Lockdown Eight (Too busy to think)

Another lazy post, been too busy gardening and prevaricating since the last one.

small painting gif ‘fox jaw’

I made this small painting, and I entered the last one into an online competition…

It’s there on the right, you can click this link to vote for it https://www.doncasterartfair.com/?pgid=kb84pw6k-c20b0fd7-b161-42b3-ac0a-0086832b9f2e but I don’t really stand a chance, the final 30 are picked through the online vote and half an hour in some of these had 500+ votes. I don’t know enough people online. It was free to enter though.

I’ve been continuing to work on the ‘gardens’ project, tentatively titled “et in arcadia ego” the viewer moves through a series of gardens, all the gardens I’ve spent time in. I think its about the pursuit of quiet spaces, the expanding and contracting nature of safety – mental and physical – and the chimeric nature of confidence (for a start).

This is the first space, the back yard at Glover Street in Birches Head, Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent. The spaces will eventually lead to the garden I used for geranium and I’m working on a post explaining the concept fully for a new funding bid (small funds but tech support).

I’m building sculpture this week, I’ll post it next week or on the internet as I go.

More Lockdown (less success)

I’ve got the WebGL down below seven minutes consistently, with data caching, it’s still too long though. www.ian-latham.com/geranium/build_newmirror

Began thinking about meadow forms for sculptures.

07/05/20 tried loading the WebGL again, took 20 minutes to do nothing, 12 minutes to load, then twice seven minutes to load each time with no sound! Next step is to upgrade the Unity programme which means a complete rebuild. Love this game!

08/05/20 Too nice a day to mess about with Unity so I did some sketching in the garden and started to work a maquette for the meadow forms.

buttercup sketch

buttercup sketch

I’ve started to draw on the iPad in the mornings as well, posting them on instagram. [@latham_1959] The maquette is air drying clay and will be varnished and cast in plaster.

common orchid maquette

common orchid maquette

I’m thinking of different finishes, certainly mounted on a stem.

meadow forms sketch

meadow forms sketch

Since these, a couple of days ago, I’ve had to update Unity to try to resolve the load issues.

Lockdown Continued… (notice the calmer Title Case)

The VR world from the geranium project on simmer – www.simmer.io/@IanLatham/the-geranium-project – takes 8 minutes and 7 seconds to load.

The latest WebGL build on my own website – www.ian-latham.com/geranium/build – takes 11 minutes and 39 seconds to load.

I’ve spent hours trying to work out how to make the things load more quickly but everything I try seems to make little or no difference.

I participated in an online event for the Doncaster New Fringe art group, a kind of delayed open studio evening in which artists film their work and upload the videos to a website. This is the video I made Art Bomb Video for Doncaster New Fringe I found some old 3d models I made for sculptures over a number of years and built a VR environment for them, I then made an awful video of my studio and me explaining what I’d done in fluent gibberish and placed that video inside the VR world. I recorded that through the computer and there you go.

Other than that this week has been a lot of gardening, building a greenhouse, and the endless frustration of Unity!

greenhouse

My New Greenhouse

I finally got the WebGL build down to 6 minutes and 17 seconds! Or at least below 7 minutes over several tries, the load bar doesn’t work properly though.