I started working with this book that demonstrates the
latest updates to Photoshop, but I lost it. I MUST clean
out my van.
I rented this DVD, a documentary on the famous architect, Frank
Gehry. It is titled "Sketches.." because he uses rough napkin
sketches as the beginnings of his ideas -- something I can
relate to. This is a good look at a creative mind.
A fun, little graphic novel about spirits and many artists such as
Picasso and Gertrude Stein. Something different.
One of the books I am saving for my trip out West, "Plato and
a Platypus Walk Into a Bar" is by two philosophers who explain
principles of Philosophy using jokes as illustrations.
One of those cheap novels -- I might take this as
reading material for my trip, too.
A murder-mystery set in Thailand. I picked it up
because I like books set in other cultures.
I found these instructional manuals for the new versions of Flash and Dreamweaver
for 50% off, so I picked them up to refresh my understanding and to examine
the new features in each program.
I might as well brush up on Illustrator, too.
Recent Reading
It's been a while since I reported on what I've been reading. I think I've had trouble finding time to read during the past couple of months.
This biography of the artist, Goya, is teaching me a little about Spanish culture during the late 1700's and early 1800's. It has a unique twist -- the author, who has written a dozen art books, always wanted to write about Goya but couldn't get his arms around the subject. Then he had a serious car accident in which "so much of the skeletal structure on my right side was broken, disjointed, or pulverized that my chances of survival were extremely low...more than a dozen operations, more pain than I had imagined possible, and, at the outset, some five weeks in a coma..." This trauma gave him the needed insight into the mind of Goya. He intertwines comments about his own experience with his analysis of Goya's work (which includes "scenes of atrocity and misery").
The author describes Goya as "a true hinge figure, the last of what was going and the first of what was to come: the last Old Master and the first Modernist." And he describes modernism as having "to do with a questioning, irreverent attitude to life; with a persistent skepticism that sees through the official structures of society and does not pay reflexive homage to authority, whether that of church, monarch, or aristocrat."