A New Way of Seeing
June 2nd, 2009 by Julia Taylor
Like most human beings I tend to measure ideas out against my personal experience and some universal perspectives–generally gathered in my post college years. This pic goes right back to a childhood of cows, farm equipment and that rural mess of equipment (the junk heap lot). This is where my life view began.
When I was a wee one, my most poignant memories are of art classes–in the lines, out of the lines, construction paper and awkward scissors, oil paint., clay, and color circles. Then I got a camera early on and all was lost. I LOVED sketching and photography. Two years into a college Arts Major degree, life intervened and I decided during one of those infamous down economic cycles to go to a more marketable major. There was this implicit promise that one could provide for our family needs through commercial means and support our artistic desires on the sides. I did buy in and I still do. I love photography, fine arts and performing arts. I understand the talent, the discipline and the sacrifice that artists need and make to survive on the side today. I also understand the mix it takes in a community to create the economic engine that drives all the cultural economies. It it is a two way innovation economy. Fortunately, I enjoy all the dimensions of regional economy . You need a very robust metro area to sustain artists economically on the strength of their art and there are probably three market areas in this country that can provide that type of catch-net. Given our strength as a second tier market, we have remarkable resiliency including the largest and oldest performing art fund in the country. It’s quite remarkable and we can say it because we have so many regional and global companies who passed 50, 75, 100 and even 150 years of accomplishments and have always supported the arts.
Its been a great business plan but now we need to fast forward to how we grow our market for innovation and creativity. We know that exposure to creativity can throw the switch for a innovative talent to grow. How do we keep our big tent of the arts open to all those children and young people to learn a new way of seeing, how to create and bring this talent to our everyday world of work and play.
Somebody else paid the entry ticket for us. They didn’t know us. They just paid forward.
It’s time for us to pay forward for each of those 400,00 children in our region that don’t even have the experience of of creativity outside of a TV set yet. They need the chance to learn a new way of seeing.
Keep the arts giving forward and thank someone who believed in each one of us without ever meeting any one of us. Invest in your future and region’s well-being.
Pay it forward.
http://cli.gs/UPAF
Social Media 1.01 according to JHTaylor
May 10th, 2009 by Julia TaylorA very quick discovery walk through of social media for everyone who looks at this phenomenon with amazement and blurry vision!
MySpace.com This is the space of teens, music and hormones. There are great sites with garage band music and playlists, photography and lots of little hourly and minutely connections. Sometime in the future, someone will figure out how to nuke myspace accounts upon request similar to yet to be developed less painful approaches to tattoo removal. It’s worthwhile joining just to know what your kids are up to.
Facebook.com The original college student only site is now owned by the Boomers. The largest group of new facebookers are 45 and over. Facebook created the verb of friending. Think about going to your local Cheers bar or coffee shop. You see people you know and catch up and they introduce you to their friends. You find people you knew in high school. Its is a virtual alumni party and calendar for birthdays, events and causes. It is a contained universe in some ways since you must agree to who is your friend. More arts groups, causes, non-profits, bars and other commercial sites are showing up and the lists of friends can be of great value in forwarding information and asking for support for events and efforts.
Twitter.com Tweeting is actually micro-blogging in 140 characters or less. It is the haiku of blogs. Twitter is going into a bar or coffee shop out of town full of friendly strangers. You find people you know, people you would like to know and others that pass by in a river of tweets. Twitter’s real power is the ability to connect people on issues, ideas and causes real-time. People use hashmarks to denote a trend, issue or idea like #GMCMKE or #Brewers and using a search function you can quickly find those who are also interested. Direct Messages or DMs keep messages private. Locally, twitter delivered people, calls and information on key issues like transit, water and public art. Authenticity counts so there needs to be personality behind the tweeter. Blasting out urls or headlines doesn’t work well. Anyone can follow you and so everything you tweet out there is visible to friend and foe.
Twitter is truly a river of conversation and I like to narrow the channel using apps like Tweetdeck where I can use columns to follow groups of key people, issues and topics. It sorts it all out. You can use apps that can connect all your sites–so one message on Facebook or twitter shows up on the other and tracks messages from both.
You can also stay up through phone apps. The iPhone particularly makes it easy to track all of the social media venues.
Friends ask me why people would be interested in daily events in someone’s life on twitter and I think it helps to open the door on who we are and our personality. People also want to know what is going on and what we think about issues and ideas so I think tweeting can say more about who we are and why we think and do what we do.
I may be tweeting about an issue like transit or water or the UN Global Cities Compact and the next tweet will be my daily grumble about getting on the treadmill. People tweet back and Retweet –the ultimate help and compliment. This sends my message onto their followers. The multiplier effect of RT (retweeting) is the power and strength of Twitter–it is how the word is spread.
I’ve met an amazing group of people on twitter. Getting together is called a “tweet-up” and I’ve had a chance to tweetup over coffee with folks I’ve met on twitter. New friends and new energy for a better Milwaukee–what could be better.
Lake Michigan in April
April 8th, 2009 by Julia TaylorToday it felt like spring. It was marvelous to drive down the lakefront and see the clouds skidding over the water sparkling under this spring sun. So I had to pull over by the yacht club and take this picture. The fishing boats were being winched into into the water and men in utility vans were watching the water with coffee cups on the dashboard.
HDR Photos
April 3rd, 2009 by Julia TaylorThis is a bit different than the public art debate with the Common Council and Janet Zwieg’s commision–but then again art is an individual matter sometimes.
Photography is my current passion artistically. I grew up drawing portraits at county fairs for $25 a portrait and sketches for display advertising for the daily and weekly papers. Two years of art classes at Ball State University was wonderful but I was lousy at design so decided to protect my GPA and scholarship and went for an English/Philosophy degree with an Art minor. Nevertheless, I paid my rent often with stained glass commissions from my own little second bedroom studio called “The Vitreous Works.”
Creativity is what provides the perspective in difficult issues–otherwise life is black and white and confined to boxes that we can’t get out of easily. Enough philosophy–I’ve had a lot of fun recently with both iPhone photo apps and HDR (high dynamic range) photography with a Canon Rebel XTi digital camera. So here are a few shots and a little creative breather in the life of art and social controversy!
My backyard
My Front Porch
Side View
Sunday Fireplace
Fifty cents for the Mona Lisa
April 3rd, 2009 by Julia TaylorEarly this week, Jonathon Winkle, an artist and President of the Sharon Lynne Wilson Center, asked me a very thoughtful question. He noted that we talk a great deal about the importance of our cultural assets in corporate talent attraction but we never ask if we have created both the opportunities and public attitude to attract and retain artists. As a performing artist, he noted the reduction in concerts and other events which allow artists to support themselves financially. But what concerned Jonathon more was a general public attitude that we don’t even think about or actively discuss the environment here for artists.
His point was brought home again with the brewing flap over Janet Zweig’s proposed public art installation on Wisconsin Ave. I think public weigh in is important on public art but comments like “I wouldn’t give 50 cents for the Mona Lisa” by our elected leadership just creates the image again of an unsophisticated city that does not value art or artists. I don’t think represents Milwaukee or its art community fairly at all.
I’m a great optimist in the community’s ability to correct its course quickly when needed. It is time for some public input on both the decision to delay payment of the commission and effectively kill the project and send the funding to another community (sound familiar) and how to create more awareness and better process for public input. Let’s not send out the message that Milwaukee is down on art and artists.
You can help change the course of this debate by calling your alderperson–
Thanks to Dave Reid for the information.
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/twoaday
Urban Milwaukee http://urbanmilwaukee.com
UWM Downtown! http://www.uwmdowntown.org
The Public Works Committee would put a stop to an effort to improve Milwaukee’s pedestrian environment. If you believe we should support public art in Milwaukee please contact our elected officials today.
C. C. President Willie L. Hines, Jr. - 15th District Alderman - whines@milwaukee.gov
Alderman Ashanti Hamilton - 1st District Alderman - ahamil@milwaukee.gov
Alderman Joe Davis - 2nd District Alderman - jldavis@milwaukee.gov
Alderman Nik Kovac - 3rd District Alderman - nkovac@milwaukee.gov
Alderman Robert J. Bauman - 4th District Alderman - rjbauma@milwaukee.gov
Alderman James A. Bohl, Jr. - 5th District Alderman - jbohl@milwaukee.gov
Alderwoman Milele A. Coggs - 6th District Alderman - mcoggs@milwaukee.gov
Alderman Willie C. Wade - 7th District Alderman - wwade@milwaukee.gov
Alderman Robert G. Donovan - 8th District Alderman - rdonov@milwaukee.gov
Alderman Robert W. Puente - 9th District Alderman - rpuent@milwaukee.gov
Alderman Michael J. Murphy - 10th District Alderman - mmurph@milwaukee.gov
Alderman Joe Dudzik -11th District Alderman - jdudzi@milwaukee.gov
Alderman James N. Witkowiak - 12th District Alderman - jwitko@milwaukee.gov
Alderman Terry L. Witkowski - 13th District Alderman - twitko@milwaukee.gov
Alderman Tony Zielinski -14th District Alderman - tzieli@milwaukee.gov
Saturday Morning Walk and the La Quinta Art Fair
March 14th, 2009 by Julia TaylorHere’s a few pics from this morning’s walk with their own comments.
After a quick walk, we met our friend, Susan, and headed to La Quinta for the 8th largest juried art festival in the country. It is huge and very high quality.
The wrapped wire figurines were just gorgeous. The artist wraps the wire around wax figures and then melts the wax.
These contemperary type of totems were colorfully amazing and had the advantage of great height.
But a real living sculpture were these magical creatures spinning and dancing around us and occasionally leaning in close to say hello!
And what is an Art Festival without some Koi under the bridge.
I Love the New Photo Editing iPhone Apps–Vacation Tested
March 12th, 2009 by Julia TaylorFlight delays and airport gate rushing started this vacation off slowly on Tuesday. The Wednesday morning drive from LA to Palm Springs gave me plenty of time to download some new photo apps to play with here in vacation heaven.So here are my editorial comments and a sample of the work. Enjoy–I am!
Panolab Pro The pro version of this panoramic software (on sale for $4.99) works amazingly well for the limitations of size of the iPhone. I did learn to use my library pictures versus taking the pics with the program. To maintain a level field of focus, you need to take the pics quickly and then match them with the software. It’s easy to rotate and match using an opacity filter and a curved grid. The pro version gives you the chance to auto adjust contrast and color–which I used more than I thought I would. Here’s the original assembled panorama of the mountains by Panolab Pro and an uncropped panorama of the living room using the free Panolab app.
I didn’t use the built in cropper but rather used Photogene to sharpen, color correct and crop. It is more detailed and flexible.
To rapidly take pictures, a simple .99 cent tool is FastTapCamera. It also has a 2x digital zoom. It opens quickly and just touch the screen to take the picture. It does take longer to save.
QuadCamera> is a little weird. It reminds me of an Lomographic 4 lens film cameras and takes 4 pictures rapid fire but saves them all on one photo like a photo strip taken at a mall photo booth.
My FAVORITE one is CameraBag. It provides a jillion filters that really worked well with the desert scene. The Lola filter was my fav for wandering through Palm Springs.
Here’s Cheeky’s Cafe on Palm Canyon Dr. (owned by Tara the first cousin of our own Milwaukee Tina Chang). Based on the food and the menu, creativity and craftsmanship run deep in the family ties. There is also a pretty good Flickr site.
Here’s a sample from the panorama with the instant camera filter.
And finally, there is Photo Lab– its limited for editing compared to Photogene but has some cool filters that remind me of Photoshop’s artistic filters. 
I’ve been relaxing a bit too and reading Twilight on the Kindle app downloaded on the iPhone–it is remarkably easy to read and you just swipe through the pages. Plus no one needs to know I’m not reading Pride and Prejudice!
Art, Kindle and Emily Thomas’s Blog
March 8th, 2009 by Julia TaylorMary Louise Schumacher’s (@artcity) article today in the MKE Journal Sentinel pulls us out of the insulation of our usual circles into the eyes of a mother , Emily Thomas, who visits the Milwaukee Art Museum with her daughters. This family squirms some and views both the contemporary and traditional art almost comically. No connection through a docent tour, an audio tour or even a little advance reading of the reviews for this family.
We would never know of their views except for the Mom’s blog recapturing the visit. Technology opened the door of opinion though the door of conversation on art got stuck and never yanked open.
Technology is lifting the skirt on lots of discussions. We’re leaving on vacation soon and I’ve thought about the Kindle seriously. I have stacks of books I could bring but luggage limits make it costly and I’ve gotten used to finding things on line and clicking for instant gratification.
Lots of comments back from twitters both wondering the same thing and a few who own them. I just hate to commit to another gadget that is ready for the technology heap in a year and I don’t know if it could really replace the physicality of a book.
Maybe I’m a little like Emily above–willing to venture out some to new experiences but not out of my comfort zone. I also feel a little traitorous to my all friends who make their living with ink, whether newspapers, bookstores and even our great postal carrier.
So at @khinrichs suggestion, I compromised and downloaded the kindle app on my iphone and tried out a book. Surprisingly it works pretty well. Usually I have big problems reading much text on the 3 1/2 inch screen but I can read it easily and with swiping the pages, I feel like I am in “Evelyn Woodhead’s Sped Reding Course.” So for the time beginning, it’s a fair compromise.
Just checking back on line, there is a lot of talk about Emily Thomas and some –wow-significant reaction.
Maybe MAM could invite them in for a docent tour and some of the family art classes which has a good dose of art history in it. Sometimes it’s ok to start with a 3 1/2 inch screen and expand your vision from there.