Virtual Paintout in Istanbul

(click on image to enlarge)

Firuz Ağa Mosque

Watercolour and crayon

Charlene Brown

The Virtual Paintout is in Istanbul, Turkey this month. 

After finding that good shots at the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sophia are kind of hard to come by on Streetview (I even considered a `streetview` of the Blue Mosque from a ferry)  I had a look at the imposing Galata Tower on the Asian side of town, and almost tried this problematical streetview of it.   Then I just wandered until I happened upon this nicely composed view of the FiruzAğa Mosque as seen from the Mehmet Akif Ersoy Park. 

Elegant Clean Energy Haiku VIII: Quantum Leap Haiku Illustration

Himeji Castle

t-shirt serigraph

This t-shirt I bought in Japan has a silk-screened design that is either the Japanese characters spelling out the words ‘Himeji Castle’ or a 17-shape haiga painting of the castle. Or both. I haven’t yet finished any of the paintings I started while I was in Japan, so I’ve added this design and the following quotations about haiku and haiga to the series of blog posts on Elegant Clean Energy Haiku I started on July 29 

“Both haiku and haiga translate nature through an artistic language with spiritual immediacy and selfless skill. This is achieved through Zen-like training in contemplation and technique. When the artist has reached the state of wu hsin (no-mind), a plane of mental relaxation and manual dexterity, Tao* can then take control and work through the artist’s hand and eye. This superconscious state is not to be confused with the subconscious swamp in which the surrealists find themselves.”  – On Haiku and Haiga: an essay, by Harold Stewart

 * Tao is a ‘path’ or process rather than a theory – a term used as a convention to refer to something that otherwise cannot be discussed in words.

“Haiku poet and haiga artist alike endeavored to eliminate every superfluous element and to attain an austere beauty, akin to that of abstract art...”  – Haiku Painting, by Leon Zolbrod

When the haiku writer and illustrator is a computer app, these essentially heuristic processes are going to have to be more algorithmic – well, totally algorithmic actually.  It should be possible to get around this apparent contradiction in terms through the provision for some manual input by the user.

Clean Energy Haiku V: Quantum Leap Haiku Illustration – Plan B

South American Terraces I & II

Photoshop™

©2015 Charlene Brown

Remember the South American terrace paintings I mentioned in my September 2 blog post? 

In the pictures above they have been ‘abstracted’ by reducing the number and complexity of shapes in their composition. Reducing the complexity beyond the level of recognizability produces a non-representational design.

I hope to show that this design can evoke a quite different reality, especially when considered as a haiga, accompanied by a poem such as this enigmatic little computer-generated haiku:

Less is more for all

Superconductivity

Now accelerate

This is where the ‘quantum leap’ I defined at the end of my September 23 post comes in… How far do you need to go beyond ‘recognizable’ to make that leap?  Further than South American Terraces II, I suspect. 

Plan B will continue...