sound and vision

i first heard david bowie's song, "space oddity" in 1970 during a camping vacation in new england with my family. i was ten years old. we were driving through the cobblestone red brick canyons of boston, and i had never been in a big city before. when bowie's song came on the radio, i felt a surreal sense of mystery and intrigue. it lent a magical, almost psychedelic feel to the surroundings. i had never heard music like this before. this was the time of the first moon landings, the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey", and the hippie movement... an exciting time to be young.
that song burned into my mind. i had no idea who sang it. just hoped i would hear it again. several years later, i did.
bowie has long been a source of musical inspiration for me. he has always been a step ahead of the masses, pointing the way. and he is still scouting ahead for us. i think it is cool that, at his age, he is still at the cutting edge of music and culture.
seeing bowie's recent "reality" tour concert from sixth row centre was one of my best musical experiences ever.

a day in the life

furtive glance

kim

let's get together and feel alright...

the eyes have it

painting

when we first got internet access and email at work, my friends started sending me photos of naked women. i guess this is a natural thing for guys to do.
anyway... right about that time, i had discovered a very crude photo-editor program - which was included with microsoft's windows-nt operating system at the time.
i had had an interest in visual art for a while, but i couldn't paint and i couldn't afford to get into photography.
i quickly realized that this crude little photo-editor was a doorway into the world of creating visual art. it was a tool that i could use to manipulate shapes, colour and light. so i started playing with it.
i took a photo of a naked woman that my friend don had sent me and manipulated it every way i could... just trying out all of the possibilities. eventually, i discovered that if i "selected" a section of the photo and then pasted it in somewhere else, that it was much like dipping a paintbrush into coloured paint and painting. so that is how this image was created. it took a lot of manual work. i had to blur each blob that i pasted in. but doing it the hard way made me really appreciate photoshop, years later.
this picture looks absolutely nothing like the original photo (which was of a woman eating grapes while sitting on the floor... her face and hair looked very different from this).
at some point, the image started looking like a painting of a real woman... one with a personality. so i stopped. and here it is.