Prices

I wonder how much Vermeer was paid? The Dutch Golden Age was the biggest, most prolific and cut throat market for art in history, perhaps second only to the present day, the dawn of the 21st century, in terms of quantity of high quality artists. Plenty of historical artists died penniless, not only van Gogh but great painters like Zurbaran, Rembrandt, oh, and yes, I've just remembered, Vermeer.

I've been thinking about prices recently. It's one area all artists struggle with. I work by a regular disciplined schedule, and record how many days a painting takes. My painting days run from 9am to 6pm, and depending on whether I get paid for my lunch hour, my most expensive oil paintings earn me either £5.50 or £6.25 per hour, both below the minimum wage, which is, at time of writing, £6.31. Even then, some of my paintings can retail (with a modest commission of 30% exc. V.A.T.) at over £1500, and with a more common 50% plus V.A.T. commission, £2500. Would I want to paint the sort of paintings ordinary people can't afford? Do only the rich deserve good art?

I could exploit my works further by selling limited edition prints, or open reproductions, but should that be relied on for income, or should that be a bonus?

Johannes Vermeer painted slowly and had a large family. He painted less than forty paintings in his lifetime, each taking many months of work. He had a wife to support and produced almost as many children as paintings, but at the same time he was elected head of St. Luke's Guild, and dealt in art at least as much as he painted. Perhaps his actual painting time was limited. Perhaps his art, bought by a small clique of patrons, one in particular, was a personal indulgence and he made most of his money from selling other people's work.

It's reasonable to expect, while a student, to have student prices, and expect prices to naturally grow as popularity increases. Ironically, the artist controls price growth, but he must compete with other artists who offer similar services too. Or must they? Isn't a key point of art the uniqueness of the artist? Even a forger, trying his best can't paint an actual Constable, or Leonardo da Vinci, or Vermeer.

Is there a point when older works must be raised in price? Is there a moral pressure to hold back the works that an artist considers artistically and culturally of national importance? I have no doubt, none, that after my death one of my works will sell for more than my entire lifetime's earnings so far. That happens a lot in art. Should that knowledge make me sad or happy? Happy, surely. I didn't become an artist to become rich, no artist does. In fact I became an artist specifically to escape chasing money, specifically to do what I wanted to do even for no money at all. I want to share my work with the world, but I wouldn't be that bothered if I never sell another painting. In that circumstance, then charging a good price for each work is justified, more than the minimum wage at least... that is, unless you need the money...

Poor Vermeer. An economic collapse and a war destroyed his finances and he died of stress. I wonder how he'd have handled things if he could go back in time and live his life again? (I'm never one for contentment in that regard. If I could live my life again, I'd do everything differently!) Would Vermeer have taken on students? Have ignored his constricting patron and exhibited widely, painting the aristocrats of his secular capitalist universe, gaining fame and fortune in his lifetime... like Rembrandt.

The picture is the painter from my work The Art of Painting, an homage to Vermeer. It was my first (and so far only) painting to sell for over £1000. I will increase my prices.

Dawn of the Age of the Superhuman

I'm working on a new cabinet artwork at the moment, something for a major forthcoming exhibition that will tour to the great galleries of the great cities of Britain, and so to impress those curators as much as the public, it's important to make some special artworks.

This one is called Dawn of the Age of the Superhuman, and is about the way that the internet and knowledge and implementation of psychology can create a sort of super-human, the best a person can be. The painting will include a crystal cathedral of science, but also a death, a death of the old normal human, and thus be tinged with as much sadness as warning.

For the cabinet I wanted something much simpler than the iris, in engineering terms. I decided on two simple doors, allowing me to focus more on the aesthetics than the engineering. Here's an early look at the design...

And a pencil study of the portrait in the painting. I certainly look sombre here! - Like I've not slept for a month! Be at peace, the crudenessess of my pencillary skills have stomped over the ultradelicacy of the final painted perfection that will, I hope, eventually appear.

I've been thinking a lot about art recently and this year will be a first year in a new renaissance. Death was my obsession in December, after the Love of 2013, so now I'm already rapidly moving towards rebirth.

So, what is art about? I'm concluding that art is like a religion, and functions like a priest in medieval times. Art provides solace in times of difficultly, understanding, psychotherapy. We suffer, and we see art that reflects our suffering; we know that we are not alone, and gain peace. This important social need can transform lives and society. All good artists know this. It's interesting to me that Beethoven remains more famous and loved than any king or political leader alive during his life. It's about time that the religion of art was set solid, canonised, lithified, aurified.

Iris Pictures

My major artwork of 2013 is nearing completion and today I added the thrust bearings to make the doors open more easily, and they work! Here are the first photos of the finished artwork.

That is the cabinet with the doors closed. The doors are 3mm MDF with a 6mm limewood top which has been carved, then gilded with 23.5kt gold. The whole construction was made using hand tools or hand power tools. I wanted to avoid laser cutting or computer controlled machining. Using something that was computer controlled would have made the job a lot easier, particularly cutting those curving slots which needed to be very accurate and work first time! In the end I used a jigsaw.

However, the easiest way is rarely the best, and I think that skill is an important part of what it means to be an artist because it aids self-expression, and therefore the quality of an artwork. Of all things I like learning new techniques, and I gained a lot from this, certainly my most complex creation to date.

The seven doors slide open to reveal the painting...

The Rape of Eden by Monkeys is about damage to the environment and I wanted something that was eye-catching, stunning, amazing, different, a combination of engineering and art, but at the same time an artwork that was true to itself, where the cabinet matched and complimented the painting.

Here the circular Eden and Earth, partly inspired by the globe on the outer cabinet of Hieronymous Bosche's Garden of Earthly Delights, is complimented by the golden surround of the sun.

The Rape of Eden by Monkeys

My main project of the year has been my Eden iris, a large circular cabinet with doors that open like an iris diaphragm. It's nearing completion and here is the main painting contained within it. I aborted a first version of this, so this is the second version.

It's called The Rape of Eden by Monkeys, a simple overt metaphor for environmental destruction by humanity. The painting is filled with animals, hidden here and there, extant and extinct from a dodo and a quagga to a tigers, giraffe, rhino etc.

Broadly speaking it's a burning Garden of Eden. There is destruction, but the painting isn't all negative. In the distance is the tree of life, gilded with white gold. Adam and Eve gaze at the tree peacefully. A planet Earth in the sky also offers hope, this isn't Earth but a vision of one, a warning perhaps.

This painting is oil on panel, 500mm across. The cabinet, which is almost a metre across and weighs about 15kg, is still not complete, but will be soon.

I'll be developing a unique custom design of circular frame for a series of 100 extremely limited edition prints. I want each print to be framed in a custom, non moving, variation of the gold iris cabinet.

Wombles

Wombles

Underground overground wandering free,
the ragged of Wimbledon Common are we.
Making the most of the things that we find.
We are the people the world left behind.

Bites of Greatness

My main task now is music and the release of my next album, Bites of Greatness. I wanted to get started on new music in October but lots of other things, the Eden Iris, the Artsfest, Future Nouveau! got in the way. I'm making time!

Less than one week ago I finalised the track listing for Bites of Greatness, many of the tracks were written earlier in the year, partly inspired by Tim Prevett on Red Shift Radio who really liked my album Stupid Computer Music. I wanted to write something similar, catchy electronic tunes, sort of like the chart single releases by Jean-Michel Jarre or Vangelis. I used to think it odd that Jarre would make one track that was obviously "the single", why not make a whole album of those good ones - I thought! I wanted Bites of Greatness to be like that.

The last track Trax was actually a distant remake of an Amiga tune I wrote in the 1990's. I'm not a fan of re-working old stuff (it's much more interesting to make something new) but this one was quite good and deserved some modern production. I completed Trax on Saturday night, Nov 30th, and for good measure finished another new tune called France TV. The original title was just "France" in my sequencer and I didn't bother thinking up a new title, so just stuck with it. Amazingly the first run through of that one sounded fine so I decided to forget about any further refinements and call it done.

In the last three days I've finalised the artwork, added a page of the album to my website, with clips, set up the products, made some new edits and, today, sent the final tracks to the distributors for submission to iTunes, Amazon and others.

For the artwork I wanted a mix of every day objects with "bites" taken out of them. Here's a metal candle holder with bit missing. It also shows the track listing...

And here's the cover. It's rather grey and steely, but I think that look will appeal to people who like that sort of music, and I liked the idea of a clock on the cover too.

Like all of my music now it's made using software I programmed myself. I designed all of the algorithms, from the sample generation and filters to the reverbs. I'm probably the only music artist in the world who has created all of the instruments and the artwork - well, there can't be that many, but I had lots of help from the unseen shoulders of giants that post helpful snippets of code and assistance on the Internet. Like anything, programming a computer is learnable.

Next task; to make some videos, I think. Then, onto the next album; Black and White. There's always a balance between creation and promotion. I probably create too much, especially as most of the albums haven't sold more than one copy and nobody's really heard most of the work! But if the iron is hot, what can we do but strike? I'd rather have too many ideas than push too few too much. I'll leave those tactics to the major record labels.

Bites of Greatness will be available from various download distributors in a few weeks, and via www.marksheeky.com from December 16th 2013.

New Painting

I'm pausing the programming after about five solid days working on it, with moderate (but not good enough) results. Instead I decided to finish this simple painting; "An Experience that isn't Shared is the Same as No Experience", oil on MDF, 420x318mm.

Soundy Stuff

I'm supposed to be recording music this week but I've got caught up with enthusiasm for sound programming, as my new music will be vocal and I'd like some vocal processing options. I write my music on my own software, which is brilliant because it's cheap AND it gives you the freedom and power to add new bits as needed. Today I wrote a vocoder, which turned out to be quite simple; it's a bank of band-pass filters that filter the voice at different frequencies, then boost a sound wave (music) in those frequencies by an amount proportional to the volume of each filter.

It has sixteen filters. I wondered what would happen if I changed the destination frequencies but kept the source ones the same. I got some interesting results when boosting the mid range but didn't experiment further. I must try more of that one day...

My next task though is to pitch correct a vocal sample. Playing a sample at any pitch is easy so the hard part is determining the root frequency of the voice. I started by pondering (and head scratching) at Discrete Fourier Transforms for a couple of days. This bamboozling maths made sense; from what I understand it's basically that there are two ways to represent a complex waveform; as amplitude and time, and as a sum of sine and cosine waves of different frequencies. Both represent the same wave, just in two forms, the time and frequency way ("domain" mwahahahaha). This made me wonder if the universe behaves like this, as it sparked off a connection with waves and particles; odd how waves are seen as timeless and infinite but particles are discrete and finite, yet they are the same thing seen in different ways. It made me think that the Fourier transform has an important role in physics, and that any equation for the universe must be two equations, both different that say the same thing in two ways. After all, everything is one wave, the whole universe is a complex wave.

I'll leave that prediction to history and get back to my speech test. So, I need to work out the frequency of a bit of singing. I've split the sound into lots of sections. After lots of reading it seems there are several ways to identify pitch. The frequency way had appeal because I'd not done it before; that basically divides the sample into root frequencies, so a pure note would be a clear spike. The thing is the voice isn't a pure note anyway, so it's not necessarily easier than looking at the normal time-based sample.

So I think I'll start with normal sample data. Speech/singing isn't always pitched anyway, lots of hissy sounds like "sh" "tch" "sss" are white noise really and could be ignored. I'll need some A.I. to guess a good pitch, or even think that it isn't a pitch, and discard it.

Some principles mused...

A singing voice might be off but it's not going to be very off so it's more likely to be close to the desired pitch, or it's more likely to be at the previously sung pitch (rarely will a song jump up two octaves). You could go further and guess that a pitch will be musically pleasant, guessing that a tune is probably in the right key. This is the start of artificial intelligence routines...

So, I've got a few starting strategies. At best I want to determine the difference between ideals; a sine wave and white noise, and if it's a sine wave then determine the frequency. What options are there to detect either?

A sine wave flows smoothly, white noise jerks about. I thought of a fish flowing along the wave, heading up or down for the next hillock or trough. The fish can't turn as rapidly as the sound wave. If the fish stays close to the target path then it's a smooth wave, if it's always turning or miles away then it's more likely to be random noise. Perhaps the fish could be rewarded when it's close to the wave with accumulated points, but those fall away if the fish becomes sad at unable to track the wave (or rapidly turns; the pain of the anxious fish means white noise psychosis). So, a volume tracker of some sort is one strategy.

Another is to pick random points every so often... if that fish headed for waypoints every so many samples, then on a sine wave the results would still be easy going; a quantized sine wave would still appear smooth, a noisy one still random. Does that help?

And frequency. I thought I could track zero crossings, the times that the wave jumps above and below zero, then track similarity. This would be a great indicator on perfect source data; on an ideal sine wave the periods would be identical; and totally random on white noise. So a reward number for regularity would be good, together with a proposed period.

(EDIT: What if a sound wave had a good repeating pattern rather than simple repeats? I expect a few natural sounds might do that, or do they?)

Looking at different windows of samples might be a problem too, chances are there will be a few periods of pitch on there. An ideal size to analyse must be sought; one short enough to find only one sound/syllable, but long enough to give a good indicator of periodicity for low notes. Perhaps window periods that match the tempo of the song would be an idea. An idea that a musician and never a mathematician would even pick, as powers of two are best, and they're not at 120 B.P.M. (I wonder why 44,100hz was chosen as CD frequency and not 65,536hz for example? Maybe it's something to do with the laser of a compact disc, or a transistor or something.)

Well, I'll give it a go tomorrow. Please excuse my meandering thoughts but I wanted to type them out and I thought that this might be useful to other signal processing people in future. There's no conclusion to this blog post ... well, not tonight :) Happy dreams of sound fish to you!