Weekly 5 is a round-up the past week’s creative news, discoveries, and happenings in my world!
Best thing that happened in my world this week:
The best part of this past week is catching up with several friends, partaking in delicious meals, and catching up. This coming weekend looks to be just as busy with one friend having a birthday gathering, as well as having breakfast with a cousin visiting from out of state. Of course I can’t go a week without getting into some mischief, even at my age (who said growing up was law?). Upon arriving at one friend’s home, I made a last second decision to park in his driveway…sideways! I always try to park properly, but I figured this was a good time to pay him back for the time he parked in ours sideways many years ago. No vehicles, animals or parking surfaces were harmed!
Meet Tatsuo Horiuchi, the 77-Year-Old Artist Who ‘Paints’ Japanese Landscapes With Excel
From COLASSAL
For over 15 years, Japanese artist Tatsuo Horiuchi has rendered the subtle details of mountains, cherry blossoms, and dense forests with the most unlikely tool: Microsoft Excel. The 77-year-old illustrator shunned the idea of paying for expensive painting supplies or even a basic drawing program for his computer, saying that he prefers Excel even over Microsoft Paint because it has “more functions and is easier to use.” Using simple vector drawing tools developed primarily for graphs and simple shapes, Horiuchi instead draws panoramic scenes of life in rural Japan.
Artist discovery: Catherine Rains
It was an accident. Being an artist was not part of my life plan by any stretch of the imagination. Until age 33, I was one of those people who said, “I don’t have an artistic bone in my body.” (Sound familiar?) My favorite exercise, and the one that changed my life’s course, was the one where I listed all of the things I loved to do as a child without being told to do them. Smack in the middle of my list was the word collage, sparking the memory of the 10-year-old me proudly holding my first collage…
©Catherine Rains
Layers of meaning in art; On the perception of art & a comment on AI
From Art As Home on Substack
AI as a technology is here to stay, that’s for sure. You are free to choose whether to use it in any capacity or to ignore it completely in your creative practice, but by now it’s so ubiquitous that it’s almost impossible to avoid it in our lives. My own opinion is that it is a double-edged sword, because it bears the potential to increase efficiency (I mostly mean e.g. routine business tasks), but also can harm creatives either through exploiting their work without remuneration, or through substituting their work.
Saying that, I want to emphasize that cheap substitutes for artwork have been around for decades – think various prints from supermarkets, stock images, mass produced cheap decoration pieces, etc. Even flea market and second hand pieces fall under this category. I don’t think these products are in direct competition with artworks that have a premium on their originality and uniqueness, although they still are substitutes.
Playlist of the week:
