Joseph and the Sky That Broke: Masterpieces of a Different Sort - #7

 

I found this one at the dump. I reminded me of my great-grandfather, Joe and his eldest son - my grandfather, Forrest. The painting is real and the story is true-ish.

They say it started with the wind. Not the kind that passes through, but the kind that stays. Hangs in the air. Gnaws on your skin. Teaches you how to live small.

Joseph York was a farmer in western Oklahoma. The kind of man who didn’t waste a word or a meal. He and his wife had five children, and they all lived in a house that leaned a little too far to the east—like it, too, had started to give in.

By 1930, the sky had turned mean. Rain stopped visiting. The crops died with their roots curled like fists, and the dirt began to lift—at first just a haze on the horizon, then something closer to judgment.

One day, Joseph saw the sky fold in on itself. Dust boiled up across the field like smoke from a fire that hadn’t started yet. He called for the children. Told Forrest, the eldest, to pack what they could into the truck. Told the others not to look back.

But Forrest—he did.

And what he saw stayed with him for the rest of his life:

His father, standing in the doorway, one hand on the frame, the other shielding his eyes as the land he had worked his whole life became a memory he couldn’t hold onto. The dust didn’t just take the farm. It took the years that built it.

That’s the moment this painting captures—or seems to.

It’s not signed. Not dated. Just left behind at the dump like a story someone didn’t want to tell anymore.

But I think it’s Joseph.

Or maybe it’s every Joseph who stood still just long enough to lose everything but the will to keep going.

Red Hats, Cold Feet

Meet MAGA Mick

Something new is brewing.




I’ve started work on an animated cartoon—limited animation, to be honest. We’re talking slow blinks, head tilts, awkward shuffles. The kind of movement that mirrors the mental gymnastics of a man caught in a moral midlife crisis.




His name is MAGA Mick.




He’s a dyed-in-the-flannel Republican. Trump voter. Used to shout at the TV. Used to own more flags than shirts. But now… something’s shifting. Not all at once. Not dramatically. But enough that you can see it in his eyes.




The man’s starting to wonder.




The cartoon is satire, yes—but it’s not a hit job. It’s a portrait. It's short and punchy. A study in contradiction. A bit of absurdity laced with humanity, because that’s the most honest way I know to explore what’s happening in the bones of this country.




Mick is fictional. But his story? It’s everywhere.




The project will grow slowly, the way real doubt does. A still photo is the one above. No voices or narration, just a lot of cards that, one after the other, probe the unsettling issues gnawing at Mick. This is my attempt to speak to a fracture in our collective story using the only tools I’ve got: humor, pixels, and a deep love for asking inconvenient questions.

Hello, Blob. (A Brief Encounter With Abstract Life)

Out in some math-born corner of the void, the Blobs float.

They spin. Pulse. Change color like they’re listening to music only they can hear.

Once in a while, a presence enters their realm. A viewer. A traveler. You.

The Blobs notice. They shimmer, respond.

They spin brighter, move with more purpose, like they’re dancing just for you.

This little animation started as a whim. I wrote it in Python with Processing. Just a way to make something move, something abstract.

But once the Blobs showed up, they didn’t want to leave.

And if you watch long enough, you might feel them watching back.

Boxed In: a look at recursion

"To understand recursion, you must understand recursion."

(How I love this.)

I made one of my little generative art animations with the idea of seeing what kind of effect I could get from recursively drawing some simple shape or shapes over and over again with small changes. 

I used just a box and a circle and came up with this:

While coding, this happens when a function being defined is applied within it's own definition, like this:

function makeBox(x,y,s)
  {
    translate(x,y);
    rotate(s/10+(col/2)%360);
    blah, blah, blah
      {
         makeBox(x+s/4, y, s/2);
         makeBox(x-s/4, y, s/2);
         makeBox(x, y+s/4, s/2);
      }
  }

In this case the function makeBox calls itself within it's own definition. This can be very powerful. And so much fun!

I hope you enjoy.

Latest Images

This:

and this:

based on this:

I started with the above image I generated as a part of my first foray into mandalas. The top image takes the lower one as a reference and generates random points of various sizes, sampling the reference image's color. Same for the middle image, except it paints with short strokes instead of points.

Latest image

The latest image from my generative art series was a nice surprise.

It started as this:

for (i in 1:500)
{
x = x*((0.98)^i)*cos(i)
y = y*((0.98)^i)*sin(i)
}

which is simple R code that generates 500 x, y points that spiral. That code gave me this:

Next, I replaced the dots with line segments. This looks much different.

Finally, I ran an image processing script over it. The short version is that the script connects dots with a series of lines. That script spit this image out, which I love:

There are a lot of possible permutations of this I want to explore later. Like: