On Monday, November 5, 2018 Rigoberta Menchú Tum was awarded the Alice and Clifford Spendlove Prize in Social Justice, Diplomacy and Tolerance at the Art Kamangar Center at Merced Theater in downtown Merced. The 1992 Nobel Peace Prize winner was the 12th recipient of this UC Merced Prize.
Rigoberta’s presentation was informal, touching, and profound.
She sat for a book signing, and I photographed her with the intention of drawing her freehand in my iPad Pro in the Sketch Club app.
Rigoberta Menchú (click on image to enlarge)
Sketch Club has a cool technical feature that summarizes the drawing/painting statistics:
I’ve added a few posts about Merced Art Hop in the last few years; check out the PHOTO GALLERY for sure to get a feel for this quarterly, downtown Merced, CA event. Saturday, October 20, 2018 was Art Hop’s 10 Anniversary. The October Art Hop is always fun. It’s cool enough for kids to show up in costumes, get their faces painted, and engage in some hands-on activities.
I brought my iPad and a projector and invited a few local artists to share their talents with everyone at Bob Hart Square that evening.
Ok, this simple idea popped into my head yesterday, and I had to get it out of my system. Some of you will remember Norm Crosby, the Master of Malaprop. I’m pretty sure he didn’t say this.
About a week ago, a mobile/digital art friend of mine, click here to meet her, posted an evocative photo of a succulent, bulbous tomato on Instagram:
The image reminded me of Karl Malden’s nose; and so for several days I walked around, semi-entranced, with that image on my cognitive back burner…until last night:
click on image to enlarge
Reference photo (stock, Google images)
Technical: I drew this freehand in Sketch Club on an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil. Mas o menos, eh? Sketch Club produces a cool statistical summary of the images you create. You can see in this summary that I played around for about an hour. The summary doesn’t show how I used iColorama to slightly darken and sharpen the image, which only took a couple of minutes.
Lately, I’ve been enjoying the sounds of G Street Revolution whenever I have a chance. A few of the musicians are colleagues of my wife at UC Merced. Check’em Out on Facebook or here.
At the Merced County Fairgrounds:
click on image to enlarge
At Vista Ranch and Cellars:
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Just a snippet at Five Ten Bistro:
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Pretty sure all these were done in Sketch Club and iColorama.
…on the way to Santa Barbara to see David Byrne’s 100th performance (8/24/8) of the Utopia Tour held at the Santa Barbara Bowl. See tiny snippet of performance below.
This past July (2018) Annyth and I spent a week at Zulu Nyala, a private game reserve near Hluhluwe Kwazulu Natal. We were lucky; we managed to see all five of Africa’s big five game animals: lion, leopard, rhinoceros (black and white), elephant, and the African buffalo. We saw plenty of others as well – up close! Beforehand, we spent a week and a half first in Cape Town and then in Johannesburg, where we toured with an old friend, Ruth, whom we hadn’t seen for 25 years.
Annyth, Ruth, and I met in 1989 in Washington, DC at American University, where the three of us were graduate students in anthropology. Ruth is from Johannesburg and still lives in Johannesburg. Learn more about Ruth here. With the exception of a few emails and maybe a Skype call several years ago, we had no contact with Ruth, but we somehow always regarded her as a dear friend. So it wasn’t a surprise that, after a quarter of a century, our time with Ruth was spectacularly awesome. We got to meet her partner, Toni; her colleague, Meryl; her brother, Jonathan and his family; others as well; plus, we got to see Cape Town and Johannesburg through Ruth’s eyes to a large extent. It turns out that our friendship had quietly grown over the years, and now because of our reunion, it’ll continue to grow for years to come.
Here’s the image I sent Ruth a week or so before Annyth and I showed up in South Africa: {Please click on all images to enlarge.}
They didn’t really put this sign up…iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, Sketch Club, iColorama (click on image to enlarge)
Getting there by air…(practice/play time with my iPad Pro and mainly the Sketch Club drawing/painting ap:
On the runway…iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, Sketch Club, and iColorama (click on image to enlarge)
Still waiting…iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, Sketch Club, and iColorama (click on image to enlarge)
Some guy in Atlanta also going on our 13 hour flight…iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, Sketch Club, and iColorama (click on image to enlarge)
Started wondering…iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, Sketch Club, and iColorama (click on image to enlarge)
Cape Town, Robben Island:
Rainbow Ruth in Muizenberg…iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, Sketch Club, and iColorama (click on image to enlarge)
South African penguins: iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, Sketch Club, and iColorama (click on the rest of these images to enlarge, ok?)
Our guide at Robben Island Museum, a former political prisoner himself…iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, Sketch Club, and iColorama
Short hop to Richards Bay from Johannesburg:
Short Hop from Joburg to Richards Bay
Zulu Nyala:
Giraffes…iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, Sketch Club, and iColorama
Impala…iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, Sketch Club, and iColorama
Zebra…iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, Sketch Club, and iColorama
The noble warthog…iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, Sketch Club, and iColorama
Hippo…iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, Sketch Club, and iColorama
Elephant…(She co-stared in the video below) iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, Sketch Club, and iColorama
You just have to see this:
ok, back to my iPad drawing:
Rhino (white)…iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, Sketch Club, and iColorama
Lion…iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, Sketch Club, and iColorama
Our tent…iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, Sketch Club, Procreate, and iColorama
Our excellent guide, Chris (senior)…iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, Sketch Club, and iColorama
Thanks for visiting!! Comment below, if you’re so inclined.
I know a little bit about the bible. I have an M.Div. for Christ’s sake; it’s one of three graduate degrees for Pete’s sake! I may no longer be an ordained Benedictine monk, but I sure as Hell sat through my share of biblical studies, theology, even Greek courses. Most of them were fascinating. I had a brilliant seminary professor, one of several like that, in fact, who approached the study of sacred scriptures from a literary-criticism perspective, steeped in critical hermeneutics, semiology, and philology…right up my alley. He planted the following image in my mind (I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.):
I’d like to let the photos and images do the talking in this post because it was an intricate confluence of chances, that evening of May 21, 2018. A few years before that at my first Mobile Digital Arts and Creativity Summit in Palo Alto, CA I met Claire Iris Schencke, digital artist extraordinaire. Check her out here. Claire lives in Arcata, CA, and so since Ann and I were planning to be in the neighborhood on our North Coast road trip, I let Claire know.
Claire Iris Schencke and yours truly
As it turned out, Claire, who routinely does live iPad drawings at live music events, invited us to such an event at the unquestionably funky home of Gregg Moore, whose “crib” is well known for exquisite live music. Check this out for yourself, please.
Gregg Moore in his Crib…hey, there’s Kaisa Mäensivu seated, she’s the talented upright bassist
Claire live iPad drawing; Ukrainian American pianist Alex Pryrodny; Finnish bass player, Kaisa Mäensivu; and, of course, Swedish flugelhorn player, Oskar Stenmark, momentarily playing the airhorn.
I was invited to open my iPad Pro, and these are the three – quick – digital renderings that I contributed to the evening. I’ll let the images and that final photo close out this post. Let me simply add that this evening was a genuine and memorable treat!
Sketch Club app; incidentally, Oskar ended this particular piece with an actual animal horn, which, I hope, explains why he isn’t holding his famous flugelhorn.
Sketch Club app
Paper 53
Claire Iris Schencke and your humble servant with iPad drawings from the evening
