23. January 2012 22:00
by Jens Malmgren
0 Comments
Some things around you may come as a complete surprise and the less expected the more of a surprise it is, that a character can have a popularity for example. The letter R in the alphabet is the most popular letter in the Jens alphabet.
For me personally is R no special letter at all. I give R the same value as any other consonant. I actually like the vowels better than the consonants. You can sing vowels and make sounds with them and consonants are less useful from that respect.
I remember when I had Japanese colleagues. We were talking English a lot with each other and the letter R gives some problems for Japanese people abroad sometimes. Especially since Japanese often confuse R with L.
They told me that the reason for this was that they don’t have these sounds natively so really long ago someone had to decide what sound a Japanese would associate a letter with and so it was decided that the western sound for L was called R but it does not matter to them because they normally cannot hear the difference anyway.
I don’t know if this is correct because I don’t have Japanese ears myself. I have Swedish ears. For example I cannot hear that the letter V in English has windy sub sound at all but the Dutch they hear loads of wind going on in the V, it is almost like Feehhh when a Dutch person hears a native English person saying V. Complex indeed. Whatever you do, don't bring up this subject when you speak to a Dutch person because they really hear loads and loads of wind in the V and there is no discussion about it.
Anyway, I sat there with my Japanese friend and we were discussing the problem with R sounds in Japan. Then I figured out the cleverest question of all… I asked my Japanese colleague if he had been playing with toy cars in the sandbox when he was a child. He could confirm that YES That had happened. Then I told him that I also had been playing with toy cars in the sandbox and how I was sounding when I played in the sand box “Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr”. He looked impressed. As if he could see that my toy car had a supercharged turbo when I was a child. Yes and now it is your turn, I said to him “Le-le-le-le-le, Le-le-le-le-le” he tried unconvincing. I said to him that if you do these L sounds really quick then after a while it will sound like Rrrr. I tried to encourage my friend to practice this for a while. He ended the conversation with “No, we cannot do these quick tongue movements in Japan”.
So the character R is by far the most popular letter of all letters in my alphabet. The most popular vowel is O but it earns a fraction of the popularity of the character R.
(The first time I posted this image was on 9 July 2011. Now I republish this image but with my contemplations about the letter R and the popularity of this letter)
9. September 2011 21:40
by Jens Malmgren
0 Comments
After this autumns series of illusionistic paintings I was left with one idea to work out. It was not going to be illusionistic in the way that it would be a clearly impossible figure. My impossible figures are often the result of imagining possible figures. I imagine three dimensional objects that I swivel around in my head and combine and “look at” from various angles and then when an idea has started to form I start drawing it on a paper.
Until now I had been working with opaque objects for the illusionistic paintings; objects hiding something that comes back differently from behind a ribbon or a bar; objects with sharp elbows as if they were steel beams. One theme this spring has been to bend the beams and investigate round shapes and how to make illusions out of that.
When I worked on the round shaped illusions it occurred to me that if objects were transparent then you would be able to push one object into another and see through the objects as if they were made of glass. So here is a painting based on this idea. It is three cubes and they are pushed into each other. If you do that in reality you get a collision or you get that one object when pushed into another object is in itself is intact but here in this painting that although one cube is pushed into another that other cube is also pushed into the other cube. So the remarkable thing with these objects is that they leave no visible damage on each other. This is impossible so from that sense this is illusionistic.
To enforce the idea of mutual merge between the cubes and massive glass I have painted the breaking of the light. This is purely speculative. I have carried out no scientific study to find out if the light in the cubes would be broken this way.
The colors here are neon acrylic but used in a more “subtle” way.
6. September 2011 23:02
by Jens Malmgren
0 Comments
I concluded that round shapes can give many interesting forms to play with when it comes to illusionistic motives. There was one unexplored possibility, to create a round shape of blocks and to make this illusionistic.
During my experiments this spring I had tried oil paint. That was tedious and not so rewarding. I had also tried aquarelle and this worked very well actually. With the ribbon painting I rediscovered that acrylic paint has a really nice intensity in the paint that you need to work a little bit harder to achieve with aquarelle.
Along that path of experimenting I wanted to see what the intensiest acrylic paint ever could provide. I found what I was looking for. The shop called this bright. I call this neon. I like neon. My hat is neon orange. I have been talking about my hat already in this blog at the blog post about Three Clementine’s.
I used neon orange, neon yellow, neon green and neon pink for this painting. If I show this painting on the street the entire street is lit up by my painting. I tried this and everybody said “Ugh” except a little girl of three years old. She said “This is a really beautiful painting”.
6. September 2011 22:49
by Jens Malmgren
0 Comments
When you take the round shapes and cut them in pieces then you can make a kind of mat. This is no longer round shapes. With this painting I finished this spring’s exploration of round illusionistic shapes.
6. September 2011 22:37
by Jens Malmgren
1 Comments
I had started on a journey to explore the illusionistic possibilities of round shapes. My initial attempt were based on various repetitive round shapes. In a spiral each turn of the spiral repeatedly comes back. In a sinus curve each top and bottom is part of a repetitive pattern. In the rings painting the ring shape is coming back again and again. I thought that it would be nice to have an irregular yet repetitive shape with round forms that became illusionistic due to the piercings.
Here is the result.
The background is inspired by the sunset over Småland while i was driving to Sunnerås in Sweden during the spring holiday. For a painter the view of this kind of sunset is attractive but yet so impossible because at the top you have the blue sky and at the horizon you have the final rays of yellow and orange light. It is perfectly possible to find this sight in the nature but when you paint this you need to be careful because the transition from blue to yellow unavoidably goes over green when you mix paint on the canvas but in the sky there is no ray of green to see. So in a way that sight is illusionistic to a painter.
For this painting I Used acrylic paint. Acrylic paint has a lovely intensity.
6. September 2011 22:23
by Jens Malmgren
0 Comments
The round forms as basis for illusionistic paintings started with the spiral and then I tried the sinus curve. What’s next? Rings. What illusions can you do with rings? A magician can do magnificent art with rings but what could I do?
I set off to find out and soon I got into complex constructions that even I have problems to decipher. On this painting my theme of color spectrum was lost. Instead I tried my best to get some interesting color combination's. I am not convinced by the result. Is this an illusion, yes it is!
6. September 2011 21:54
by Jens Malmgren
0 Comments
A spiral is a beautiful shape in itself. This gave me inspiration to try to break free from illusionistic paintings of constructions of beams and studs with hooks mainly. What illusions can you create with curves and spirals were one of the questions I tried to answer.
On this painting I took two sinus curves and merged them together and then I punctured this construction with an impossible piercing. Also on this painting I worked on the spectrum of visible light.
6. September 2011 21:41
by Jens Malmgren
0 Comments
Right now I am the most famous for my illusionistic paintings. I have a puzzled relation to this fact. The main reason for this fame is that I published my illusionistic alphabet already 1998 on the Internet. In terms of Internet is this a long time ago. The alphabet has been published in for example a Dutch illusionistic calendar by Paul Baars only because it could be found on the Internet. This means that I have fans, sort of, and this means I have a responsibility towards my fans to give them a little bit more of my illusionistic art.
So here comes a series of blog posts about illusionistic paintings that I made during the spring of 2011.
This painting is a spiral. The edge of the spiral displays the color spectrum. There are a couple of verses to remember the color spectrum: Richard Of York Gave Battle in Vain. Another is Ring Out Your Great Bells In Victory. And is this spiral possible? No it is not possible, it is an illusion.
13. August 2011 21:47
by Jens Malmgren
0 Comments
These are four boxes. They are standing two by two next to each other. So far it is correct. It is also correct that each box has outer corners. The boxes are not tied together with each other. The front most box is standing a little bit in front of the other boxes so that they form a connection to each other. In this way they become related to each other. Because of this overlap there are interesting geometric forms created between the boxes: triangles and trapezoids.
If we look more carefully to each box is it obvious that each box is an impossible figure. The viewer will normally inspect all four boxes before it is possible to make the conclusion that they are all impossible figures. To do this is it necessary to follow the internal structure of each box with the eyes. When doing this the viewer will register the various color transitions. When looking at the shapes and the colors the viewer will start to figure out the logic behind the color scheme. There is logic in the color scheme broken by irrational choices of color. Each box has another pattern. There is one infinite box. Three boxes have two ends. One box has an internal loop.
This painting was published in Paul Baars illusion's calender 2011
13. August 2011 21:45
by Jens Malmgren
0 Comments
This is an oil painting of three impossible loops connected to each other. I made this painting February 2011.