The Art Of Tim Stringer

I’ve spent the better part of today ripping albums, vinyl albums that is.  Since Christmas of 2008 when I bought myself a USB turntable I’ve been working on converting all my vinyl albums to mp3.  A large task since I have several hundred of them.

Actually I’m on my third turntable since I started the conversion.  I wasn’t terribly happy with the USB turntable. Sound quality was low, in fact quite tinny. After doing a little searching on the web I found a mixer that I could connect to one of my PCs and then connect my Yamaha turntable to the mixer.  It worked great until my Yamaha turntable bit the dust. I guess 20 years is a bit much for a turntable.  I searched around for a new one but everything I found was pricey to say the least.  My must have list was direct drive and a known brand. Bells and whistles are not important to me.

For the fun of it I checked Craig’s List and actually found a used one. It is an older Technics but it works great. I don’t think the sound is quite as rich as my old Yamaha was but I’m still very happy to have it. It is many, many times better than the USB turntable and I didn’t have to break the bank to get it.

One of the truely great things about this whole process is I’m rediscovering music I had forgotten about. Being vinyl, most of these albums are from the 70s and 80s.  There are some gems in there. There are also some oddities that I’m not sure how they wound up in my collection. Possibly albums that got mixed up with mine from my military days. If that is the case then I wonder what albums of mine wound up belonging to someone else.

My only real regret is that I didn’t start doing this earlier.  Like years ago earlier.

The economic downturn is affecting everyone. I wish I could say I’m excluded but as luck would have I’m not. I do actually consider myself lucky in that I do still have a job, although in my case I’m having to take unpaid furlough time off.  Thinking about how this economic struggle is affecting almost everyone is what inspired this piece.  If you look closely in the bottom left you might see an abstract figure. There are some other recognizable shapes in there as well, but I’ll let you find them on your own.  Even better would be if you saw more than I intended. After all, abstracts are meant to be interpreted by the viewer.

Prints can be ordered here.

Being a graphic designer by day sometimes affords me an opportunity to create images with an artistic bent.  Sometimes an image is created that isn’t used for its original purpose.  Such is the case with Lotus Yin Yang. The illustation was originally done for a book jacket cover. As it turns out, another designer got the job.  But I got a pretty good illustration.

Prints available by clicking here.

I still find it amazing that there are so many out there in the art community that still just don’t understand digital.  I keep telling myself that it is merely a lack of knowledge, that they believe that digital is nothing more than clicking a mouse a few times and that the computer does all the creation.  Which is utter nonsense.  A computer creates nothing, it manipulates data as instructed.

This latest rant on the subject is brought on by an upcoming show that I had considered entering, that is until I read all the rules.  Prints are not allowed and that means digital is out.  For an artist that paints digitally, everything physical that I produce has to be a print.  The originals are computer files.

I did write to the organization sponsoring the show and did get a very nice response back that was encouraging.  They made no promises but did at least recognize that digital is becoming more prominant.

I’m willing to go a little farther and say that digital is eventually going to become dominant.  I believe that there will still be artists out there working in conventional mediums.  I think that is a good thing.  I still have several canvases and quite a few brushes that I intend to make use of, someday, maybe.

In one of the groups that I belong to, I was reminded that art shouldn’t be judged by the medium, but rather for it’s merit.  Does the piece evoke an emotional response, are the technical aspects good? Theses are the criteria that art should be judged on, not the media in which it was created.

While it has been a week or so since I’ve worked on a painting, any painting, I’m not just twiddling my thumbs. For the last several weeks I’ve been working with video and animation, so I have been drawing and to a certain extent painting, but nothing I would consider fine art.