Before I start the profile, I want to make sure that I let everyone know that I have added Mic to the site without her permission. I needed some content, so I wrote for an hour or two. This shouldn’t be considered a “true ” look at her work. Hopefully in the near future I’ll contact her to do a full interview.
The first artist that kennethcurtis.com would profile seemed like an easy one. I chose my longtime friend and mentor, Mic Muhlbauer. I’ve known her for about 21 years and she was one of my first professors when I entered undergrad and I am still as impressed with her work as I was the first time that I saw it so long ago. Though retired now, she lives a comfortable life following the life of an artist in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Mic’s main body of work contains a playful feel that embraces caricature”ism” melded with realism. Looking at her work you get a sense of stepping into her life as she lived it. I think that’s what makes it so interesting to me that I feel as if I’m getting a glimpse into her life. Even the people that are portrayed in her work seem to remind me of people that I realize that I don’t know, but maybe have seen somewhere. Maybe these unnamed people remind me of someone that I have known in my life.
Discussing Mic’s painting’s special knack of bringing the viewer into her world is to me, unique, but she has also moved to other types of work as well. She has a whole body of work that is 3D or sculptural. I’m the first to say that I am in no way an expert in castings or 3D, but from I can see in Mic’s sculptural work has the same basic playfulness that her paintings do.
So I going through my twitter account and stumbled upon an artist creating amazing works with just with fabric and a clothes iron. In all honestly though I’m taking the word of an article written about him. I don’t know for sure, my guess is that there is something more involved than just an iron. Regardless, when you see his work you’d no doubt question whether it was fabric or some other medium.
“Benjamin Shine studied fashion design at The Surrey Institute of Art and Design and Central St Martins in London. In 2003 he set up his creative studio, where materials, techniques and constructional ideas continue to inform his diverse portfolio and multidisciplinary approach.”
Due to copyright concerns I’m not going to add any images into this post, but you can find some of his work on Instagram.
My own take on his work is that I’m fascinated that he is able to create something so unique in a world of 7 billion people. How is it that I hadn’t heard of anyone doing this before? Although, maybe he isn’t the first, maybe he is just the first to succeed with it. His artistic talent coupled with the innovation may have worked together to accomplish something that no one before him was able to. After all it’s not like he is using technology that has just become available.
The use of fabric appears to create more of a sculpture than painting, but from a distance it genuinely appears to be attempting to be 3D. Indeed, there are images of his work hanging in galleries that look like paintings, and my guess you probably wouldn’t be able to see that it was constructed of fabric unless you were viewing from the side. He states that he strives for his works to appear as smoke.
Contact me if you are the student that drew this image.
I want to talk about the images/illustrations that are under the menubar on the main pages of this site. Aren’t they the best ever? I wish I could claim them as my own, but I can’t. What I can do is acknowledge that I got them from people that I know. I didn’t just search the web for great images, but the people that created these images are super-talented and although I may be stepping out a little, they are my friends or at least were my friends. The image on the front page is by a world renowned illustrator and I’m not exaggerating, his illustrations have been on some of the most well know magazines in the world and I think he’s my friend, Maris Bishofs, from Riga, Latvia.
The other image that I’m using, again with implicit understanding it was okay to use, was from a highly talented student that I had a few years ago. This sounds bad, but I can’t for the life of me remember her name. I can see her face, and see her sitting in class, but I can’t remember her name. I’ve spent hours looking for her on deviant art with no success. Years ago, I left a comment on her deviant art page and I thought if I could log into my account there, that I could find her, but I can’t find anything about her. The girl can draw! As her professor and supposedly an expert on art, I was in awe. Contact me if you are my student that drew the pokeman image.
I remember the good old days when I’d jump on the computer and fire up Dreamweaver to either make a new web site or to make changes to a site already up. Those were the days when the web was new, back in the mid to late nineties. If you were around back then, you remember the days when you were cutting edge if you had a site, bonus if it actually worked. Points were lost if you just used an image map to create your site, or the worst was having some software build it for you, “save as web page” ugg!
There were a lot of problems building a site back in the day, but over time, mostly because of large corporations getting into the mix, the web design process has become more domesticated. It was a something that nearly anyone could do if they really tried hard, now it’s left to services like Squarespace or Wix and just a step above them is WordPress. This to me is just awful, not for using those services, but that there was a technical aspect to building a site. Just by having a site meant something to others, mainly that you were dedicated, and depending on what the site looked like, maybe talented too.
There were two ways to build a site back then. If you had a programming background, you could code it with something like c++. The problem was that the site built this way were awful to look at. If you were a right-brainer, then you went for a wysiwyg editor like Micorsoft’s Frontpage, Macromedia’s Dreamweaver, and lets not forget Adobe’s GoLive.
The war was on. Frontpage was basically considered your parents choice and suffered from corporate bloat everywhere. To upload a Frontpage site you had to install special files on the server to ensure that your site would work. Adobe’s Golive was the second offering from Adobe. For some reason they just didn’t get any traction or respect from designers back in the day. Then there was the much loved Macromedia Dreamweaver. Nearly everyone I knew used Dreamweaver and it usually showed in their sites. There was a sense that Macromedia was an outlier, based on the idea that they cared about helping people to build sites not about greed.
Then the black day that I’ll always remember as the beginning of the end came when I heard the announcement that Adobe had purchased Macromedia. I can’t tell you how hard it was to take the news. There was talk that during the merging process that all the up and coming young talent wanted to switch over to the Macromedia division and all the business types wanted to head to the main offices at Adobe. It seemed so appropriate at the time.
Okay, before I start on my rant, I want to make sure that I do give Adobe some respect for Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, and InDesign. These programs are still very good, even if they seem to be slipping a little over the last few years. I absolutely love ‘content-aware’ and swear I can’t figure out how PS does it. I just watched a video on After Effects CC2019 that showed content-aware being used on videos. Too cool! So adobe does do some things right.
My rant.
I was using Dreamweaver back in 1998 almost on a daily basis
until about 2014. At that time I was pretty good at programming css and html
and didn’t really use Dreamweaver expect for basic previews. I also taught web
design at a university and we used Dreamweaver for the first two classes. Mid-2014
I went on a five year trip around Asia and put Dreamweaver behind me. When I
needed to update a site I coded it by hand and to help with my blog, I changed
from a straight CMS to a WordPress site. So for about 5 years my interaction
with DW was almost nil.
Let’s jump to today, or rather about two days ago when for a
week I was trying to create a new site with DW. Remember I used it for 18 years
and even taught it, but the week working with it was painful. The interface is
just awful, they’ve switched, in an attempt to give access to some of the most
popular features, to not allowing you to create the workspaces as you want. There
may be some special place that you can go to configure it perfectly, but I don’t
have the commitment to jump through hoops.
Get this, I edited something in my CSS in DW, and then changed my mind hit cmd+z to undo. Nothing happened, so I did it again and still nothing, then one more time still nothing. Eventually I gave up and went to the source code side and noticed that I was missing my last entries there. I guess for some reason DW was undoing the source code edits that I made while I was in the CSS. Just imagine how hard it was for me to fix. I couldn’t remember exactly was the last three or four changes that I made were or exactly how many undos I actually did. In that instance, I was so angry and frustrated that I went to my browser and searched Duckduckgo.com for, “why does dreamweaver suck ass?” I was surprised to see a full page of people complaining about DW and how it has gone downhill.
As I’ve mentioned I generally do most of my designing using code and although I didn’t mention it before that for the most part coding is just easier in BBEdit. If you’re not familiar with BBEdit it’s just a simple code editor that gives you some help but doesn’t seem to get in your way. I mention this because another one of my pet peeves with DW is that the highlighting of code is a mess. I literally can’t see the cursor through the highlight and if I can’t see the cursor I don’t know where I am putting my edits. I went through the preferences trying to eliminate the highlighting feature but couldn’t find it. Oh, there were lots of highlighting prefs that I could change, but I couldn’t find the one that was annoying me. In the end I just tried to make due. The highlighting also has the worst tendency to highlight the entire line when I only want to add a comma, or remove a class.
My typical layout for DW
Another terrible thing that I have been dealing with today is that DW will not refresh the design window. So I add an image, and it doesn’t show. Think about it, DW’s only function is a what you see is what you get (wysiwyg) editor, but you make changes and nothing happens. It so sad.
Just searching the net looking for people complaining about DW will prove that I’m not exaggerating that Adobe has dropped the ball so to speak on DW. They took a program that was much loved by designers and totally trashed it. Why? I’m not sure. I tend to think that their insatiable goal of updating their software yearly requires that they make changes just to make changes. Who knows for sure, it could be that an up and coming wysiwyg web program has a feature and Adobe adds feels that it needs to add it into DW.
I get the feeling that Adobe is getting ready to discontinue DW. I’ve seen some posts about it and it makes sense since it is almost unusable to all but the most dedicated users. I mean what can they do to fix it, start removing features? It seems logical to just create a new web building program and then discontinue the mess we know as DW. I will still probably have to use it since I need to be able to teach it, but I will not endorse it or use it for my own sites. It just has turned out to be a turd of a program.
So there I was feeling all down and out about being fucked over by someone that for the time being, I don’t know right now. I don’t really care if I find out who is my enemy, but if there is any justice then that person will feel the wrath of kharma. Yeah, I’m not going to go into the details, but just let me say that I had to somehow expel this anger. So what would you expect a creative people do when then feel violated? They build a website. 🙂
So where is this anger coming from? It’s hard to tell, I will say that about five minutes ago, a bug flew into my beer and I’m still feeling violated by it now. Should I throw out the beer and clean the cup… or just try to forget that I removed the bug’s body and flicked it to the floor and save all that beer.?
