A flock of swallows were having some sort of gathering by the ceiling of the Chaturbhuj Temple in Orchha, India. They may have been feeding on insects. The video captures a fragment of the magic:
Swallows in the Chaturbhuj Temple, Orchha, India from Y Bean on Vimeo.
I recently returned from a memorable three weeks in India, starting in Delhi and Orchha in the north, then central Kerala in the south, followed by a few days in Mumbai. Lots of visual inspiration to be found there and I'll be a while mentally processing everything. I've posted 300+ photos on Flickr here.
Boabab tree, Orchha, Madhya Pradesh
Tea plantations near Munnar, Kerala
Building in Chor Bazaar, Mumbai
Small Hindu Shrine near Munnar, Kerala
This one has no title as yet. Its about 13"x19", drawn on a Wacom Cintiq tablet. Basically it started as a 3D model doodle, and then next thing I knew I'd spent about 20 hours at it.
Its part of a show of my work called "Sleeping with the Window Open", up currently at Line Gallery in North Bay, Ontario.
I work in visual effects for TV and movies, mostly digital environments. Along the way I've picked up some skills in 3D, and I've always wanted to make art with it, and blend it with my drawing. Recently I've been posting about my experiments doing just that over on the forum for Luxology, the software company that makes Modo, my favourite 3D application.
Amazing how Lev Rudnev's building in "City of the Future", drawn in 1927, resembles present-day Toronto condo towers. Rudnev was a soviet practictioner of Stalinist architecture.
If there's one thing I've got, its details...
From Sleeping with the Window Open:
From Hypnagogic City:
I decided to create a facebook page for my art. Click the link and go and "Like" it if you like.
Meanwhile Here's a detail from one of my pencil drawings:
Life and work etc has distracted me this past while. I've hardly drawn a thing lately, though I was back in my studio this week, blowing the dust off everything and rearranging the furniture in preparation for resumed drawing. I have a show in North Bay, Ontario in February and I'm making some new work for it.
Also, I must apologize to anyone who's been waiting for my book to be available. I'm beyond giving a timeline, but it does exist and it will get released sooner or later. Meanwhile, please accept some random bits and bobs:
This is a dreamy montage of some of my grandfather's old 8mm film footage, lakes and other cottage country scenery:
This was from an extremely challenging draughting class where we learned perspective techniques and such. Sloppy work was sometimes put up at the front of the class with "who's rubbish is this?" written on it. In this assignment we had to morph one object into another in six even steps, rendered isometrically with contour lines that had to fade with distance. Difficult, but fun. I still use both the pencil sharpener and the wrench.
I was going through piles of stuff hauled out of the basement recently and found a bunch of forgotten drawings and school assignments rolled up in a tube. This is one of them.
Here's an early room drawing from 2001, done in ballpoint pen:
From a very early age I had frequent dreams of finding hidden rooms-between-rooms in my house. Usually some facet of my fears or desires would be present in these rooms. As a Lego fanatic, I'd often find fantastic new Lego sets I didn't know existed (which made waking up disappointing). Later we moved into an old farmhouse with lots of nooks and crannies and a basement that often flooded. It underwent a lot of renovation over the 17 years we lived there, and I was always fascinated when a wall was removed or temporarily breached and you could pass from one room to another in a new way. The scope of the dreams expanded to include strange gaps and holes and secret shafts that dropped away into spooky abysses. Sometimes I'd explore basements beneath the basement, or attics beyond the attic. I think I've probably explored a thousand different dream versions of that old house.
These are two of the first room drawing doodles I did in 2001. At the time I was living in a tiny basement room. I also went without a home computer for about a year so I was sketching a lot more...