A model idea

Necessity is the mother of invention.

Economic times like these call for creative approaches to keeping business flowing. Developers, artists and not-for-profits have come together to call upon the "strength in numbers" philosophy. Beautilful model homes in posh Naples and Fort Myers, Florida are showcasing artists, changing each month and donating the commission to charity. Affluent home-buyers traffic through these lovely models throughout the day, plus there is a reception every second Saturday, giving good visibility to the art, possibly even more than in many galleries.

Something else that was neat for me was to see my art hung on the walls of a nice house. It was as if someone had bought a ton of my work and hung it, and I got to visit their house to see.

Virtuality

I recently had the opportunity to curate some virtual spaces. These walls, art, lighting and furniture don't exist on a material dimension, but visually they do exist on my monitor. There is an increasing number of venues for this sort of "house playing" game (The Sims, Second Life, vSide, imvu, etc). It's been around for years now and is growing in popularity so it's not a new concept. What is new for me, however, is that I actually painted something in real-life with the sole purpose of hanging in a virtual home. You can place any art into virtual frames, so of course MY paintings are "hung" in my virtual dwelling. This picture shows my character (or avitar), Epiphany, sitting in front of Jessi Miller's art:







A good friend of mine who lives in the UK needed to decorate the apartment that lives in his computer. I planned for his space and created one horizontal painting, an abstract with a visible horizon of sorts. I then took a photo of it, brought it into photoshop and cut it into four squares. These four new digital paintings were brought into his virtual apartment and placed into large frames. What started out as one 24" x 8" painting ended up to be four pieces together equivalent to maybe 12' wide by 3' tall, or thereabouts. Here wer are hanging it, and there I am with it all together:











I shipped the real painting (titled "Virtuality" for virtual and reality) off to the UK and now it lives on my friend's real and virtual walls, simultaneously, in two different forms. Below is the original:





Whew! I can't wait to see where the next 10 years take us and how differently art will be expressed. Kind of opens the mind a little wider and turns it at an angle, doesn't it?