Meat Your Maker part 3

In this third and final installment I'm gonna go over "BLJCHEWNA" short for BLUE LONG JOHN CHEWNA.  First, I wanna state that this is actually a Rainbow Trout pictured, "Chewna" is actually the name of my dog's stuffed fish chew toy.  So moving on from that fish can be farmed just like chicken and cattle, and as fish farms go this represents the trout farm I grew up around called Lake Julian Trout Farm.  The blue in the background flowing with the other primary colors, and the secondary color of green used for the trout follows the same color theme as orange for the YKFCHICKEN and purple for RMCBOVINE.  As the eye wonders down you are left with this pixelated, bugged, vaporwave-esque depiction of a certain fast food establishment's fish and chips (chips not included....hush puppies extra).  The intended style was to portray, much like vaporwave, a retro, Windows 95 OS, 32-bit video game feel to it...

...and just like that the project that was dreamt back in 2010/2009, that saw revision after revision, came to a close.  I alway feel a sense of accomplishment whenever a big project sees completion, as if to see a physical embodiment of what's rattling around in my mind finally birthed so others can see.  Many other projects and ideas still take up space, and sometimes weigh heavily on my mind as to how I'll make it happen; but if there's one thing I know from EPIC and Meat Your Maker, it's that if I plug away at something long and hard enough anything can be accomplished.

  Thank you for sticking with the blog for Meat Your Maker, and if you want a copy of this, swing by the website's "store" in July/August as it will be up for a limited supply and time. Until next time; thanks for stopping by!

MEAT YOUR MAKER
A FIELD TO FACTORY TRIPTYCH

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Meat Your Maker part 2

   Thanks for coming back, dear reader.  This is the unveiling of the second part to the "Meat Your Maker": A Field to Factory Triptych. I call this one "RMCBOVINE" was again is short for Red McDonalds Bovine.  I touched up on the color theory of the pieces previously in posts, and I suppose it will be more evident when the third piece comes out later this week.  How so ever you can get the theming between pieces just from these two.  Red and yellow being primary colors, while orange and this time around purple taking the secondary color spot.  The nice people at a neighboring farm from Hillbunker Farms, Windy Acre Farms, let me on to their property to shoot, and was able to nail the shot after only a few minutes with little to no difficulties.  The gradient used was more of a black leading to the burger shot.  Now I'm not putting McDonalds, a Chicago company, on blast but I'm not foolish enough to not see that McDonalds has been and continues to be the punching bag of an example for anybody and everybody.  They are also picture perfect at most any given time as of late, which does helps fish out its poor image the last few decades.  Beyond the burger, the style of "urban art" which the burger is made is reminiscent of magazine, newspaper, or billboard ads utilizing  a halftone style. Look really close at print ads and still to this day some utilize this style of halftone printing. It gives certain images color tones while saving on ink, and in black and while it can give shades of grey with little effort.  Something I always noticed ever since I was little, and shoved my face real close to pictures to see the style of images in magazines and books.  That covers this edition of Meat Your Maker, join me later this week as I wrap up this triptych.  I'll be putting this and much more later this Summer as Bendersama Photography redesigns the site and fills the shop up a bit more.  Until then, take care and thanks for stopping by!

 

Meat Your Maker part 1

Apologizes all around to you viewer, as I have been side tracked with a book I am writing for later this year, along with a camera upgrade (more information to come).  We're back, and it's now time to unveil Meat Your Maker individually.  Each one of these has a story to their creation and since we already know about the drummie, the item that started it all, it's only fair to start it off by seeing where that drummie went.  I call this "YKFDRUMMIE", short for Yellow/KFC/Drummie.  The chicken itself is actually from a local farm, the source of a separate blog later, Hillbunker Farms.  This farm offers wool balls for dryers, local honey, soaps, pigs, lambs, eggs, and chicken to name a few.  They do pretty good for themselves, and it was a pleasure to work with them on this project.  As you can tell by the previous blogs the art style and design that I was going for was executed perfectly and right down to the chicken colored and edited to look like a monochromatic dollar bill face.  I'm really happy with the results!  As your eyes go down the piece you can see a vibrance and liveliness to it slowly wash away into want it becomes.  Now I didn't want it to be too depressing towards the bottom but a more solemn monotoned and monochromatic theme needed to be implemented, so it was a departure from color topside to black/white/grey at the bottom.  Each one of the "products" at the bottom also fit a street art style, as mentioned before in a previous blog I believe.  For this piece of the triptych I went for a Banksy-like  black and white vector, colorized it, and still tried to give it the vector paper urban poster feel.  To re-iterate, this is one part of a three part triptych, and you'll see the other pieces in the next few days separately.  So please do check back as I'll give each one their time to shine.  This leads up to a great Summer store update coming in July where Meat Your Maker will be one of the many things that gets added!  Check back in a few days, and thanks for stopping by!

Color Play and Symbolism: A color evaluation of Meat Your Maker

  Previously, on my blog....

 We discussed how a drummy was destined for something greater than something contrived to more in-line with the flock that was putting out the same unoriginal work day in and day out.  I wanted something with more design/color, something to make you think but not hard.  Something with a message but not too deep as to seem intellectually edgy and smug.  I went with the triptych because I wanted to focus on three sources of meat: "Land Meat" most common of this is cattle with their "transformation" a burger, "Sea Meat" farmed or wild trout and its form being fish sticks, and "Air Meat" Chicken best represented with its counterpart fried chicken.  Examples to these may or may not be the best representation of the animal, seeing as McNuggets are far "worse" for you than fried chicken, but I think it's splitting hairs. Anything deep fried in excess can't do a body good, and the fact all three of these "fast food" representatives can be bought as fast food is enough.

 

  The three pieces laid out was supposed to start from the top and degrade to the bottom. This is to show the original full of life animals on top and as the eye moves down the food form of them is at the bottom.  Represented for each animal I was leaning on something simple and went with primary colors; Red, Yellow, and Blue.  The animals themselves were going to be secondary colors, Orange, Green, and Purple, with the piece next to it; so the cow is going to be maroon or purple (depending) because the red piece is going to be next to the blue piece.  The background primary colors are supposed to be vivid and slide down to a darker, depressing, more warped version of the original color; kinda like the animal to their product.  The only changes I really swapped up was the fast food items.  The original food stuffs were just going to be the same style of black and white "Banksy-like" street art vector, but I needed more diversity in the street art so I went with different mediums; graffiti, wall art vectors, and billboard halftone ad art.  

  Lastly, the animals were something unique.  Back in the ye olde olden days, animals were a form of payment in trade.  Barter system aside, the fact is livestock did and still do have financial value. Which got me thinking about the art style of U.S. currency, which always interested me. The line stencil art of each bill seemed very interesting, and I intended to recreate that style with the livestock animals, to give the animals some value.  I think that covers the design and color, wanna see the pieces in their final form? 

 OK!

In two weeks I'll show each one of the triptych every other day! Why two weeks? Because next week I have a video for those interested in buying the triptych.  A pre-order bonus if you will.... See you all next week, and thanks for stoping by!

It started with a drummy...

 When shown in it's form (above) it raised a lot of questions; what was the purpose of the drumstick, and why was it changed in format from the photo originally?  I'll be perfectly honest.... I don't have any idea the exact year this was taken, but if I had to guess it might have been around 2010.  So it was in the making almost seven years, but It didn't start out as what you see now.  It started as a faux Andy Warhol design that was going to have vectors of the same crow in flight in a row and several columns and one of the crows was going to be the drummy.  Let's see if I can recreate it: (be kind, I threw this together in a matter of a few minutes)

So this was the original concept of my vision, and I scrapped it.  I thought higher of myself than to go to a faux-Warholian Pop Art well, which isn't a slam against the artist.  Where I lived at the time (Palm Springs area) it seemed like anybody who claimed to be an artist could always fall on Pop Art to move... I also need to back pedal again and say I have nothing against Pop Art, but when that's all I see at the time I kinda went with the flow, and thought to myself "Well, maybe my vision will be different."  "Maybe my art will be deeper."  I suppose my reasoning behind it, trying to come up with a more profound message (if art really has to have one anymore), gave birth to a different plan of attack, and thusly Meat Your Maker began.  So after many years of thought between projects I came up with a mindful and colorful Pop Art triptych.  The concept was a reflective question: Do you really everyday, every meal, consider where your source of protein, that gives you strength, comes from?  

 Do you really consider "how the sausage is made"?  From a non judgmental position, you should.  You should because modern fast food, while convenient, separates you and disconnects.  It's in that passion I thought of how this piece was just going to incorporate more than the drummy.  I tried thinking of patterns and easily memorable expressive formats, then it occurred to me. A younger me would go with a few friends on a Wendy's run before we gathered around and played Dungeons and Dragons.  We would get the "Churchill Special" and get  Land, Sea, and Air. I'll save the details on what we ordered to be judged a little less, but it is in that vein (and things in three are more memorable) that I went with a triptych approach.  Well, this covers the picture with the past and the seed that grew into the triptych you all will see soon enough.  In the "making of" I'll touch base on all the details I thought of throughout  the days leading up to the final reveal.  Keep checking back this week and next for a few updates and posts about Meat Your Maker, as I'll have an announcement here about a limited engagement related to it.  Thanks for dropping by!