Headshot Retouch

This is Luisa Inés García.

Actress, with many different side-skills that can be appropriated with her craft. (Directing, Writing, Poetry, Acting, Dance, I believe she does Costume Design, and even freaking Gymnastics)

I did some retouching for her Headshot earlier this year. I tried to smooth out the natural blemishes while keeping true to her look and aura/aesthetics, while enhancing some other areas. True, I could have taken some more of those stray hairs, but dammit if the hair doesn't end up looking like she's wearing a head-piece that looks like hair. You would notice there's probably a 20% increase in eye size. Yup, the rules of subliminal allure, made not-so-subliminal in this blog.

Here's little bio of Luisa Inés García:

Luisa Inés García earned her BFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts (PHTS) in Creating Original Work and Acting. For the past two years she has worked in New York, New Jersey and internationally as a director, actress/dancer and teacher. She most recently co-founded Buffoonocene Productions with Seth Baum (Columbia University’s Center for Research on Environmental Decisions), which creates new works built on scientific research to stimulate dialogue and promote activism regarding climate change. The project was debuted at this year’s Nature, Ecology and Society Colloquium at the CUNY Graduate Center and the newest video will be available on YouTube soon! She currently plays the role of María Teresa in In The Time of the Butterflies at the Spanish Repertory (Repertorio Español) .

She's currently directing El Coordinador. “The Facilitator” takes place in an elevator where four people must deal with the ambition and morals of the others. Shut in the elevator, they experience a collective desperation that results in the discovery of the true personality of each person when their fears and virtues come out to play in this game of survival. Winning play of the 1993 Best Dramatic Text Award at the VII North American Chilean Institute’s Theater Festival and the 1994 Municipal Award for Literature in Theatre in Santiago, Chile. 

They have 5 performances!
August 23: 7pm
August 24: 8pm
August 26: 6:30 pm
August 30: 7pm
and
August 31: 8pm 

Written by: Benjamin Galemiri
Directed by: Inés Garcia
Assistant Director: John Gutierrez
The players: Antonio Solar, Billy Martin, Elena Sanz, Ron Sarcos

Set design: Leni Méndez
Sound design: Erin Cummings
Light design: Miguel León Valderrama

Tickets are $10, with premium seats at $20

The play is in Spanish with simultaneous English translation.

You can find more info on El Coordinador.

I crown you, Mother

My mother had her birthday yesterday. It's been a surreal year so far for the family, so I wanted to give her something original, as original as her love, contribution, and warmth that she brings (so, yea, so I'm a mama's boy, yea, I'm a son).

I wanted to do a calligraphy piece from a poem of a poet she likes, Pablo Neruda. But after I found "Sonnet 31", I wanted to crown her with his words more than concentrating on calligraphy. I recently purchased a Pilot Parallel Pen, which I'm excited about, but it has a wide nib, big enough that it didn't give me room to draw the foliage deco that I wanted to design with the size of Bristol board I have. So I settled with a less cooler calligraphy marker.

With the spirit of being original, making a piece that's un-repeatable, captured in the moment, and of being on time, I wanted to do this as a stream of consciousness. I winged the calligraphy, with only one horizontal line drawn in pencil showing the top of the x-height of the first line of the sonnet as a guide to the rest of the poem. The decos are winged too, only loosely sketched in pencil first, just to make sure I have room for everything. I only looked at the visions the poem paints as inspiration.

It's in Spanish, for we are a Spanish-speaking family.


 The shape of the paper is designed so I can crown her with the poem (and I did), like the Romans wreathed themselves (notice how the two loops can go around the ears).

This is the poem in Spanish and in English:

Soneto XXXI

Con laureles del Sur y orégano de Lota
te corono, pequeña monarca de mis huesos,
y no puede faltarte esa corona
que elabora la tierra con bálsamo y follaje. 

Eres, como el que te ama, de las provincias verdes:
de allá trajimos barro que nos corre en la sangre,
en la ciudad andamos, como tantos, perdidos,
temerosos de que cierren el mercado. 

Bienamada, tu sombra tiene olor a ciruela,
tus ojos escondieron en el Sur sus raíces,
tu corazón es una paloma de alcancía, 

tu cuerpo es liso como las piedras en el agua,
tus besos son racimos con rocío,
y yo a tu lado vivo con la tierra.

Pablo Neruda 1959

Sonnet 31


With laurel from The South, and Lota oregano,


I crown you, little monarch of my bones,


and you cannot do without this crown,


that the earth elaborates with foliage and balsam.

You are as he who loves you, from the green provinces:

from where we brought the clay that runs in our blood,


In cities we go about, like so many, lost,


fearful that the market will be closed.

Beloved, your shadow has the plum's aroma,


the roots of your eyes remain hidden in the south,


your heart is a dove-shaped collection-box,

your body is as smooth as stones in the water,


each kiss a cluster covered over with dew,


and I, at your side, live with the earth.
 

Pablo Neruda 1959

"Sonnet 31" is 61 years old. It's older than my mom. :-) 

Happy Birthday, little monarch of my bones.

Random drawing 001

Random drawing from some Sports Illustrated on some Greg Land status.

She Is

Happy 2012 Valentine's Day!

This is She Is, about 14 inches squared frame, written by yours truly and made by hand, with love for love. It's sits in the home of she.

This is the text to the poem:

She Is

She is that way.
Her manner is affable,
vision and sound. Soothing
and I will never stop her bantering
so I'd reminisce if I become lovelorn.

She is her smile.
Her smile is her joy.
Her voice is pleasant to my
ears, like the waves and sounds
of foams from the sea by the beach,

and the dunes of warm sand are her skin. The makers to her words, her lips, do her
voice justice. The creator to her words, her heart, is always true to her soul. Kissing
her during the summer, and I kiss the warm summer rays. Kissing her during winter
I kiss refined snow. You would want to hear her nature as you sleep, in hopes you
dream of resting times, dreaming a long dream. Her lips feel like marshmallows.
the soft ones. Not viscous like honey, but a bit diluted like marshmallows.
not sweet like honey, but a bit tender like brown sugar. Making me yearn
for more. And whenever she speaks to me, her words travel through my
ears pass my veins and wind my heart into a golden glaze. When she says
“hi” to me, I feel my body soothingly warm. It’s because I feel as
though she is here, with me, in front of me, with open arms. And
she warms me. She is what I look forward in·a day, or pass
many days. One can say this about few people; her way
manner and words are all the act of her heart in
fruition. She is the reason to my ambitions,
the fuel of my intellect and joy. She is
the lovely hand that genuinely
cares. She is lovely, every
day in every way.
She is lovely.
She is love.
She
is.

Beyond the Four Walls:The Rising Ministry andSpirituality of Hip-Hop

Hi everyone.

Below I present to you a book I designed named
Beyond the Four Walls: The Rising Ministry and Spirituality of Hip-Hop
by Walter Hidalgo.

Marilyn Manson's Antichrist Svperstar

This is a hypothetical CD cover I did for an existing artist of my choice, as an assignment for illustrator Tim Okamura. I gotta say Tim's a stand-up kinda professor and person. He taught me tons and even more via example. There's a nice Wiki entry of him that shows some of where his paintings have been featured. And, since I just wrote about graffiti on my previous post, it's only fitting to mention that his work is very Hip-hop. To quote a quote, "...a painter who does portraits with tumultuous graffiti backgrounds....a hip-hop painter". --Nicholls,Liz (October 29, 2005).

In this assignment, he played the music from each corresponding CD that each student brought. He played Antichrist Superstar as he displayed the illustration... Isn't it fitting? :-)

This is collage with acrylic, trying to convey the character of Antichrist Superstar in all three of his incarnations, the man/boy, the worm, and the Svperstar!

Graffiti Galore

The following shows my graffiti side.

I'm not sure if I mentioned this before, but I feel graffiti is a definitive expression of what goes to the core of what typography, calligraphy, and graphic design is all about. There are countless graphic designers in its rich history that began their artistic endeavors in tagging on the wall, spraying throw-ups or wild style graffiti anywhere they could. There are also a lot of letterers, doing signs on grocery stores and supermarkets, painting on the stores' cinder blocks that would make any graphic designer jealous. These people also turn out to become great graphic artists.

Yet the determining results are the same. One tries to be legible and readable, following the rules of type in such a way that its appeal lies with how well the rules are executed, how elegant and crisp it seems with the bounds of its physicality, whether on painted plaster, chalkboards on a wooden easel, or canvas signs hanging overhead. The other is on the yang to its yin's side of the spectrum; its beauty lies in how well the artist is breaking the rules, how much can the artist abstract type beyond the point of recognition. "You can't read it? Too bad! But the letter form is there somewhere, if you look and not just see." And that probably says something more than its conventional cousin, for by stripping away what makes letterforms relate with other stylized letterforms, you're ratifying what defines that very letterform to its essential anatomy. And as they're tearing apart the constitution of graphic design rules, they're enjoying it, having their fun as they rent! You better believe that when you see an exceptional piece, you think that piece was done with fun in it, it may be a serious kind of playfulness, but you can't deny that you're looking at it in every color, in every stroke. Some graphic or type artists can learn a thing or two from graffiti artists.

I did these at different times, different spaces in life. Hope you enjoy them.

















I'm working on something new, something very very new! Yup, said too much. You've probably guessed it already. Keep your eyes open and stay tuned.