October

Working with video is incredibly  time consuming. Because I’ve included paint mixing in the painting video, the time has doubled from a ten minute video to twenty minutes. I think its worth it, because nowadays a ‘painting’ can be produced by a machine, so I think an important part of modern traditional paintings, is how they are produced using eyes, hands and the most basic of materials. For me, this means trying to keep materials as simple and ‘technology free’ as possible.

Producing a painting using the same method as the cave painters, is an art form itself. Using the most up to date technology to share this primitive process is appropriate. YouTube videos are viewed by hundreds of millions of people. The biggest art gallery in the world, where the artist can show much more than just the finished work. Pure science fiction (to people of my age).

If you are interested in uploading a video, here are a few words of advice on an issue I’ve had recently. Time-lapse is used by many artists to share their painting process. Time-lapse means speeding up the video, so a two hour painting session can be viewed in ten minutes. This is more practical for the would-be painter than having to spend two hours for each painting viewed.

The problem is the sound track. Speeding up the video makes the natural sound unusable, so sound has to be added after the speeding up process. I’ve been using music supplied by YouTube but none of the suitable  tracks available are long enough for twenty-plus minute videos. A pure silent video (which I used to do) is un-nerving. I used Apple’s GarageBand application to produce ‘white noise’. This application has ‘loops’ of natural sounds which are used to make up a soundtrack. They are licensed  for use by Apple product users and as such don’t have copyright issues. Or shouldn’t have. The problem is that if you use a licensed loop in your uploaded video (which you are legally entitled to do) and this loop has also been used in a registered commercial music track, YouTube will flag your video as a copyright violation, even though you are legally entitled to use it. Its a legal issue which will have to be addressed by both Apple Inc. and YouTube and it doesn’t look like it will be resolved soon. To stay legal, I had to make my own (actually my son, Will recorded it) ‘white noise’ and this delayed me further in my video production.

Finally, here is the said video. See you next time.