Musings on types of art I like to create

In one of the art museums I visited today, there was a quote on the wall

In my art I try to answer the question: “Who am I? Who are you?” Questions of identity and the soul are important to me.

He had a series of mostly uninteresting portraits. I did see other exhibits at other museums that did make me think about the identities of people in the picture or various aspects of human nature, but not necessarily the concept of the soul in general. I usually approach questions of identity and the soul in a very rational/psychological sort of way.


It's interesting to think about what kind of art I like to create. I enjoy doing things that:
- Make use of some natural phenomenon to generate an aesthetically pleasing image or movie (the natural phenomenon could be a mathematical formula, a way that dyes mix, a way that a plant grows etc)
- Plays with tricks of human perception to create interesting effects higher up in the human mind's visual processing.
- Seems mysterious or magical because it uses unusual techniques that people are unfamiliar with
- Play with light and shadow
- Plays with the superposition of geometrical forms.
- Has humor or irony value
- Is interactive or social in that people are able to touch or climb inside it, and the art facilitates social interaction between the people experiencing it.

I generally don't deal with human subjects unless they're part of the art.

I'm not including photography in this – I tend to have a wider range of subjects when I'm photographing.

So I think it would be interesting to try drawing poartraits. I will be terrible at it... i'm more or less terrible at representaitonal drawing to begin with, but I want to see if picking up some skill in this area changes the way I perceive and remember human faces.

[travel] Unintentional elimination diet.

In Asia I did everything the Lonely Planet guidebook told me not to do. I ate the fruit. I bought food from street vendors. I never got sick. In the Middle East, the available foods were completely different, and I still never got sick. Similarly, Egypt and Greece were just fine. In fact, in all of these countries I was better off digestion-wise than I was at home.

However, Eastern Europe has been a neverending stream of trouble. Why?

Things I ate in Eastern Europe that I didn't eat so much of during the first part of my trip.

- Sausage and other cured meats
- Dairy (though I had some in Greece as well), specifically cheese.
- Whole-wheat bread (and more bread in general).
- Chocolate
- Very salty entrees

I don't know if one of these is the culprit or if it's something else (eg types of fat used for cooking, specific pesticides used on crops, spices etc). I'll have to experiment more when I get home. I may look into that nutrition evaluation some friends of mine have done.

[travel] Familiar faces and genetic subgroups

The most interesting thing in Budapest for me was seeing a large number of people who resembled a Hungarian woman I dated back in college. Her look was fairly distinctive. Although I cannot easily describe it, I know it when I see it. What's interesting is that while 15% or so of the residents looked very close to the way she looked, the rest didn't resemble her at all. In a country with a long history of continuous habitation by the same group, there are probably substantial subgroups within each ethnic group – eg, the peasants kept separate from the noblemen, people from within a particular guild tended to intermarry etc.

Update: Accordiang to my Hungarian-Italian couchsurfing host, after a particularly devastating war many centuries ago, Hungary “purchased” a million peasants from Romania. So that might account for some of the genetic diversity. Ah, serfdom.

[travel] The Sedlec Ossuary

The Sedlec Ossuary was built from the bones of 30,000 victims of the Black Plague. For an artist, the chance to work with the remains of 30,000 people doesn't come along very often. Generally, for it to be okay at all, the people have to die naturally, rapidly, and in very large numbers such that there isn't time for individual burial. In addition, enough time has to pass such that any personal link to the deceased is gone. In this case, the bones were kept in a church crypt for 500 years before a local sculptor had a go at them. The aim was to create a monument to the dead, and the massive skull piles do give you a sense for the effects of the Black Death..




( A couple of big photos and a flash comparison )

The other decorations are all mixtures of pretty, creepy, clever, tacky, and weird in differing amounts. One that scored high on both clever and tacky was the coat of arms of the family that paid for the project. I applaud the artist's clever use of vertebrae and the irony that the skull in the bottom right corner of the coat of arms is meant to represent the skull of a defeated Turkish invader, and it's made from the skull of a defeated Turkish invader. For once the map IS the territory! On the other hand, the whole thing is kind of wrong in a chapel mourning Black Death victims.



Speaking of wrong, toward the end of my visit, this guy showed up. He swears that this is the only sweater he had, and he only wore it because it was raining outside. It was way too funny to not document though:

[travel] Paying to remember the dead

Today I found out it costs nearly $20 to visit the memorial for Czech Jews who died in the Holocaust and the small adjoining Jewish Cemetery. This just seems... wrong. It's as if the US govt charged $100 to see the Vietnam War Memorial and Arlington Cemetery.

As far as I can tell, they do it beecause they can get away with it. They know busloads of Israeli tourists are going to show up every day, and there's no way they will come all this way and won't see the memorial, no matter how much it costs.

In any case, here are some very expensive pictures.  The reason the cemetery was so dense is because the land was limited, so they started stacking graves on top of existing ones and then moving up the headstones.