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© Kahuna Content

With a new truck photo project upcoming, this question ran through my mind: “How do you photograph a truck?”

This question arose because trucks are a subject that have been photographed so many times that no one could possibly count them. Is every possible approach already passé? I don’t want to be repetitive or inadvertently derivative.

This is the problem that “Truck Study 1″ addresses.

To help me capture that new approach, I warmed-up by pulling out my trusty (and somewhat rusty) “Buddy L.” He became a practice subject in my studio. The balance he has acquired in his 50+ years made him a calm, cooperative model.

See some new approaches in Truck Study 1.

© Kahuna Content

Looking in any direction except the one that is frequent, may provide unusual perspective, literally and figuratively.

In the new gallery “At My Feet,” you’ll see images in the study of line, shape, and pattern. Contained within this study is also a look at the ordinary but with a different angle.

What’s at or beneath our feet is usually considered to be of no consequence in our daily lives. Yet, when we stand or sit and ponder what is there, the meaning changes. The seemingly ordinary things we see are curiously no longer ordinary. Without that at our feet, would our daily lives have any meaning? Without that at our feet, would that not at our feet even exist?

Not only are these images a study in line, shape, and pattern; they are also an examination of surprise.

Check out the gallery “At My Feet.“

For a visual of Comodo concoctions, guests may go to the restaurant’s visual menu on Instagram. And then once served, guests may snap a pic of their meal for uploading to the Comodo Instagram page, so as to help out future Comodo guests. The service, in which guests are invited to participate at the bottom of the Comodo paper menu, saves Comodo time, effort, and the need for placing visuals on their paper menu. (Which just simply isn’t done.)

See the vid below for a visual explanation.

In “How Capitalism Can Save Art,” Ms. Paglia doesn’t actually ask “Can Capitalism Save Art?,” nor does she actually say how capitalism can save art. The article is more focused on a discussion of the insularity of today’s visual art scene with remarks on how she sees young artists ironically indoctrinated against an economic system which enables those artists to pursue their passion. This anti-capitalist indoctrination, she asserts, causes young artists to pursue their art from what she sees as a limited perspective. Her observance of this limited perspective, one which she classifies as “liberal secularism,” is based on her experience as a professor at the University of the Arts (Philadelphia) and through her contact with young artists.

Her point, I believe (the article is a bit “muddy” in places), is that since many visual artists are limited in their artistic perspective, i.e. an overzealousness to condemn capitalism at every stroke of the brush or flick of the sculptor’s pen, the works they produce are of limited market appeal, perhaps serving only to satisfy the needs and wants of the very small, capitalism-hating community that produces the works. (Her quote, “too many artists have lost touch with the general audience and have retreated to an airless echo chamber,” speaks volumes.) With capitalism scorned, the blame for which she lays largely at the feet of arts faculty, visual artists, she asserts, not only produce polemic work, but also lack the necessary entrepreneurial skills to succeed in the marketplace. (Maybe this lack of entrepreneurialism is at the root of all the angst-ridden work we see?)

The production of art, like other products (many of them intellectually based such as music), succeeds and builds upon itself when not only the artist’s spiritual needs are fulfilled, but also when those of the marketplace are met. Such an outlook on the production of art, that of a healthy, and perhaps selfish, respect for capitalism, may serve to prevent what Ms. Paglia characterized as fine arts from evolving into a further wasteland.