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At the end of the last school year, I rode my new motorbike to the school at pickup time. My daughter had already started to ask me to take her for a ride as a passenger, but I was not ready to do it yet (I am still not ready). We went to fly our trainer kites at Clover Point, and I had my GoPro running the entire time. I thought it would make a fun vlog post, but I under-estimated how much time it would take me to edit it. I worked on it on and off throughout the summer, and finally today decided that it was time to declare it finished. It felt a bit strange today, on a cool, rainy day, to read a subtitle in the video telling how excited I was to see the spring sunshine that reminded me of the approaching summer. It’s another reminder to myself that the videos, as well as photos and written notes, are more relevant, and probably more interesting, if they are brought to a more-or-less publishable form in a timely manner.

Better late than never, I suppose…

Our last photoshoot for The Black Light Magazine involved some serious production effort, including the work of two models and two makeup artists. In addition to learning a lot about black light photography, I am discovering that some of the most interesting and educational work for me personally is the follow-up writing of the blog posts describing these photoshoots. In this case in particular, I had an opportunity to interview one of the artists. We talked over Skype and went into the details of the airbrushing technique, in which I have a personal interest through my fascination with the painting of model tanks and dioramas. Below is the post that I wrote for TBLM.

Following a recent Tron-themed photoshoot featuring the spectacular makeup and body painting of Jennifer Walton (Jenny Jenn on Facebook), we had a chance to chat with her to find our more about her background, inspirations and current work. For me personally, it was an incredibly educational experience to see Jenny use her airbrush to apply fluorescent patterns that she created on the spot to the model’s body. I found that her technique was both versatile and restrained – combination that produced a strong visual impact while retaining a unique personal style.

When asked to describe her work in a couple of words, Jenny replied that most of her art was airbrushed, and that she created both canvasses and body paintings.

Jenny’s artistic education involve studying graphic design in college, but she began drawing when she was a child. Jenny loved art for as long as she can remember, and she had many opportunities to pursue it by going to art camps, shows, etc. At grade 10, her art teacher encourage Jenny to learn drawing in pen. The fact that one cannot easily erase pen drawings teaches the artist to work with any mistakes she might make along the way. Jenny found this skill crucial to building her confidence and ultimately to enjoying drawing and painting.

As far as her biggest achievement to-date, Jenny considers it to be her work with Evan Biddell, the winner of the first Project Runway Canada, at the Toronto Arts & Fashion Week last April (2015). Jenny introduced the black light-activated florescent paints to create reptile-skin patterns on the clothes and the models’ bodies. The effects have not been used in the industry until that point, and the collaboration of Jenny and Evan earned them considerable international acclaim.

Jenny has been perfecting her body painting techniques for the past seven years. She became involved in it by entering a body painting competition without any prior experience or knowledge in this genre. She did all her work by a paintbrush and ended up winning the competition. This win led to her getting a job that involved painting fifteen performers at a festival. The winning brushed body-painting took Jenny five-and-a-half hours of non-stop work, so she was naturally concerned about speeding up the painting process.

Someone suggested to Jenny to use an airbrush, so she proceeded to order one on the Internet. Using it turned out to be so addictive that it became Jenny’s main tool. From learning the basic techniques to perfecting advanced layering and making her own stencils, she gradually developed her unique style. Jenny particularly enjoys seeing her characters literally come to life, when she paints them on a live model. This aspect of human interaction is what draws Jenny to body painting.

Last year, Jenny started to incorporate more free-hand (rather than stencilling) airbrushing into her work, which has become her main focus. Her most current work was a painting of a woman’s face that she created for the promotion campaign of The Conscious Goddess Festival, a creation of her friend Tamara Broughton. Jenny reflects on this work as being particularly challenging because it involved a new subject and also because of her personal connection with the project. Despite the challenges, or perhaps because of them, Jenny was pleased to see an improvement of her technique, compared to her earlier works.

Jenny’s artistic influences include Gustav Klimt and Alex Gray as well as the airbrush masters Terry Hill and Javier Soto. Last year, Jenny attended an intensive course on airbrushing techniques in Las vegas, where she met Jonathan Pantaleon, whose work has made a big impression on her.

In conclusion, I asked Jenny to share one piece of advice with someone, who might like to get involved in airbrushing. Her advice was: “Make sure your airbrush is always very clean.” This is, perhaps, not surprising, but Jenny emphasized that the very basic techniques, e. g. taking apart the airbrush for cleaning, which involves handling tiny, precision-manufactured details, is what many novice artists find most stressful. She also suggested developing a habit of always blowing air through the tip of airbrush periodically during painting in order to keep the tip clean during the work session. Blowing air through the tip is easily accomplished if one uses a dual-action airbrush, where pushing down on the trigger controls the flow of air, while pulling back on it controls the paint flow. Jenny also finds it helpful to use a compressor that can continuously sustain airflow, even when the brush is not in use. This helps her to avoid splatters at the beginning of the strokes.

In terms of the basic techniques, Jenny emphasized the importance of mastering the “dagger stroke” for freehand airbrushing. This stroke produces a line that starts thick and gradually tapers off. Learning how to execute it smoothly in every direction is challenging, but it makes a tremendous difference in the technical level of one’s painting.

In a typical painting session, Jenny uses two Iwata airbrushes (one for light and one for dark paints) attached to an Iwata Smart Jet compressor.

We have been incredibly lucky to have an opportunity to collaborate with Jenny on several projects, and we look forward to tapping into her creativity showcasing more of her work in the future. In the mean time, she can be found on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/jenny.jenn.923

“…it is not only necessity, but also laziness, which is the mother of invention.”
– Alan Watts, “The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety.”

Conserving energy and economy of motion is important in many, if not all aspects of life. It is certainly true in the case of martial arts, academic research, teaching, and other areas, where creativity is important. However, there is a fine line between conserving motion and thus moving “skillfully – along the line of least resistance”, as Alan Watts puts it, and just being passive, procrastinating.

I think the difference is in taking a proactive, as opposite to a reactive approach to whatever is at hand. When we are in a reactive mode of operation, overwhelmed by whatever is coming our way, we might be busy, but not truly active, fro the creative point of view.

In kendo, there is an expression “bogyo no tame no bogyo nashi” – “there is no defence for the sake of defence.” I would not attempt a definitive interpretation (these sayings are notorious for having layers upon layers of underlying meanings,) but one way to read this is that even when we have to be defensive the reaction itself should be viewed as an opportunity to prepare to the next action.

Alan Watts in his “The Wisdom of Insecurity” explains that we, as humans, cannot  really compare any two experiences, because one and only one experience can occur at any given moment, and we cannot rapidly shift our attention to a prior experience – only to a memory of it, which is not the same thing (“A menu is very useful, but it is no substitute for the dinner.”)

Photography, in fact, facilitates this rapid switch between the memories, which are frozen in images. Because, as Watts explains, we tend to think about a memory of an event as if it was the event itself, photography can actually alter our subjective experiences in retrospect. This is why eyewitness accounts are not considered to be definitive evidence in courts – the memories of the witnesses can be affected by the information acquired a posteriori.

The question of whether the act of photography detracts from the actual experience of whatever is being photographed is not an unreasonable one. After all, a photograph is only an image of the a event, place, person, object or situation. A still photo cannot even adequately represent motion, which is arguably one the most important components of an artistic image. A still image is just representation of motion, a conventional way of describing the concept of time-dependence and change, which is inherent to everything that surrounds us.

Moreover, taking a photo requires a certain amount of concentration and effort, which can detract from the interaction with the subject. Travel photography is a perfect example of this, where lugging around a backpack full of heavy photo gear often profoundly altered my experience of many exciting and relaxing destinations. In fact, this exact issue (travelling with too much equipment) prompted the popularity of “nimble photography,” which is being popularized by Derrick Story.

On the other hand, I believe that the effect that photography has on the experience is well worth the effort and attention that it requires. To be clear, I don’t think that the main value of photography is in documenting the experience. Rather, it is in forming the experience. In this respect, photography is similar to writing, which does not simply express a pre-existing idea, but serves to crystallize the idea or a viewpoint through the writing process itself.

In the case of travel photography, researching the destination for possible photo locations, looking for shots and taking time to take them is what allows me to formulate my impression of the place and people, who live or visit there. Carrying a camera is then similar to an artist’s carrying brushes and sketchbook. As to the question of whether a DSLR is necessary or if an iPhone would suffice, I prefer to paint with high-quality brushes on good watercolour paper rather than with a blade of grass on a napkin. In other words, I find it very liberating, from the creative standpoint, not to be limited by the equipment.

It would certainly be sad to pursue an experience merely for the story that could be told about it in the future (as this is what a photo is – a condensed story in a single picture, the one that is, hopefully, worth a thousand words). But creating that story can actually shape the experience itself. I think that in this the storytelling has a tremendous power.

An unexpected aspect of sharing photos on Flickr or other social media and offering them for sale as stock images is realizing that some of the most popular photos (in terms of the number of views, sales, etc.) are not my personal favourites. I believe that this is a feature of broadcasting to a very large audience, as opposite to “narrow casting” to a small community of personal friends, who generally have similar tastes and interests to my own.

Sometimes, however, I have a sense that an image has a potential to become popular even before I post it. It usually has to do with the subject, as in the photo of ukai (fishing with cormorants) that I took in Inuyama, or the unique viewpoint, as in the shot of Niagara falls taken from a helicopter.

Otherwise, I find that even if the image has some of the components that can potentially make it interesting, such as motion and emotion, if the audience cannot relate to or immediately recognize the subject (e.g. the Eiffel tower or the Great Wall of China), their engagement in terms of views, shares over social media, etc. will be limited.

Our calligraphy submission for official grading, the first one since resuming practice after a substantial break, is completed. I am submitting a mandatory kaisho (formal script) of the specified assignment and an optional gyosho (semi-formal script) of the same text (see images above and below, respectively).

I wrote earlier that of the most challenging elements of these calligraphy exercises is compositional balance of the overall image and that of the individual characters. I find that it is somewhat easier to achieve this balance in gyosho than in kaisho. This is a little counter-intuitive, since gyosho is less structured and more reliant on the speed of the brushstrokes. So achieving balance in gyosho is a bit like riding a bicycle – you are never perfectly balanced (in a static sense) at any given moment, but are always applying small corrections for the overall dynamic balance.

I think there might be an analogy for many other life activities here (these kinds of Zen-based Japanese “Ways” – kendo, shodo, etc. tend to have plenty of them.) Achieving a perfectly balanced state at any isolated moment of time is often exceedingly difficult and (as a result) stressful, but if we are willing to sacrifice the absolute immediate balance by recognizing that there will be plenty of opportunities to apply small corrections, the result can be a smooth and even graceful ride. The important thing, of course, is to avoid excessively large deviations from the balanced condition, which could lead to an unstable situation when recovery is no longer possible.