested, here are the basic steps to taking digital images of art with a digital SLR (recommended, but you can do this with regular digital cameras as well...).

a) Choose the highest Megapixel setting,
b) turn off the flash,
c) set the ISO to 100 and
d) the aperture to at least F8, setting the camera on aperture priority,
e) choose a fast shutter speed,
f) white balance the camera,
g) and shoot outside with a tripod.

Shot outside, with DSLR.
White balance is off.

Little fiddly details:
The artwork has to be straight, with the camera planes and the artwork planes equal to each other, or you will get fuzziness at the edges of your image. You also need to make sure you give border around the piece so that your focal plane can be cropped out. What I mean by that, is that unless you use a macro lens, which gives a flat focal plane, your image will slightly curve at the outer edges, which will blur the artwork image if you extend the piece right the edge of the picture frame.

But for me, that wasn't enough, I wanted to take my pictures inside, which meant lights!
Now lights, that's a whole other problem... My artwork is varnished, so you always get glare when you use a flash.
And it really doesn't matter if you photograph the paintings unvarnished, you still get glare! This was an issue I had been dealing with right back to my days with my old SLR, and it wasn't getting resolved to my satisfaction.

DSLR with window backlight
from morning sun and Macro lens.

After I got the DSLR, I could get good enough shots, but not really as I wanted to get closer, and control the lighting more closely. I tried a number of solutions --> flash diffusers, those little puffers, and hot, stand alone lights... I even made a makeshift diffuser for in front of the studio lights I used to have out west, and it sort of did the job. But it wasn't perfect.

Then I added in the issue of photographing glass paintings, just to make it more interesting, and that just got me back into the old problem of finding the perfect photography solution to the regular artwork... Which I had started to ignore, actually...

Once I bought a secondhand macro lens for my DSLR, the glass painting issue was solved (finally!) as the flat plane of focus and extra sharp detail certainly satisfied me.

Since I didn't want to take photos of the glass paintings at night (I needed the backlighting from the sun to catch them properly), I was back to my initial quest of photographing my regular paintings indoors with artificial light. I'm not an outdoors person or a morning person, so this was important to me!

It's the little things that count though, and I finally got some help on this, a photo store clerk named Scotty (I kid you not Star Trek fans!), helped me for two hours today figuring out a solution for my problem. What I am trying to do is called 'copy image' photography, and it's usually done by professional photographers. But not all of them know how to do it.

You need to put two light sources pointed at your piece at 45 degree angles and the two light sources and your camera need to be in the same plane. IE: on the same level, same height. Or else your light with be concentrated higher or lower depending on where you are taking the picture from.

You can get this effect with regular lights with umbrellas, strobe lights with umbrellas, or slaved flashes. You can umbrella the flashes as well if you just really like umbrellas!

If you use flashes, you don't have to worry about the ambient light from other sources, just adjusting for the light introduced by the flashes. Synchronization is important as well... It's not an easy problem, but we resolved it by going with the wireless functionality on my Pentax KX which allows me to use two specific flashes on the same channel so that they go at once and all the focussing and the rest of the digital handshaking works properly. I'm putting the flashes on tripods so that I can get them at the same height as my camera and fixes to the best height for the piece I'm photographing.

If I was using fixed floods with diffusers or umbrellas, I'd have to adjust to ambient light and it would also get hot. The flashes give off enough light when they go that the ambient light is flooded out by the sheer intensity of the light from the flashes. Not the case with the fixed lights. Otherwise, they'd really be hot! Ambient light could introduce blues (daylight), ambers (tungsten lights), other blues (fluorescents), and if it hits at the wrong angle, you can cause uneven lighting on the artwork or even glare.

Anyway, I think I've finally gotten close enough to satisfy myself on image colour reproduction, sharpness, (right to the edges!), depth of colour and no glare. I guess I can go back to painting!

Images by Teresa Young:
1. Dragon Feed - Jun.2010, 2. Untitled Surreal - 1996, 3.and 4. Alien Rotations - Apr.2010, 5. Jubilee - Jan.2002, 6. Frozen Frame - Aug.2010, 7. Exposing Your Inner Child - Aug.2010.

Colour and How It Can Be Used

2010-08-22T18:32:00.001-03:00

The Surrealistic Reflections blog has been transferred to a new site, http://www.teresa-young.net/blog/.

I'm constantly amazed at the beauty of nature and how transitory it can be. Take a sunrise or a sunset, often these transition phases in the day are the most beautiful, and the most fleeting in time duration.

Artists and photographers are attracted to these times of day due to the vivid colours and deepness of the hues.

It seems that every sunset (I tend to see more of these, morning is not my best time!) is unique... And depending upon atmospheric conditions, can have more colours sprayed across the horizon than one would ever believe possible.

Fleeting beauty is something that appeals strongly to the human psyche... It's more precious because it passes so quickly. It all about appreciating something that can't be held or pinned down...

With artists though, it's more about color scheme and dramatic contrast. Artwork is much more visually exciting if colours play off against each other and don't fade into the background. Complementary colours are great but rarely occur in nature. An artist will change colours to create colour harmonies that are more pleasing to the eye and jump out at the viewer. In fact, when complementary colours are placed side by side in a piece, they will both seem brighter and more vivid.

You also extensively use complementary colours to tone down an overly bright colour in a painting. I tend to tone down most of my colours because I like my colours to give a realistic tone to forms within a painting, this makes the piece seem more real, even if it is an abstract landscape.

Think about those paintings all did in elementary school. We used tempera watercolour paints and we pretty well all painted in unmixed colours. The colours jumped out at us and they were vivid and atttractive. But they never looked like a real place no matter how beautifully painted they were...

The thing is, because there was no shadows to make the forms in the paintings look like they were floating in space, 3D, they didn't look like they had substance. And shadows are great, as long as they are present and a thing appears to be 3D it's much, much easier to suspend our disbelief and allow ourselves to pretend this fantasy place exists!

And isn't that part of the point to art sometimes? To allow us to journey somewhere else? Someplace exotic that we couldn't see any other way?

Images By Teresa Young:

1. Sunset at Peggy's Cove, NS, 2. Sunrise out my window, 3. The Ripple Effect - May 2004, 4. Velvet Dreams - Apr.2002, 5. Constrained - Mar.2004, 6. The Tree Grows - Mar.2009.

A Tour Around Peggy's Cove

2010-08-15T20:34:00.002-03:00

Closeup of the lighthouse.

Undersea Eyes.

The Surrealistic Reflections blog has been transferred to a new site, http://www.teresa-young.net/blog/.

On Saturday, after working on a number of glass paintings and reaching the point where I was watching paint dry, I decided I'd procrastinate in a new and unique way,
--> so I went and took a boat tour around Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia.

Peggy's Cove is gorgeous location and seeing it from the deck of a boat is a great way of getting a different perspective on a premier tourist spot...

Peggy's Cove Tour Boat.

Cove Jewels - glass painting inspired by the cove.

If you want go ahead and take a look at the website run by the boat tour company, it contains quite a lot of information, some beautiful photographs and loads of facts about Peggy's Cove and the wildlife of the surrounding area.

View from the boat.

We were made to feel very welcome at the outset by the crew of the boat and were given the initial safety information prior to leaving the dock...

At least it wasn't as bad as the airplane lectures on safety I've sat through as it was delivered with a sense of humour by our tour guide Emily.

The tour includes an hour long ride around the area with great water views of the lighthouse. The underwater camera portion of the tour is where the boat is stopped to drop a camera so the passengers can get a good look at the ocean floor.

Nice day for a cruise...

And there's also a chance to get a photo of yourself with the olympic torch that was used to start the run across Canada for the leadup to the Olympics.
--> I found this quite ironic as I'd moved away from British Columbia prior to the Olympics, and here I had a chance to hold one of the torches, which I never would have if I hadn't left...

Surreal colours!

I think Emily is admiring Bill's legs!

While anchored in a little cove not far from the lighthouse, we were watching video of a local lobster and the camera decided it really wanted to be free and somehow slipped the line holding it to the boat...

Peter helps Bill into his new clothes...

Apparently, this isn't a common occurence so we just happened to luck out on this tour. I wasn't about to complain about the extra time on the water as it was a beautiful day with a clear blue sky overhead...

As we watched the captain of the boat
(Bill Johnston) get helped into a dive suit by Peter Richardson, (his first mate) we were able to get a great look at the surrounding landscape.

Fishing village near Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia.

One small island we passed had been bought by a local woman for 240 thousand dollars and she built a house on it.

The power would have to be brought out to the island via underwater cable and the fresh water would have to be brought in or captured via a cistern.

But I bet the lady has great privacy!

There was a nice little boat dock there and it looked like a beautiful place to swim... Just imagine owning your own island though! That amount of money would buy half a house in Vancouver, BC area at best...

Emily (our guide) pointed out the comorants sunning themselves on the nearby rocks. She explained that these fishing birds are wonderful weather predictors.

If the birds are there, you can count on decent weather, but if foul weather is coming in, then the birds will be mysteriously absent...

It's never been explained how wildlife knows in advance about things like earthquakes and tornadoes, but I guess you can extend that little mystery to thunderstorms and hurricaines as well!

After Bill retrieved the camera, we pulled anchor and started back towards the cove.

Emilio Giancola and Joe Persicone hold the torch.

As we neared the lighthouse, Emily pulled out the Olympic torch and also brought out some Olympic clothing that we could put on if we were interested...

A couple of young lads down from Halifax and Ontario decided to go the whole route and suited up...

--> Of course no photo op is complete without the captain's willing participation...

Once everyone got a turn to try out the torch (although for a while there I thought I'd dropped in on a Star Wars convention, they were using the torch as a light saber for a bit...) we started the boat back up and headed back to the dock...

Sunset at Peggy's Cove.

As far as I was concerned, it certainly was a wonderful trip that I'd recommend to anyone visiting the area. And it was a great way to take a break and see more of the province!

Next month I think I'll check out the Cabot Trail!

Images by Teresa Young:
1. Undersea Eyes - Aug.2010, 2. Peggy's Cove lighthouse, 3. Tour Boat, 4. Cove Jewels - Aug.2010, 5. The lighthouse as seen from the water, 6. Unnamed glass abstract - Aug.2010, 7. Wake of the boat, 8. Photo of Bill in scuba gear, 9. My surreal lighthouse shot, 10. Bill and Peter preparing to retrieve the camera, 11. Fishing village near the cove, 12. Emilio, Joe and Bill with the Olympic torch, 13. View from the boat, 14. Sunset at Peggy's Cove.

Gameplaying and It's Role In Our Culture

2010-08-09T23:03:00.002-03:00

The Surrealistic Reflections blog has been transferred to a new site, http://www.teresa-young.net/blog/.

I just read an article online about how some people are now saying that playing video games can help people learn how to be more effective at work. That's pretty well an opposite position on the end result of gameplaying than what I've seen in the media over the past twenty years...

Just as thought provoking are the comments at the end of the article... The last comment in the stream particularly caught my eye, the author of the comment was discussing how his skills in strategy acquired through gaming directly translated into his business skills...

Now, I know that when playing games you learn through trial and error and eventually become comfortable with that game and it's environment in order to achieve your goals and ultimately (hopefully) win the game...

But you also learn how to employ strategy, you just have to learn it, or else you literally get nowhere! Gamers that embrace strategy, discuss it with others and actively refine it progress a lot faster.

So, incrementally, through playing games, the gamer learns to think in terms of strategy.

This learning process is greatly enhanced by traditions that have appeared in games over time that are common to most games... I'm sure the traditions grew out of convenience and a desire to make the user comfortable and acceptable thereby increasing the chances of the game's success on the market. (In some cases, similar interfaces for inventory, battles, and quest logs... But there are more to the similarities than just that, it's more in that you have to work as a team and deliver on your tasks in order to be effective.

Of course this led me to search for definitions on Internet regarding what exactly this is called... After following a red herring called 'Game Theory' that looked pretty relevant to me, I found out through Wikipedia that what I'm discussing here is actually called 'Game Studies'.

Here is the Wikipedia definition:

'Game studies is the discipline of studying games, their design, their players and the role they play in society and culture more broadly. Game studies is largely a multi- and inter-disciplinary field with researchers and academics from a multitude of other areas such as computer science, psychology, sociology, anthropology, arts & literature, media studies, communication, and more.'

In fact, when I searched further on this topic, I found an article from Nintendo about the present social acceptance level of videogames and how acceptance is on the rise, but response is still quite mixed. And of course, the game companies constantly seek to make gameplaying mainstream, because they want to increase their market size.

Personally, I believe that this is a type of evolution in our modern culture. A logical offshoot of computers becoming commonplace and the Internet becoming an integral part of industrialized culture.

A question even more enthralling is where is this all going? Can gameplaying make the jump from entertainment over to a tool for industry and education? I mean if the connection is made in popular media that gameplayers have better capabilities with regards to cooperation within teams and improved learning skills within their job environment, how far behind can software be that is developed primarily to help the employees learn better strategies for these very things?

Think about it. How far in the future will it be that you go in for an interview and your aptitude test is a mini game that tests your teamwork, problem solving skills, aptitudes and capability to learn using computer simulation?

It really wouldn't be out the current realm of possibility, even now most games have some sort of elementary learning engines in place. The trick would be finding a market for the software and translating that type of programming over to industrial and consumer applications.

At the risk of sounding like a science fiction author, what about software that helps you in the following possible ways:

Identify your interview weak spots and helps you learn to correct (adjust) them?
Identify your aptitudes and possible career choices, and fill in the blanks on what is weak in your current profile in order to pursue the job of your choice?
Learn how to problem solve and make decisions.

Then again, like any tool, this would only be as good as the software programming behind it, and it could be used in very negative ways. Discrimination based on aptitudes or current skill sets would definitely be an extreme repercussion to identification based on software tests. Kind of reminds me of a movie I saw recently where your blood is tested at birth and the whole futuristic society is based around the end results of that blood test. Gattica? It's an older movie, but that theme has been used in science fiction in many forms for decades.

I guess you can't fight human nature, but like anything else, it's a two edged sword... I'm thinking that the development of this type of software is inevitable. It's a good thing there have been so many stories speculating about the social pitfalls of such tools. Forewarned is forearmed!

Images by Teresa Young:

1. Fantastic Frogman - Aug.2010, 2. Floating In The Dark - Jul.2010, 3. Tribal Tribute - Aug.2010, 4. Blind Oracle - Jul.2010, 5. Searching For Camelot - May 2010.

Painting Outside the Box...

2010-08-01T20:03:00.003-03:00

The Surrealistic Reflections blog has been transferred to a new site, http://www.teresa-young.net/blog/.

I think I mentioned in a previous post that sometimes I have a tendency to paint anything that doesn't move too fast!

I don't know, maybe it's the three dimensionality that gets my motor running, but it seems to have a much different feel than painting in 2D.

And you get in the mood for a change, so it's all very interesting to explore...

I think it might have started with my
ex husband's motorcycle back in eighties, I had painted a nice surreal on his jean jacket that he was really attached to, it had a floating face above a marshy scene based on landscapes in photos I had taken around Nova Scotia, Canada somewhere. It was supposed to catch the feeling of the Maritimes, and it really did, in a very dreamy, bluish, sort of floaty way... After he decided his Yamaha 750 Virago had finally reached the point of needing a paint job, he really wanted that image on his bike!

Never mind that I had no experience whatsoever painting a motorcycle, had never used an airbrush and didn't even own one! Talk about being forced out of your comfort zone... But on some level, I think he did me a favour, I muddled through, did my research and it all turned out quite lovely. And I learned it's much better to step out and experiment than to get complacent and stop learning! --> I wouldn't mind painting a few bikes sometime too if it ever came up, and I learned a lot about airbrushing, metal paints and so on in the process. So it was all good.

But back to the blog subject at hand... That was probably my first serious experience with painting on 3D objects. And it's got different design challenges, you have to keep looking at it as you do your design to see what the audience will see and try to balance it as much as possible to keep the composition working. It's a lot of fun, but you have to keep on top of things.

After that, periodically, I'd just paint something that caught my fancy, just for the sheer enjoyment of it!

When I was first separated and had no money, everyone on my Christmas list got homemade shortbread cookies and hand painted dough ornaments from me that year. The funny part of that was that when I eventually got more money together and things got better over time, my friends and family still wanted the cookies and ornaments instead! Hilarious;-) Thankfully, they finally got tired of them and I got tired of baking, so it all worked out.

Somewhere in the mid 2000's, I found a lamp in a thrift shop that looked like a clove of garlic to me. It was kind of attractive in shape, but was very, very ugly in colour and texture. So I decided, well, why not, I'll paint over it with acrylic and varnish it, it's plastic based anyway! The lamp turned out beautiful, and I've still got it. It got me to thinking about other objects...

Such as boxes. Jewelry boxes, knick knack boxes, boxes for keeping keys, rings or pins in. Why not make them more decorative and something people can enjoy putting on their shelf or mantle? So after that, as a small hobby, I've always painted boxes, it's just something that satisfies that urge to create that doesn't seem to be quite as serious as a full blown painting.

I've noticed boxes have come back into style more in the last decade, maybe I was just getting ahead of the curve a bit... And of course, I've been experimenting with glass painting as well, maybe next I need to paint a glass box!

Images by Teresa Young:

1. Candlestick - Jul.2010, 2. Paper mache ring box - Jan.2010, 3. Small Jewelry box- Jan.2010, 4. Octagonal box - Dec.2009, 5. Circular box - Jan.2010, 6. 7. 8. Lecture Stand - 2009, 9. Painted Lamp - circa 2001, 10. Book shaped box - Jul.2010, 11. Eye box - Jul.2010.

It's A Comedy Of Errors!

2010-07-24T13:25:00.002-03:00

The Surrealistic Reflections blog has been transferred to a new site, http://www.teresa-young.net/blog/.

Last weekend, I decided to go on a short jaunt and take a look around New Brunswick, Canada, just because I can... I had a place to stay for a couple of nights in Fredericton, my friend Donna and I had been in the military together in the eighties and had stayed in touch over the years, so I was all set. Or so I thought...

Now there is one little thing about me that is really relevant to know before you read the post, I literally have no natural sense of direction. I could get lost in a shopping mall and have! But that's never kept me from driving around looking at scenery... I tend to think it just adds to the mystery of a trip if you don't really know where you are and how to get there. But I've become very good with maps in compensation...

Well, I've done the road trip from Halifax to Fredericton quite a number of times, so you'd think it would be a no-brainer. But I sometimes get inventive and veer off on weird tangents.

And what they say about artists is true, they are eccentric, no way around it! In some way or another, you're going to feel a twilight zone around at times when dealing with them... And I'm no exception.

On the spur of the moment, I figured out I was bored with the old route and decided to drive down the west coast of Nova Scotia and maybe take the Digby ferry across to Saint John, NB.

What the heck, I'd do it different this time. Didn't check any schedules, as that would be a copout, sigh.... By the time I got there, it was just before noon and I found that the ferry didn't leave until four and it was an exhorbitant price. If I turned back around and continued driving back up the coastline, I could beat the ferry and get into Freddy Beach at the same time anyway.

Not a problem, right? Except I got lost going back up the coast around the bay of Fundy and ended up losing a couple of hours going in circles. It was beautiful, but by the time I figured it out, (I had to break down and actually check a map) I had added a couple of hours on to my trip. Happens.

I guess I could be the poster girl for GPS if I applied, but I hate being told what to do (pigheaded and five years in the military!) so I actually have one that I have never used. Just couldn't bring myself to download that software and call myself lame at navigating! (No offense meant to Donna and others who swear by their GPS's)...

But I made it and saw some very beautiful and artisticly inspiring scenery, not to mention sunsets, and I was very happy to arrive...

The next day, we all got up and went on our originally scheduled tour down to St. Martins, New Brunswick... Or we tried. On the way, just an hour outside of Fredericton, we heard a snap, clang and a crash and the muffler was dragging.

Oh this was hilarious! I was soooo glad I wasn't driving this time, I'd just taken ribbing the night before on how I was pretty good at extending a short trip with inventive driving and unusual circumstances and this time, I wasn't in the driver's seat! After I stopped laughing, we got out and looked at the problem.

I looked at her trunk and really stopped laughing, booster cables, one screwdriver, no rope or wires, and one very sad emergency kit that was aimed toward first aid! How could people drive around like this? Ah well, not everyone is mechanically inclined, and she's not an ex-technician but an ex-finance clerk, so I guess it makes sense. If I need help with financials, I'll call Donna, but not for anything like mechanics or practical things that require some type of tools...

So she called a garage and we found out that it would cost, cost, cost to tow, and while she was doing that, I found the muffler clamp so it could be wired up to get to a garage, saving her money... It would still take 45 minutes and cost over a hundred bucks as it was. Yuck! I'm sitting there, thinking it over, and decided I couldn't take it anymore... I asked her how much were her booster cables worth. Ten bucks on sale... Alright! Now we're talking!

I stripped the cables, jury rigged the muffler clamp back into place and she called off the towing guy. She told him her friend was a former technician and mentioned my solution. He laughed, called me 'inventive' and told it should work fine for a short jaunt.

We made it to a gas station and I bought what I could find, brass snare wires of all things, and wired it up tighter and it sounded better than ever! So we decided to continue on to St. Martins. No guts, no glory, right? And it worked out fine, it was hot and sunny, I think we used up our set of weird things to go wrong by then and were due for a break... If you want to take a look at the caves of St. Martins, which are well worth the trip, muffler or no muffler trouble, you can follow this facebook link and look at my shots of it.

After we'd worn out St. Martins, the T-shirt lady showed us the latest area attraction, the literature on the Fundy Trail...

Ah well, onwards we go! It was also beautiful, but I want to go back again to see that with the tide out next time. Here's a public Facebook link on that one as well if you want to take a look...

The next day, I was going to drive straight back to Halifax as I'd promised Donna I would! But well, I tried, but ended up taking a side trip up to the Miramichi en route just to see if it still looked the same... It did, and then I went home! Can't be too predictable now, can I?

Images (photos and paintings by Teresa Young):

1. Unnamed abstract - Oct.2003, 2. Map of Maritimes, courtesy of Google, 3. Covered bridge near St. John, NB, 4. Sunken Treasure - Jun.2001, 5. Blue Emotions - Jul.2002, 6. Caves of St.Martins, NB, 7 and 8. Fundy Trail, NB.

When You Have No Choice

2010-07-14T18:48:00.001-03:00

The Surrealistic Reflections blog has been transferred to a new site, http://www.teresa-young.net/blog/.

I know it sounds strange, but for me, art can occur in many ways.

Sometimes, it just feels like a tap that I open and the creativity flows out through me into the artwork, something like a stream of conciousness thing...

The pieces surrounding this paragraph occurred this way...

Sometimes, an idea occurs to me that I want to experiment with just to see how it would work out.

After a family vacation where I drove down through Washington and Oregon, I was fascinated by the patterns in the shells I saw and wanted to see if I could incorporate them into paintings...

I still really like that idea and I might go back to it and try again, who knows....

I saved some shells, and I think I could probably do more with it than I did...

Anyway, back to my point here. I have some paintings that don't seem to want to be completed, and they can sometimes work out very well, or die an early death (in my eyes, anyway!). Some of my own paintings I don't like, just like anyone else, I have favourites. I have been known to give up on certain paintings and just paint over them and try something else.

Some pieces can change quite dramatically as they metamorphisize into something other than what they started out to be. There are wishy washy paintings, and then there's another group that is very different. They are images that pop into my head and just keep coming back to me like they won't be dismissed.

This is fairly rare, actually, I'll know an image wants to be created if it keeps coming back like a repeating dream. I can count these images and they generally stand out for me.

In the last few days, It's happened again, and I literally had to do some research into anatomy and musculature in order to execute a rendition of the image that keeps appearing in my brain!

I've managed to do a first run at it, and I'm pretty happy with how it looks, but it's not finished. I've reached that point where there's a freshness and power to it that I could lose if I overwork it. Sigh. You see what I mean, I like it the way it is (see below), but I think I'll leave it alone until I figure out whether I want to elaborate on it or not...

Images by Teresa Young:

1. Flight of the Humblebee - April 2002, 2. Blue Abstract - June 2002, 3. Oregon Coast - August 2002, 4. Blue Emotions- July 2002, 5. Flight of Fantastic - November 2001, 6. Queen of Thorns - August 2009, 7. Emergence - September 1998, 8. Exposing Your Inner Child - in progress.

When Things Don't Go As Planned

2010-07-11T14:26:00.003-03:00

The Surrealistic Reflections blog has been transferred to a new site, http://www.teresa-young.net/blog/.

I've been trying to capture my new direction of painting on glass digitally and have met with all sorts of problems. So this has become my new 'thing' or quest for lack of a better term...

In trying different approaches, I find I get mixed results. A white background allows me to eliminate some of the contrast issues, but I lose some of the depth, luminousity and texturized feel that so adds to the effect of the artworks on glass...

I would like to do it justice, so I did some research and I don't think that this is a new problem at all. Even in books and articles I've seen on the internet it appears that a lot of detail is lost due to the high constract inherent in glass art.

The human eye appears to adjust to it automatically seem to see the piece bettter than a camera can capture it!

And somehow, even when I get darks and shadows in the clearer parts of the pieces, it seems to have more depth than the ones with the flat backgrounds...

So, I'm adding a small gallery here of what I've been experimenting with lately with in painting directly on glass for your viewing pleasure!

The four pieces below actually inspired the title of this blogpost, I was trying to change a frame on a large piece I did in May and cracked the glass, so I found out that if I was very careful, I can peel the art off of the glass, prepare new glass to adhere the piece to and refinish the piece. Essentially, I cut this one into four sections because the painting got cut by the glass breaking in the first place. Four for one, not a bad trade in my mind!

Here's the original piece, which no longer exists in the larger form:

Images by Teresa Young:

1. Untitled Glass Art - 2 5"x7" pieces - 22 June 2010; 2. Untitled Glass Art - 2 5"x7" pieces - 23 June 2010; 3. Untitled Glass Art - 2 5"x7" pieces - 18 June 2010; 4. Fauvist Fantasy - 8"x10" - 21 June 2010; 5. Serenity - 12"x14" - 16 May 2010; 6. Untitled Glass Art - 20"x24" - 2 May 2010; 7, 8, 9 & 10. Final Glass Fragments - 8"x10".

The Sounds of Motorcycles In the Summer Make Me Nostalgic

2010-06-25T00:15:00.003-03:00

The Surrealistic Reflections blog has been transferred to a new site, http://www.teresa-young.net/blog/.

It's a strange fact that as you get older, more and more things tend to link back to things you've done in your past and then bingo! Something will remind you of your past without warning...
So we all eventually get to be that old coot on the porch, you know, the one that says --> 'I remember that when I was young, we used to....'.
When you start finding yourself saying something along those lines, you just know you are getting old!
My latest reminder of this sad fact is the advent of spring moving into early summer... Ah the dulcet sounds of motorcycles gunning their engines as they roar along the highways!

It sometimes reminds me of the late eighties when I had a motorcycle and I was touring all over British Columbia...
My exhusband and I were avid motorcyclists, it was something that we both loved and we used all of our vacations to travel as far as we could around Canada, seeing the sights. And British Columbia was a beautiful province to investigate on motorcycles...
In fact, in the late spring/early summer of 1986 I decided that I was tired of being a passenger on the back of the motorcycle and I wanted my own bike. So I learned how to ride and got my motorcycle license just in time to take my used Kawasaki 440 across Canada myself. It was a nice shiny new license, I'd had it all of two weeks and there I was long distance touring!
You know what they say about jumping in where angels fear to tread? Well, it wasn't that bad!

After two days of twelve to fourteen hour a day highway riding, I'd worked out a lot of my newbie traits and I was pretty confident on that bike...

It took us eight days from Kamloops, British Columbia to make it to Chatham, New Brunswick. Considering that poor little bike didn't have much of a gas tank, the stops were very frequent! Needless to say, the days ended up being quite long to make up for the lost time, but I loved the seemingly endless riding! If really is quite different seeing the world on a motorcycle, you don't have all that metal surrounding you as you trail on down the road. You feel very close to the outdoors when you travel on a bike.
Initially, I had a windscreen and it was all clear plexigas even though it did have the right shape to keep the worst of the wind and rain off of me while increasing my speed potential by making my profile more aeriodynamic. Unfortunately, I had a bit of a scrape in Alberta on the trip out and it broke so I had to deal with riding without one, which meant that I had the wind holding me up for most of the trip. Needless to say, it slowed me down a bit, although it was often quite refreshing! Unless it was raining, of course... Which it did for six out of the eight days on the way eastwards... But it was still fun! Unfortunately, due to the wind effects, in order to pass transport trucks in Quebec, I literally had to lean forward on the tank in order to get up to a high enough speed to get by them.
The funniest thing that happened on the trip occurred on the way back, and unfortunately, I wasn't in the habit of carrying a camera around in those days, so I didn't get any physical record of it. Probably the memory is much better anyway!

We were riding back towards Kamloops and had come to a section of the TransCanada that was being redone. They'd ripped up the top layer of asphalt, ribbed what was left and were laying down miles and miles of a very fine oil preparatory to installing new layers of road. So there we were riding our bikes through that in ninety degree weather... And after many miles of driving through fresh oil, since I had no windscreen, I was literally coated with a thick tarlike layer of oil... Of course the lineups were long, with lots of vehicles backed up and hanging around... So I had quite a nice sized audience for what happened after that...
I was hot, tired, and sticky... So guess what did happen next? Murphy's Law decided to kick in!

I hit a bird with my front tire.

You'll never guess what happens when you hit a bird at fifteen mph if it's small enough...
It shreds. And when it shreds, the mass travels upwards following the windstream and whoomph!
Tarred and feathered!

That was it for me... I pulled off the side of the road, leaning over my bike laughing my head off... I had a lineup of cars going by me honking for dear life, and some of them even stopped to take pictures of me!

It's not everyday you get to see a biker lady covered in blood and feathers sitting by the side of the road...

By the time my ex noticed that I was no longer behind him, it was a good fifteen minutes later and I had collected my wits and was pretty calm (I thought!).
So when he roared back to where I was and calmly parked his Yamaha 750 Virago on the side of the road, I thought nothing of it... Until he walked up to me, brightly reached over and plucked a feather off my nose and said 'What's the matter dear?'... That was it, I lost it again... I'm afraid that as well as laughing, I just had to see if I could nail him with my helmet as a high speed toss after that one!
I'm sure the tourists had a pretty good laugh on that day.

Images by Teresa Young:
1. Unnamed surreal from early nineties, 2. Kawasaki 440 with surreal sun digital photo, 3. Closeup of New Brunswick Farm - 1985, 4. The Trickster - Feb.2009, 5. Force One - Jul.2001.

My Cat Is A Mime...

2010-05-22T15:22:00.005-03:00

The Surrealistic Reflections blog has been transferred to a new site, http://www.teresa-young.net/blog/.

Today, I'm going to talk about my cat!

Her name is Nikki and she's a pretty ordinary tabby, as far as tabbies go, in that she lives in my house and never goes outside except to see her 'friend' the vet or to move to a new house.

She's seventeen years old, so she experienced the nineties in her own feline fashion and wasn't so impressed... No Wall street speculation for Nikki or working in an office wearing sneakers to work trying to make ends meet;-)

The 2000's weren't much different for her either, she didn't discover new music groups that she liked or pare down her lifestyle to make herself 'lean and mean'... In fact, that cat gained weight as the decade went on! So much for 'doing less with more', Nikki didn't get the last decade at all!

There is one pretty strange thing about Nikki though, she has a birth defect in her vocal cords that interferes with her ability to make any sounds...

For the first year of her life she never made a single sound at all other than scratching the appliances to hear the sound of her claws or shaking her tail on plastic to hear it rattle!

I used to call her the 'Mime cat' because it was pretty funny to see a cat go through the motions of meowing with no audio track turned on. Mind you, there does seem to be some sort of cosmic compensation going on here, as you can hear that cat purr from across the room!

Later on in life, she figured out ways to get around the sound issues a bit...

Now she stretches her neck up to finally get a strangled sort of drawn out meow out when she really feels the need to be heard... Sort of a cat version of baying at the moon.

Since it really sounds somewhat like a cat in trouble she generally gets a good reaction, so she must figure it's worth the effort... Personally, I'd like to find her volume control and turn it back off! She was pretty well perfect the other way as far as I was concerned!

Did you ever stop and think about cats? I'm convinced that they see the world very differently than we do, they're pretty sure that they own us and we are staff!

On top of that, I have a sneaking suspicion that my cat thinks that the level of service has degraded in recent years... She was pretty annoyed by moving from the west coast of Canada out to the east coast. Nowadays, if you bring out a box and start packing it, she'll look at you like she'd like to give you a little bite to get you to stop...

I don't blame her though, I figured it out recently and over the last seventeen years, she's moved approximately half a dozen times. For a cat, that's a lot, they aren't the most flexible pets... Especially if you consider that she's made the trip by truck across Canada four times!

I remember a funny joke circulating the Internet years ago that I thought was hilarious... The joke was showing what went on in the minds of dogs and cats with regards to how they see their lives...

--> For the dog, it was all oh boy, a walk, my favourite! Oh boy, dog food, my favourite! Oh boy... You get the idea...

For the cat, it read like a conspiracy novel!

The cat went on and on about how the person that was keeping them prisoner was torturing them with horrible gruel while keeping all the good stuff (meat dishes) for themselves... And on top of that, their captors were eating it in front of them! It went on to talk about how their latest attempt at assinating their captors failed when they didn't suceed at tripping them to fall down the stairs... It was pretty funny and I think they caught some truth there! And I'm a dyed in the wool cat person! HaHa!

I'm pretty sure my cat would agree! I think my Mime cat actually thinks she's a tiger... I'd hate to tell her she's a bit short.

Images by Teresa Young:
1. Tiger Tracks -Apr.2004, 2. Nikki Smiles - 2009, 3. Nikki in her natural state - 2009, 4. Howling (Yawning) at the moon - 2009, 5. Nikki's Self Image - May 2010.

Ruminations About Art And It's Context

2010-05-14T20:47:00.004-03:00

The Surrealistic Reflections blog has been transferred to a new site, http://www.teresa-young.net/blog/.

Like everyone else out here in cyberspace, I follow blogs in my areas of interest and recently, I started commenting on some of them. Just a couple, sort of like putting your toe in that cold water for your first swim of the year outside!

It's interesting to be part of a comment stream if you're not all that used to it...

You can end up being a small part of a discussion that is riveting because it's something that speaks to you on a personal level... Unfortunately, since it's someone else's forum, you are really free to explore the line of thought deeply, the discussion is soon over...

This is where having your own blog can really come in handy!

On Edward Winkleman's recent blog on 'You can't take it with you, so it's about what you leave' I enjoyed the comment stream so I made the following comment:

"Continuing in the vein of thought presented, I'm going to express something I firmly believe in as an artist --> that artists express based on their personal context in their culture and generation.

Which means in my eyes that an artist is being a conduit of expression for that period of time in their own way...

Whether they do that successfully or not, suceeding generations can often figure it out through hindsight, but at the very least making the effort in the first place is valuable.

I'm thinking the context of a piece of art with reference to the artist and their life on a personal level and the context of their times could greatly enhance the experience of the audience for that artwork."

I'd like to expand on the thought I expressed with this blogpost, since it's something I'm interested in on a personal level!

What I was talking about with regards to artwork when I mean context is basically what surrounds the artist at the point in time the art piece was created...

IE: It can be general things like their location (North America, Canada, Europe...); gender (obvious but can have a major effect); or less general factors such as their personal history which will affect what cultural groups that they belong to and the language of their personality.

For instance, I'm female, live in Canada, and my personal history includes things like divorce (mine), parenthood and a non-traditional career..

This can affect the 'language' of my artwork in many ways.

For instance, as a female in a general, cultural context I have an interest in independence and growth of a distinct identity. This is very common among women of my age group in North America as we've basically come into our own in recent decades. This general message and context is expressed well in 'Emergence'...

The personal context of that piece is also that I was recently separated and just starting the process of divorcing when I painted the picture and I was truly finding my way as a separate person from my previous life!

Now it might represent something else for other people viewing the piece, but it can have the added dimension of my context as well as theirs depending on what the mood of the audience at that point in time. Usually what happens is the viewer experiences the painting within their own context and reacts to it on that level... What I'm thinking is that knowing the artist's context could enrich the piece for the audience in a very real way and give a richer experience.

Let's do it again...

'The Spirit of the Wolf' relates to general feelings of the symbology of the wolf in our culture and how it can be used to express the feeling of being free and unfettered. One interpretation, anyway. This is just an example, I'm not really trying too hard on the general interpretation here, just using what I come up with off the cuff for illustration purposes...

In the personal context of me, the artist, the painting is about freedom (again!) within the context of emerging into a more independent identity through divorce, etc, but, it also heavily relates to the fact that my great grandmother was a Cree indian in Manitoba and you can see the animal spirit guide roots in this piece in particular.

So, I think I'll leave it there... My writer friend, Nina Munteanu and myself are working on a book about art and it's context, among other things to come out sometime this later year (hopefully) and it will expand on what I've touched on here... Of course Nina is much more eloquent that I in that she is a writer! So the book will give a much richer experience and have a lot more to it!

Images by Teresa Young:

1. Painted Window - May 2010, 2. Unnamed Abstract - Dec.09, 3. Salmon Arm - Sep.96 (photo), 4. Prospect Cove - Mar.2010 (photo), 5. Emergence - Sep.98, 6. Spirit of the Wolf - Jun.01.

Living With The Consequences Of Not Being An Artist

2010-05-07T17:37:00.004-03:00

The Surrealistic Reflections blog has been transferred to a new site, http://www.teresa-young.net/blog/.

I'm asking myself a relevant question with the title of this post... And it's because I've recently read something that made me think carefully about it.

The first thing I had to mull over was what art meant to me, and that is something I periodically examine as its an important issue for me. It's a question that most artists (if not all) end up wrestling with periodically...

So I sat down to consider that age old question and I've found some answers that fit my psyche.

When I paint, I do so to express something within my soul that needs to come out. I know that probably sounds a bit hokey, but there it is!

Many times, I lose myself in the act of painting and time flies by without me being aware of it. That's an almost meditative state for me.

Real art, not just the flexing of the muscles of your skills for the sake of it, comes from the soul and has some sort of impact on the audience. If it connects that is...

Sometimes, I really think that part of the process depends on where the viewer is at, they may not be able to understand the 'language' that the artist is speaking.

So to me, art is a different language that has no rosetta stone and no words to it. It can have clear cut meanings, but usually good art has layers of metaphor and subtlety to it that can be interpreted in many ways by the viewer. And that can also mean that the audience can have a slightly different experience each time they view that artwork.

Art pushes the boundaries of not only the viewer, but lives outside of the comfort zone of the artist as well... Good art isn't the same as everyone else's art, it isn't easily classifiable or interpreted, it challenges the viewer and can often bother them or hit them on a visceral level.

I've mentioned before in previous posts that I started out as a portrait artist. And I started selling portraits when I was just sixteen years old and not really settled into my own identity... It made me very uncertain about my own boundaries with regards to my art and also very malleable on what I would draw for others... I was a very gifted artist, so my portraits were very realistic and my customers loved them.

But over the years, I ended up seeing many different scenarios as to what people wanted and how the art was treated. I learned that I was actually a conduit for producing a commodity! --> 'How would this fit in my living room; can you put in more blues and greens so it goes with my sofa; it should be bigger/smaller; no I don't want them in profile'...

In time I felt like I was just slamming them out with no real room for creativity or changes in composition, and basically, no real artistic input allowed from me, the 'artist'!

It really killed my enjoyment of the art itself, as it became a job, and a chore --> something I didn't really do for my own enjoyment anymore. The end result of the process was that I just about killed my own love of art expression with twenty years of portraiture.

Last year I did a portrait, probably the first one in over fifteen years just to see how it felt.

And I was very, very surprised to find that time can heal, if you're patient...

Although I wouldn't ever return to commissioned realistic portraits, it was fun to flex those muscles again. Just to see if they still existed!

And even though the finished product you see is really nice to look at and my friend and his wife loved to have a portrait of their children --> I don't call it art.

I'd classify what I did above as the product of a technical skill on my part. I'm not truly expressing myself, there are no layers of complexity and metaphor to the piece and it's just a record of that point in the development of those kids. A good photographer could do the job here, it's just a novelty to see it in pencil format.

The consequences of my earlier foray into an art 'career' were that I stunted my own creativity and exploited my own technical skills without any real idea of what it would do to me psychologically.

The consequences of this were that I literally turned away from identifying myself as an artist and quit following that career path. I lived my life the same way as everyone else did, marriage, children, career, and in my case, divorce and so on...

As I went through the stages of my life, the art started coming back in quiet ways... I had started doing surrealistic drawings in my early teens and since I never ever sold or marketed that type of artwork, it was a safe haven for my creativity.

Over time, I moved away from realism and my expression flowed into surreals and abstracts... And as that happened, I found I could include portraits of a sort in some of my pieces, since I now had creative control and the faces melded into the art to express my personality within my art. Much like a window into my own soul.

The upside of that coin is that I felt I had to discover my art from within myself, not through external sources or influences.. I was on a personal mission to hone my style and focus it into something truly meaningful for me personally. I slowly started pushing my own boundaries and definition of what I would create... As I did that, I found out that I regained something I thought I had lost; the joy of just creating art.

Don't get me wrong; I was lost, really, really lost; but I figured out that I had to find my answers on my own, without commercial pressure to produce a product, or copy someone else's expression...

And that's what I ended up doing.

I've been surfing the Internet lately and looking at different websites, checking out what other artists have created, and I've noticed that my art doesn't look like anyone else's. I'm happy with that, because at the very least, I'm truly only expressing my soul, and that is what art really means to me!

Images - artwork by Teresa Young:
1. Unnamed Glass Art - May 2010, 2. Fractal Node - Sep.2001, 3. Suspended Dehydration - Oct.2001, 4. Portrait of the Diehl Children - Nov.2009, 5. Unnamed Abstract - Jun.2002, 6. Unnamed Glass Art - May 2010.

Timing Is Everything

2010-05-04T18:09:00.004-03:00

The Surrealistic Reflections blog has been transferred to a new site, http://www.teresa-young.net/blog/.

I was down at the beach the other day trying to catch a photo of the surf and I was finding it frustrating to hit just the right moment to catch the wave...

I know surfers have coined a phrase for this, but when you think about it, much of our life is about 'catching the wave'. If we aren't paying attention when opportunity knocks, we might not even hear it!

I think that this really serves as an accurate analogy for life in general. It's often all about the timing... When we stop and smell the roses or talk to someone who might lead us down a path that we are meant to follow, we are in the right place at the right time...

Nowadays, we are often rushing around trying to get through our tasks that are so very, very important, and we don't pay much attention to what's around us. Who knows how many times you've rushed by that individual that might impart some nugget of wisdom necessary for your life's evolution?

When I was working in the IT industry out west, I was often too busy to do anything other than my job! Whatever energy I had left over at the end of the workday was used to grab the small necessities of life and not much else... After years of this day to day cycle my horizons literally shrank for me, because I just wasn't enjoying being alive! I was just rushing to get things done and not seeing the world around me.

This had an effect on me in many ways, many of which I wasn't even aware of... As an artist, I didn't stop painting and drawing because I found that I had to hang onto that particular anchor to maintain my balance and sanity... But I'm very sure that my artwork suffered in unseen ways even though I was still doing it regularly.

If you are hanging onto where you are at and you not growing and experimenting, it's just treading water...

I found that the way I was living was turning into a very grey existence for me, without colour or vibrancy. For an artist, that's like a sort of living death!

I wonder how many of us sink into the abyss of mundanity without realizing that we are throttling our inner selves in the process? I don't believe anyone seeks that kind of existence, it just sort of sneaks up on us quietly...

The stress that occurs over time with that sort of existence is rampant these days... I was talking to different people prior to leaving the west and found out that in technology jobs such as IT, people are stressing out and finding it harder and harder to cope... In fact, it's so bad that workers will be 'used up' by large corporations and then downsized when they are no longer effective. That sounds pretty cold, but it's the way the world often works these days... I have a friend whose husband spent many decades with a large company and was downsized less than a year before he was due to retire... It was toxic and demoralizing for this man as he felt that he had been used and rejected, which on some level he was.

The ability to extricate yourself and move into a better environment is something not everyone can do. We trap ourselves with mortgages and lifestyles that require we stay firmly planted where we are with no deviations...

And really, what kind of existence is that when you get right down to it? You know what you are doing, day in, day out, and there are no real variations on the theme... It's no wonder I got bored in my own way. As an artist, I need to have a feeling that life is a mystery, that there might be something around the corner that is new, that I don't expect... Within the mosiac of our society, Artists aren't really painted as seeking a stereotypical existence... And it's probably for good reasons. I'm a round peg that didn't fit into a square hole!

I really don't know what I'm going to be doing tomorrow and for a lot of people, that would be a very scary thing. For me, it's freeing...

Nowadays, I feel inspired to paint and experiment with my art in ways that I hadn't felt before, and it's the uncertainty and freedom that I'm experiencing here that is feeding that creative flow.

But the odd thing is, I would work in computers again, no problem... I went and took an engineering degree because I like to use my brain to problem solve and think. It also provides a good balance to my artwork, because they use different parts of the brain. But I would think long and hard before I signed on with a large corporation with a hierarchy in place that dehumanized people... It's easy enough to recognize when you are on the outside of it!

But we are the sum of our experiences, and I believe that as artists, it is important to have a wider world view to give depth to your art. And timing is everything... My artwork did not have the depth twenty years ago that it has today, I believe the maturity and viewpoint I've developed through my experiences has reflected itself into my artwork. And that is enriching in itself.

Images - photos and artwork by Teresa Young:
1. Peggys Cove Wave - April 2010, 2. Convergence - Feb.2010, 3. Unnamed Abstract - Mar.2010, 4. Fleeting Eternity - Jul.2001, 5. The Crowbar - Nov.2001, 6. Mahone Bay - Jan.2010, 7. Golden Dreams - Apr.2001.

Where Are The Famous Female Artists?

2010-04-29T00:57:00.001-03:00

The Surrealistic Reflections blog has been transferred to a new site, http://www.teresa-young.net/blog/.

You know, I was thinking of role models the other day and it occurred to me, that other than one single female artist (Emily Carr), all of my 'role models' are male!

I realize that up until the last couple of centuries, we have lived in totally male dominated society, which would explain the lack of famous female visual artists... But it's been a couple of hundred years here where women have been making inroads on equality, and still, I really haven't seen any larger than life genre defining women appear on the horizons.

I've been discussing this from time to time with my writer friend, Nina (SF Girl - The Alien Next Door) and she has many theories as to why.

I've even read a book about different types of societies and how humanity seemed to have started with something more equal, not a male dominated society, back in the days of Crete.

The book was called the 'The Chalice and the Blade' by Riane Eisler, and it was pretty dry, but very, very interesting... Ms. Eilser advanced the theory that early societies in human history were based on Goddess worship rather than focusing on a male God. This led to less warlike tendencies, greater harmony between the sexes and also with nature... She went on to mention how our archeological history was slanted to give credit to males while discrediting, misinterpreting or dismissing female accomplishments found in historical artifacts. This was a natural tendency as the bulk of archeologists were men and historically, women were not really thought to matter.

I'm pretty glad that society has changed, I know I didn't enjoy growing up in the seventies with my mother harping at me to become a housewife and stop having so many opinions!

As for Ms. Eisler's theory, light of how western society has worked in the past, it makes a lot of sense. I've noticed that history has a way of highlighting male accomplishments while just leaving out the women. It's a definite void in history, it's like we are missing half of our background!

I wonder if there were more female visual artists that were just left out, overlooked? It would be interesting to try to collect them and get a more detailed picture of how art evolved over time...

On the other hand, I'm going to be the devil's advocate here and hypothesize that we may have done some of this to ourselves... Women have been socialized to be modest and self effacing... That type of approach would certainly lead to women not putting themselves forward to create new art movements.

In fact, one of the things I was taken to task on by my rather traditional mother was my lack of modesty about my artwork...

But I figured that if I didn't like my own work and put it forward, certainly nobody else would do it for me! I've noticed that people that stand back and wait for others to notice their merits tend to be left standing on the sidelines...

I've never been that good at waiting for things, and blending into the crowd on the sidelines sounds like a special kind of feminine torture to me... So I think I'll just carry on with being myself and let my mother rest with her traditions back in the last century!

But I still think it would be nice to have some more famous female artists out there... Hmmm... Maybe I could help fill that void someday!

References: Eisler, Riane. 1989. The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future. Harper & Row. New York.

Images:
Paintings by Teresa Young, photograph of Teresa Young by Nina Munteanu.
1. Undercurrents - Mar.2009, 2. Central Viewpoint - Aug.2009, 3. Near The Edge of Reason - Sept.2009, 4. Halo - May.2001.

Would Intelligent Aliens Wipe Us Out?

2010-04-25T15:54:00.002-03:00

The Surrealistic Reflections blog has been transferred to a new site, http://www.teresa-young.net/blog/.

I was reading on the Internet today that Steven Hawkings warned against being friendly with aliens...

I can see his point, I've read tons of science fiction over the years, and the most realistic stories involving alien contact always ended up with human nature getting in the way and causing all sorts of problems. I saw District 9 last year, and it really tackled that question, it was an uncomfortable movie to watch, but it was riveting, that's for sure!

There's no reason to not assume that whatever 'alien nature' turns out to be, it could have a dark side that wouldn't bode well for the human race!

He compares humanity meeting an alien race to the coming of Columbus to North America... An exploitation of the resources with no regard for the people that are already in residence. If you stop and think about it, we've been getting this message quite a bit through the decades, in one form or another.... The problem here is that we can't step outside of ourselves and project our motivations onto the external. Meaning that we think aliens would react as we would react in a first contact situation, and human nature takes over and it's downhill from there.

If you've ever read Robert J. Sawyer's novel 'Calculating God', he tackles that perspective issue elegantly. He proposes that humans could not conceive of the motives of aliens. They'd be as alien to our thinking as their physical bodies are to our perceptions!

I think Hawkings is right though, we do send out a lot of information, some on purpose, but the bulk of it isn't on purpose.

What would stop anything that was technologically advanced from tapping into our broadcasts? And the next question that comes to my mind is what kind of picture do we paint of ourselves with what is sitting on the airwaves?

Probably a pretty accurate one when you get right down to it. I hate to say that, but your character is always most exposed when you are unaware you have an audience. An even more accurate study into human nature at it's basest could be done when you are under stress, this would probably make 'Survivor' very educational for aliens! With all of the 'reality TV' that's popular programming now, it would definitely give them a widely diverse picture of humanity.

Maybe the underlying problem here is that cheerful things, things that don't reflect the darker sides of humanity, just don't make interesting viewing or reading. It would probably leave out our lighter side if TV and video was used exclusively to build a picture of humans...

Mind you, if they swallowed our entertainment media as the truth, it could ultimately work in humanity's favour! Just think, we could seem to have paranormal powers, extremely advanced technology, and other way-out things that would make us intimidating to invade. Hopefully, it would scare them away and Hawkings would never be proved right!

Then we wouldn't be wiped out after all. Saved by the junk on TV, how ironic!

Art Images by Teresa Young:
1. Stained Glass Entity - Mar.2009, 2. Under The Surface - Jun.2009, 3. SF Girl - Jan.2008, 4. Force One - Jul.2001.

More Artwork, Another Exhibition and a Volcano In Iceland

2010-04-20T15:23:00.002-03:00

The Surrealistic Reflections blog has been transferred to a new site, http://www.teresa-young.net/blog/.

What have I been doing for the couple of weeks? I just noticed I haven't posted since the 8th of April, and it makes me stop and think about that.

Well, I've been painting a lot and if I'm painting I don't seem to be able to switch gears and write.

I didn't want to destroy my momentum with the artwork, so I went with the flow to get the benefit of the higher than normal output.

Since I don't have any earth shattering opinions to mull over or profound observations, I thought I'd just do a post about my current artworks and about my friend the writer being stuck in Switzerland.

I've also just been notified that some of my pieces were accepted into another on-line exhibition! The show is called Ultraviolence and is online now. The show is about the violence inherent everywhere I believe. The link to my work is here --> click here. (The previous exhibition I blogged about this month is still online, if you want to take a look.)

The first piece in my submissions is my gagged lady... The name of the piece is The Wheels Are Turning and it was really an expression of my frustration at my last IT job. I felt the politics swirling around me, and felt that I had very little say in things that directly affected me. An old story with an IT corporate type of job, I had seen a number of close friends get downsized over the years, so that only added to my feelings of powerlessness and frustration.

I took back control of my destiny by resigning my position and moving to the east coast of Canada.

Whatever happens to me in the future, I believe it was the healthiest choice I've ever made, because once you get stuck in a corner (much like a floor painter painting themselves into no escape!), you can feel like your are slowly dying if you aren't careful.

Another thing that I've been working on is more glass painting, I've started trying to work on free standing glass works that can be put in windows for display.

This is much more viable for me as I rent, I don't own a house and I'd like to have portable examples of the glassworks. Take a look at my first stab at this, the piece isn't quite finished, but it's very pretty and can be moved. Unfortunately, the photos still don't do them justice, my on-going struggle to capture the beauty of the glass work continues, slight improvements, but I'm still not getting the full effect.

The most interesting turn of events recently is the volcano in Iceland. My writer friend, Nina has been stuck in Switzerland for four extra days now and counting. I believe she's going to blog about this one, she's right out there on the front lines! Nina was at a conference in Zurich on the world economy and altruism and she met the Dalai Lama. She had a great and interesting time and decided to stick around an extra few days to see the sights. Well that didn't work out so great as we are all aware, because the volcano erupted the day before her flight out of Zurich.

This aerial photo shows a plume of ash rising from the volcano in southern Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull glacier, Monday. While the volcanic ash cloud covering parts of Europe continues to wreak havoc for airlines, grounding most of the continent's air travel for several days has had a ripple effect extending far beyond Europe's borders. (AP Photo/Jon Gustafsson)

Anyway, she is still trying to get back to North America and not having much luck. At least some of the hotels in Europe have cut their rates considerable to try to help out the stranded travelers!

Images (all paintings by Teresa Young):

1. Mystic Dragon - 6 Apr.10, 2. Reclining Reflections - 24 Mar.10, 3. Unnamed abstract - 17 Apr.10, 4. Unnamed Abstract - circular - 7 Apr.10, 5. Unnamed abstract - 7 Apr.10, 6. Chocolate Rhymes - 18 Apr.10, 7. Unnamed Abstract - circular - 14 Apr.10, 8. Another Unnamed abstract - 17 Apr.10, 9. The Wheels Are Turning - 6 Mar.09, 10. Unfinished Painted Glass - 20 Apr.10, 11. Unnamed Abstract - 14 Apr.10.

Learning To Paint On Glass

2010-04-08T15:37:00.001-03:00

The Surrealistic Reflections blog has been transferred to a new site, http://www.teresa-young.net/blog/.

Over the years, I've dabbled in a lot of mediums and foundations to create artworks. I've painted jewelry boxes, candles, wood of all sorts, lecture stands, jackets, motorcycles and even lamps! (I learned how to use an airbrush to paint a motorcycle, it was a lot of fun.)

When I bought a house seven years ago, the front foyer window had this horrible painting of bluebirds on it that were rendered by an amateur using a media I had never seen before.

It was painted over the double paned window with a plastic semi-opaque paint that gave the appearance of stained glass. Or tried to...

This was something I sat down and thought about, and I realized that not only did I want to remove the offending 'artwork' on the entrance-way window in my new house, but I wanted to do it again myself. Properly.

It seems to me that this medium has a lot of promise to it. It doesn't suffer from some of the limitations of stained glasswork but it gives a similar effect. The glass doesn't have to be cut, meaning you can include a lot of details that are possible in traditional glasswork. It's really 'glass painting' as opposed to stained glass art, and it can be done for a fraction of the cost. And it wouldn't look cheap if you did it right.

After physically removing the old 'artwork', I set out to find out about my new prospective medium by looking on the internet and checking out art and craft stores. I found out that it's used mostly to create suncatchers and to create fake stained glass pieces on mirrors and windows (in a limited way)... By fake stain glass, I mean that the craftperson doing the work will use a pattern that simulates a stained glass pattern and follow it as closely as possible... This really wasn't what I had in mind for me!

I've never been good at following someone else's patterns, my first painting at eight years old was in oils and I used the paints from a paint by numbers kit my aunt had given me to do something original... No copying for me!

So I bought some of the paint and blanks (wax paperlike plastic sheets) to practice on so that I could get a feel for the limitations and also figure out what I could do with it. I found that it dries quickly, but takes a day to clear out to the final colour. Meaning you can't see what colours you are really working with at the time you do the piece. This just makes it more challenging!

I tried out my abstract, pattern based pen drawing as 'patterns' to see how they would look, and I was delighted with results.

I'm a pretty prolific and quick artist, so I can create some pieces quite quickly. The new medium and it's drying limitations slowed me down immensely. And I found that I needed more strength in my hands to get a straight line, maybe the person who did the original work on the window was fighting this when they got the wavy lines on the bluejays...

To combat the lack of details in the lines, I bought more attachments for the simulated leading bottle I was using to apply the under-drawing to get finer control. It helped, but it slowed down the process even more.

This couldn't be helped, I wanted to be able to do the artwork to my normal standards and I wasn't going to cop out even if it meant way more work.

I also found out that the paint runs and clumps, so I had to be careful about the amount I applied to keep it from clumping up. Even more unexpected, if I didn't run a toothpick through it after each colour was applied, it would bubble and that didn't look desirable at all.

Finally, I felt confident I could start on my 'new' window, I prepared it carefully so that the paint would adhere and I created many sheets of predried leading lines that I could apply to the window and anchors with wet leading as I did the work.

First I had drawn a beautiful abstract pattern that I applied to the window to follow.

As I progressed, I found that the four foot by eighteen inches wide window ended up taking me a hundred hours or more to research, practice and paint. The actual piece itself took over fifty hours! Not a quick medium to work in, but it certainly gave me a unique result I was proud of.

I painted the window you see here in late 2005 and it never faded or chipped. It was sold with my house last year and from the response I've seen to the piece over the years, I would say that people really like it....

So I've decided to give it another go and I've started on some new windows!

Since the landlord at the house I'm renting was all for the idea of me painting a few windows to practice the artform, I decided it was a great opportunity to refine the process.

I've started on new windows here, and unfortunately, it's really hard to photograph them well enough to get the full effect of the artwork. The light from behind the window tends to skew the metering so you end up with a sillouhette effect which tones down the details.

On these new windows, I found that working with glass paint told me how much older I had gotten in the last six years. My hand shook even more and I had to take it very slow to get the result I wanted. But it was worth it, I've finished the left three windows and I'm working on the right side to pull the viewers eye over the left windows. Sort of a flow of expression, it's working out quite well, even though I haven't finished the windows yet, it's given a beautiful result!

I even bought a digital SLR camera to improve the quality of my photos of them!

Art by Teresa Young Chosen For Projekt30 April 2010 Exhibition

2010-04-03T21:09:00.007-03:00

The Surrealistic Reflections blog has been transferred to a new site, http://www.teresa-young.net/blog/.

I just discovered that I was selected to be one of thirty artists featured in the April 2010 Projeckt30 online exhibition.

Projekt30 is an online gallery designed to connect artists with "brick and mortar" art galleries interested in representing them, as well as art dealers and collectors currently unaware of their work. They host thirty-artist juried exhibitions each month, as well as special theme exhibitions several times a year.

These juried exhibitions showcase to a large number of galleries all over the world. Their "public jury" system provides a concentrated, quality-controlled survey of artists work. Artists appearing in their exhibitions have received thousands of favorable ratings from individuals occupying a diverse spectrum of stations in the arts community.

This particular exhibition includes beautiful digital photography, 3D art and artworks from artists Kevin Veara, Ron Swartz, Will Kurtz, Julie Lucus, Hyunju Jung, and others. A majority of the artworks are for sale and the prices for non-photos range from four or five hundred up into the thousands.

I entered ten paintings into the competition and I'd like to talk a bit about some of them here before including a link to the exhibition for anyone interested in viewing it.

Blue Emotions, 24" x 20" canvas:

An acrylic media with glued on shells that have the shell patterns echoed in the design within the painting itself.

After a holiday along the Oregon coast I wanted to express the beauty of what I saw as I stopped and explored the beautiful seashores.

The Genesis of Intellect, 12" x 9" canvas:

This abstract piece really expresses a feeling, a kernel of self with respect to thought that I wanted to explore within a painting format.

Really, with a lot of my artwork, it is more of a stream of consciousness process for me that allows me to express my emotions.

In the past, I called a lot of my work 'emotional landscapes', and that's really what they are, the environment of my inner being expressed externally.

Feathered Fancy, 9" x 12" canvas:

I like this piece mainly for the colours. It's really light-hearted and has a feathered feel to me, so of course I decided to go for a fun name that would suggest that for the audience.
Not that I've ever seen a bird quite like this, but it really feels like some old owl or hawk sitting up in a tree looking down at me.
Anyway, the overall link to the exhibition is here:

april PROJEKT30 exhibition and the link to my part of the exhibition is here: Teresa Young.

Enjoy!
Images:
1. Screenshot of Projekt30 April 2010 Exhibition screen, 2. Blue Emotions - July 2002, 3. The Genesis of Intellect - Feb. 2010, 4. Feathered Fancy - Aug. 2002.

Dragons, Gameplaying and Altruism

2010-03-31T19:38:00.004-03:00

The Surrealistic Reflections blog has been transferred to a new site, http://www.teresa-young.net/blog/.

I recently went to a movie about dragons...

In fact the title was 'How To Train Your Dragon' and it was a Pixar release which meant pretty great graphics...

The story was really good as well, as it was the typical heroes journey, where the main protagonist starts out as a small character that finds himself through his adventures as the story advances.

Going to the movie made me think more about Dragons in particular and how this related back to my previous post on Dungeons and Dragons... Which was interesting in itself as I am still thinking over how fantasies, sword and sorcery, and role-playing fit within the culture of gaming. In real life, we live a drab existence, no dragons, no clear cut lines between good and evil, and no real heroes journey... It's much harder to maintain a value system without the hands on practice that is evident in games.

I believe that games generally do society a favour, by instilling the principles of teamwork using quests with clear cut lines between good and evil for the people that play them. It's a training ground, essentially, and I am convinced that the explosion of the popularity of gaming is directly related to the fact that they give us a chance to exercise our nobler instincts. As well as giving us a community of gamers that we can relate to on a more personal level.

Even the sports and racing games can have the same effect, in my opinion, as the same principles apply. Teamwork, shared hardship, challenging the player's reflexes to train the hand to eye coordination which is hardship and and way to learn.

If you look at the statistics on the popularity of specific games, you can see that the most popular games are where the player is the 'good' guy with a clearcut enemy to deal with throughout the gameplay.

Games that flop actually don't make this type of distinction, which supports my argument that people generally want to be 'good'. Games allow people to exercise their altruistic instincts. And I believe that the more that these instincts are used, the more they expand and strengthen. So, games help society as they give us a learning experience to exercise our better instincts! I realize that this runs counter to some of the horror stories about how games are destroying society, but I don't agree with those theories. Based on my own experiences and what I've seen around me, I think they do the opposite.

In my opinion, we all get a chance to be the white knight and have the gratification of doing good and being appreciated for it by using games as a entertainment method. Movies don't instill positive values and are soon over, a game can be replayed many times, strengthening the underlying message it gives. Which makes it a much more powerful medium when you think about it...

Images:

1. Dragon Abstract by Teresa Young - Mar. 2010, 2. Gaia Unmasked by Teresa Young - Jun. 2007, 3. The Dragon by Toulouse LeTrek - Mar. 2010, 4. Speckled by Teresa Young - Dec. 2009.

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Teresa's Art in 2011

Canadian Artist Teresa Young and British Artist Penelope Oakley’s Collaboration 2011

Upcoming Exhibitions for Teresa Young

But What Does It Mean?

How to move on...

Video of the Venice Prebiennale

Abstraction and How Did I Get There?

Current and Future Exhibitions

I've moved this blog to www.teresa-young.net/blog

The Speed At Which We Are Changing

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Hurricane Earl Hits My Doorstep

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A Tour Around Peggy's Cove

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