Isn't this gorgeous?
Artist acquaintance, Christine McCall, gave me the go-ahead to show you some of her incredible kaleidoscope designs. Like me, Christine uses her own photography as the "seed" for her digital art works and this one she grew from a photo she took of Point Reyes Lighthouse [CA]. This image is on her website, Christine McCall, in the Kaleidoscope Gallery.
You might think that creating a design that "works" is easy...just pick a photo, upload it into the design software and hit a few buttons. Not so! The actual is that you can spend hours manipulating and turning and trying until you get that composition that sings and with colors that harmonize and tantalize...until the whole piece works.
Christine has some specialized designs based on photos taken locally in her community of Livermore, in the East Bay Area of California. Having lived there myself, I totally recognized where this is! There is a lovely lightpost at First Street right downtown.
She also does works around flowers and nature, of which my favorite in her gallery right now is "Red Grapes at Robertson Park." [next big image below] Christine's work is part of an exhibit of three artists at the Purple Orchid Inn Resort & Spa in the Livermore area. Since I'm still on the emailing list for all things arts in the Bay Area, I got an email letting the world know that the Purple Orchid is now under new management and that they are tuned into and turned onto ART. The resort is opening a new art gallery and is featuring the artwork of Christine, along with local artists Angela Johal and Phillip Ornum as their debut exhibit. Here's Christine's Red Grapes kaleidoscope:
Awesome!
I love that a business like this resort and spa is marrying its interests with that of the art community. To me it's a natural fit. Resorts and spas claim to help a person rest and rejuvenate their bodies and souls and well, I believe that Art speaks to the wellness of the soul, mind and heart. But that's me.
It was a joy to touch base with Christine and find out what's going on in the Livermore, Dublin and Pleasanton area. Since moving north last fall I've missed my artist friends and acquaintances. There was a group that would meet several times a month at the Livermore Public Library's cafe in the mornings and talk art. What a joy! Talk art! [If you haven't been there, the community of Livermore has an awesome library. Inside is a space where art exhibits have been held [I've been privileged to have had my work included in many of them] and the cafe has both indoor and patio seating. And they call it a library! [Imagine Gimli-in Lord of the Rings -saying this as he said "And they call it a mine, a mine!"]
Anyway...if any in the artist community of the East Bay is doing something cool and new, send me an email and let me know! I'd love to share it with everyone here at Mosaic Mandalas.
The post title indicates something new on my plate - yup, I'm writing a screenplay. You know that I love the art form of writing nearly as much as I do the visual arts of mosaic and such.
*an aside: don't know if I mentioned it or not, but I'm a great fan of the novels by writing team Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, especially their hero Special Agent A.X.L. Pendergast - a strange and intelligent [and very wealthy] FBI agent. To date they have 12 books in the Pendergast storyline and I'm reading #9. Anyway...they send out a newsletter to fans and the latest was very clever. It is written by one of the recurring characters of the Pendergast books, Corrie Swanson. I thought this was so cool to do. I love writers...good ones. Wonder if the guys will ever have a Pendergast movie? The movie Relic is based on their first book with Pendergast in it, but the movie excludes that character. It would take a special actor to capture Pendergast...I'm thinking Benedict Cumberbatch. He'd be perfect. But I digress.
I do have a couple novels in-progress but have been bitten by the screenplay bug. I may just turn those budding novels into screenplay treatment. I found a cool software for writing screenplays that does all the necessary formatting automatically - such a help. I'm kickstarting my writing by entering a contest. It's got a cool feature to it, this contest- you're given the logline [a one sentence summary of the film] and you write the first 15 pages. I read the logline and got inspired! Last night I fired up the writing software and wrote the first four pages until George [our Amazon parrot] complained that it was time to go night night. The prizes are awesome, but more fun is the writing. See, you paint pictures with words...you create a mosaic with written images. I'll let you know how this contest progresses.
Thanks for your kind words, Linda! Did you know that the Purple Orchid is being featured on Hotel Impossible on Monday night? The show is carried on the Travel Channel. The Vine has decided to show it live on their big screen at 8:00, and the town is invited. The P.O. owners will be there to tell inside stories about the shooting. Should be a fun event!
Good luck on the screenplay project.
Posted by: A Facebook User | 04/26/2012 at 12:19 PM