Author: Kyle Clements

Kyle Clements is a Toronto-based artist and nerd. During his thesis at the Ontario College of Art and Design, Kyle began working on his Urban Landscapes series, a body of work that aims to capture the energy and excitement of life in the fast-paced urban environment. After graduating from OCAD in 2006, Kyle spent a year living in Asia to gather source material and experience in a different kind or urban environment. His work is vibrant and colourful. Whether painting the harsh Northern landscape, or capturing the overwhelming buzz of life in the city, his acrylic paintings hover between representation and abstraction.

Illuminated Landscapes: Single Focus

As I mentioned in an earlier post, organizing and picking a select few images out of hundreds of photographs can be a daunting task.

Our first method consisted of going through the folder in waves, sorting the pictures into separate folders: Bad, OK, Good, Better Best. This left us with a very disorganized and inconsistent collection in our “Best” folder, so we changed our approach. We picked a theme, and selected the images that were the best fit for that category.

We found it helpful to sort the photos into several groups of similar images.

None of these category titles appear in the book, since text was kept to a minimum.

Instead, I will sort these images right here, in a series of blog posts.

This folder was titled “Single Focus”, and the shots in this folder made liberal use of the shallow depth of field our f1.8 lenses made possible.
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An Experiment with Micro-Payments

I know artists aren’t supposed to talk about money, but I’m going to break that rule in this post to talk about a little experiment I’m going to be running for the next few months.

See that little box in the right hand sidebar, above the archive? That is my Flattr Box. Let me explain what that is and why I put it there.

There is a micro-payment service known as “flattr”, and it seems like a really neat idea. Flattr hasn’t really broken into the North-American market yet, but I think this service has the potential to really go somewhere. Unfortunately, it’s a very social thing. Like a fax machine or facebook account, Flattr is utterly useless if only one person has it. It’s value will increase with its popularity.

You know how you can “like” something on facebook? Flattr is sort of like that.

Let’s say you are on a web page, and you want to show the author that you appreciate their work. They could have a “Like” button that is similar to what you see on facebook. But what if you are an extremely altruistic person who wants to do more than give some virtual props?

Let’s say you want to do more than offer moral support. Let’s say you want to send a small donation to the creators to show them your appreciation. But…you can’ be bothered to go through Paypay., because let’s face it, it’s a hassle to log in, enter all the info. Why can’t you just click a button and be done with it? Someone needs to design a system where a single click is all it takes to send a small token of support to a content creator.

That’s where flatter comes in.

You register an account. You set your monthly allowance. You flatter the pages you like. Your monthly allowance is split between those pages. That’s all there is to it.
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A Whole Lotta Blog Love

Half of being an artist is what takes place outside the studio. No one is going to randomly knock on my apartment door, just to see if an interesting artist happens to be living there. Marketing and promotion matter!

The most labour-intensive project I have been involved with to date is my collaborative project with Brad Blucher, Take a Picture

A few days ago, I was talking to my friend Jonathan (a maker of fantastic things) and he suggested that I try submitting Take a Picture to the Make Blog and Hack a Day.

Long story short, this was wonderful advice, and it started a snowball rolling, and I can’t wait to see where it goes.

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Writing a New Artist Statement

Oh, artist statements.

I’ve written about my dislike of writing artist statements before. Writing about another’s work is easy, yet writing a one-page blurb about my own work is incredibly difficult.

As the creator of the work, it is easy to become infatuated by the small details, and miss the bigger picture. When looking at my work, the things I notice and really work on are very minute details. The larger ideas are things I’ve been working with for so long, I don’t even notice them any more. The old expression, “can’t see the forest for the trees” comes to mind.

There is a saying among artists that describes this feeling, “I’m too close to the work.”
When talking to fellow artists, we know exactly what this phrase means. I recently had the awkward experience of explaining that phrase to a non-artist. “It’s hard to see my work from a detached perspective because I spend so much time with it up close, I can’t think of it objectively”.

That’s when I had an idea, “If it’s easier to write about someone else’s work, why don’t I get someone else to write about my work?”.
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Illuminated Landscapes: Abstract

As Brad and I were organizing the images for inclusion in Illuminated Landscapes, we were initially intimidated by the large number of images before us. We found it helpful to sort the photos into several groups of similar images.

We each came up with a few general categories. The working titles for these groups were pretty bad, it was just the first thing that popped into our heads, nothing too deep or poetic, but the idea to sort them like this was a tremendous help.

A single folder with 200 images can be very overwhelming go through, but when I had 10 folders with 20 images in front of me, I stopped seeing the image as isolated things; I began to see them as part of a series. This made sorting much easier. It wasn’t about the image any more, it became about what images worked best together. What could have been days of beard scratching was reduced to a few hours of work.

We didn’t title any of the sections in the book, since we decided to keep text to a minimum. Other than the opening blurbs, this is just about images. No captions or quotes; just text.

Over the next little while, I plan on using this place to present the groups of images.

I will start with a group of photos that is pure Kyle; not one of Brad’s shots made it into this folder. This folder was simply titled “Pollock”, and when you see the images, the reason for this name should be fairly obvious.
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Website Updates

Wow.
It seems like I’ve done nothing this past week but update and add to this website.

The biggest change to this site would have to be the addition of a dedicated area for illuminated landscapes. It’s pretty much it’s own mini site, complete with full image galleries, essays, multiple pages, links, embedded objects, etc.
Lots of work.

But that’s not the only thing I’ve been up to.
I spent a good chunk of last weekend (Feb 12-14) modifying some of the earlier entries of my CV. The old way of doing it works fine on the front end (what viewers see) but the back end (what I deal with) is clunky, disorganised, and a nightmare to maintain. So I’ve been re-arranging the CV galleries, and I’m slowly turning the CV entries into long, single pages.
All the images are still there, but now it’s all on one page. I’m also adding a lot of text, providing information on how the show went, what it led to, what I learned, and anything else that seems important.

The CV section is intended to be a ‘gold mine’ for anyone who ever decides to dig up information on me. I will reveal what I showed, who I showed with, what I wore, what I drank, old artist statements, etc. Everything I still have or still remember will go into these pages.

I think I am, for the most part, done with these website updates.

Next up will be some blog entries expanding on Illuminated Landscapes. Stay tuned.

Illuminated Landscapes Has Arrived!

Last night, the first copy of Illuminated Landscapes arrived in my mailbox, and I am proud to say that the book passed it’s inspection. The print quality matches our expectations and the project is now officially ready to go live!

It’s kind of strange to think that I now have a book out and on the market.

I don’t have a lot to say with this post; instead, I will offer a virtual tour of the book.
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Illuminated Landscapes: Free PDF Version Available Now.

If you are a regular here, then you’ve probably heard about Illuminated Landscapes a series of photographs by my friend Brad Blucher and myself.

I’ve hinted about the project three times before. But no more vague teasers!

We’ve edited down the huge archive of images into 80 photographs. These 80 photographs will appear in our new 80-page photo book Illuminated Landscapes, which will be available soon.

While we are still waiting for the hard copy version to arrive so we can apply our seal of approval and put the thing up for sale, the free digital version is available now!

That’s right, the free version is out before the “must pay for it” version!

The free digital version contains the same set of 80 images that appear in the physical version, and is presented as two separate PDFs. (one portrait, the other landscape)

To receive your free version of Illuminated Landscapes, all you need to do is send off an email to:
smile_takeapicture@ymail.com

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Illuminating Landscapes

On Saturday night, I stumbled through the front door at 4:02am.

I wasn’t returning from a night of hard partying. I wasn’t stumbling due to any sort of intoxication. I was simply exhausted, both mentally and physically.

Why was I so exhausted?
Well, 18-hour work days will do that to ya.

Since 10:00 am Saturday morning, Brad and I had been working on a little project. We call it “Illuminated Landscapes.”

I talked about the very first photo shoot of this series in a previous entry, Painting with Light, but I didn’t explain what we were going to do with these images.

This is what we’ve been working on:
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A Tired Kyle is a Useless Kyle

I am not a morning person. It takes me a while to get myself warmed up and ready to go. My usual routine is to wake up, turn on lappy, make coffee, open some web pages (twitter and reddit have really reduced the number of sites I go through on my web surfing routine, all my boingboing, slashdot and techdirt headlines are aggregated and combined on one page)

It’s only after an hour or two that I’m ready to actually do anything. And being a full time artist, once I’ve reached this point, I can usually ignore the clock and just keep on working until my hand-eye coordination degrades to the point where I know I need more sleep.

I had a break from this routine over the weekend, and this break provided me with a good reminder of just how useless I can be in those first few moments after waking up.
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