DayJob

The photo is from the old Ruckle Farm house on Salt Spring Island, taken while camping there summer 2007.

slipcoversvancouver.com

I created this business 9 years ago so that I could be home for my daughter. The site was my first foray into html and css last fall. It's all simple hand code. Site needs an upgrade already, and the gallery photos need updating...I’ll get to it this winter.

I still have a lot more to learn in web development.
I'll tackle JAVASCRIPT, PHP and FLASH this year (am so looking forward to the fluid /seamless quality Adobe will bring to Flash).

I won’t be quitting the slips anytime soon, it’s nested us well, and now that the 'chick' is a teen, it’ll take us flying… we want to see Angkor, Thailand (I want to study some Thai-massage there, and snorkel, swim then hang on a hammock for a week, or two), Italy for Senicas' sweet 16 (we'll start Italian classes this winter), Dubai (primarily to see the bizarre monumental modern architectural feats all that crazy oil money is erecting), and Australia, to name a few dream destinations.

Over the next few years I’ll continue to increase my digital skills, and develop my new media /design business.

ExtremeEdge

I created this T-shirt/ LOGO design and web site front page in Adobes' Illustrator and Photoshop, using some type manipulation plus live trace for an image I borrowed from the Patagonia site (they've got some great images).

Extreme Edge Tours was one of the fictitious outdoor adventure companies assigned in term 2/ Design Aesthetics. The Extreme web site would have been very cool with 24/7 live podcasts from ongoing tours around the planet. I related to this particular company directly because of fantastic adventures I'd had with The National Outdoor Leadership School in the mid 80's.

NOLS is a minimum impact, outdoor education school based out of Lander, Wyoming with branch schools around the world. I bumped into this intrepid bunch of adventurers when their Baja Branch school re-opened for their Fall/Winter Semester Program on the beach where I had been living and fishing with Cipriano and his family the previous summer.

I received a generous scholarship for their Fall/Winter Wyoming/Utah Semester the following year where I learned spelunking, canyoning, mountaineering, winter camping, cross country skiing, and rope climbing.

I still remember practicing wearing stiff, old, US army issue hiking boots on a bolder field near Lander. After an eternity spent in flip-flops I felt like Frankenstein. Oh! and I remember my first time on cross-country skis, with almost 100lbs. of gear in the pack on my back...talk about crash coarse! I was so tired and frustrated by the time I got into our first camp I was near tears.

Imagine learning to tie fly fishing knots (for the next part of the semester), under a central tarp, during a white out while quinsy (snow cave) camping. I quickly completed the required knots before my fingers got numb, was first done, then set out alone to my camp to start hot drinks for my camp mates and myself. NOLS has a minimum impact philosophy so all of our camps were discretely hidden from one another...I set out into the white, and for a few moments there almost got so crazy lost!! Was very weird, intense.
What a vivid experience.

Some of my instructors had climbed Everest!! Now that's ultra-intense. That's EXTREME!!!!

DejaVu

Is two photos, a Nevada desert scene I shot last summer, and an image of the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, also shot last summer. I played with the transformation tool in the palace photo, and stamped the foliage in a little more fully, also used the burn and dodge tools.

this image gives me that parallel reality feeling...insight or escape??? probably both...

Wish I’d been into this whole computer world last summer (2006), I’d have swung by Adobe and Apple, just to see and worship those geniuses.

Next time.

FuryOfHeaven

I enjoyed the movie Constantine. Any story where the 'angels' are as fierce, and raw, and flawed as the 'devils' interests me.

This image is another photo I took at The Palace of Fine Arts last summer. I threw a clouds filter background in and worked the saturation, and contrasts, added graffiti 911.. NOT 9/11...don't get me started on that!!... dishonest, life stealing 'devils' pretending to be something else really burn me!!!

ReignOfTheRoseScentedSky

Photoshop was in first term, so I guess it’s my most comfortable/ familiar program. ‘Reign of the Rose Scented Sky’ is three of my own photos collaged together plus some effect and blend modes. You can't really see it but it IS reigning, haha...(double click on the image to enlarge...to see the reign)

I’ve seen almost every animated feature at least four, or more, times!! I don’t recall many from my own childhood, but Senica has put me through the paces this past decade. I remember ‘The Grinch,’ and ‘The Point’, 1971, by Harry Nilsson (everyone had a point_on the top of their head_ except Oblio, so he and his dog go on a walkabout, through some acid inspired experiences, seeking his point…late 60’s/ early 70’s...was a very tripy time. Actually, was the time when Jobs, and Gates, and so many brilliant, maverick thinkers where dreaming up all of what we enjoy in technology today!!!)

While I’m on the subject of animation (pre-digital); find “The Last Unicorn‘, 1982, beautiful sound track composed by Jimmy Webb, recorded by America, it’s exquisite and the story is smart. One of my favorite discoveries during this parental part of life.

This image evokes an animated - kid friendly, perhaps - feature idea that I have that will blend that 60's era openness with the new age, new media influence of today…reality will bend, there’ll be heroic journeys, myth, passion, multi-dimensions intersecting and creating new paradigms that blow the mind and take the breath away, love in many forms with sublime beauty….ha ha...heady stuff…

Hopefully with something fresh and at once eternal.

There will be temples.

Temple

This sketch is just more play with color and form. A little more sensually indulgent.

It’s a photoshop collage composed of three of my own photos, one of the images had several layers coming into this comp. I used layers of blends, a couple of effects, and the eraser and smudge tools.

I am compelled to explore the 'TEMPLE' as architectural structure on ley line power spots throughout the world, and as human form: sacred places where dimensions intersect powerfully.

Taj

Paper Collage_ glue stick/ scissors technology, early 2006, before I learned Photoshop.

*“Khan Jahan Lodi cancelled all appointments and went directly into his rooms, where he locked the doors behind him for eight days. During this time he refused to take any food or wine, and the only sound that the ministers who gathered outside his apartments could discern was a low, continuous moan. On the ninth day the doors opened, and to the surprise of everyone who had known the worldly ruler, Shah Jahan emerged speaking of the impermanence of life and of a desire to renounce his title and become a homeless fakir- this from the same man who, a few years earlier, had cut down four brothers to gain the throne. A strange physical transformation had also taken place: the emperor's back was now bent in a peculiar way and his hair, which had been raven black, had turned totally white.”

*If you don’t know the story of the Taj Mahal, one particularly romantic accounting can be found at exotic india art

I’ve been drawn to the Taj Mahal since the first time I saw a photograph of it as a child. It is, for me, the most beautiful building I have knowledge of. It has always stirred awe and resonance in me. Many years later, after some lived journeys into the passion of my own heart, I would discover the popular story of it. (I haven’t been to Agra…yet…it’s a journey I will undertake after Senica takes flight into her own life...Unless???)

This is a collage from some magazine photos and a (water) photo I’d taken from the deck of a Gulf Islands ferry. It springs from my own yearning and search for this kind of invincible, irrepressible, mutually passionate, complete, complimentary love.While I was creating this, over the course of a couple of evenings, I envisioned it as scenes of stories of me, alone, and with my dream lover/s, weaving through many life times, in many forms, a tantric journey of maltesean proportions.

This was created before the thought of coming to BCIT and studying computer graphics, very early in my exposure to computers in general, but I am beginning to see how some of the skills I am learning now might be evolving into some animated creations in the future.

BeautifulFreakDefault

This is the original photo taken in The Valley of Fire, Aug_07.
I'm such a freak, I want to keep rambling, in motion, exploring this new place.
I'm curious to find Lake Mead, beneath the clouds on the right horizon, the ADVENTURER...
and at the same time I want to see the details, soak in the glory of this brilliant moment, then share that beauty with others, the ARTIST_
hence; I'm taking photos out the window with one hand, driving with the other.
I love the shadow of Toyota on the bottom right!
I admit it! I'm lusty for it all at once!!!

This is what happened next.


A pen friend said this reminded her of a 60's record album cover. Not quite as accomplished but I'd have to agree. Funny, no escaping ones past.

That's me in Toyota (my lean mean little truck) in the Valley of Fire, Nevada.
This 'Default' page for a portfolio site, for Dreamweaver_2 in term 4, is a photoshop collage from several photos taken last summer. Plus the Blue Marble NASA planet earth.

HELLO

In term 1 /Web Communications we were assigned to start a blog.

I started a couple:
http://maltesecomesouttoplay.blogspot.com/

http://alexanderpanthersdream.blogspot.com/

Term 1 was such a trip!!! I really jumped into this digital thing from no where.. and I don't type, its always a small mystery to me where the letters are after I've been away from the keyboard for even only a week...Failed high school typing...got switched into more arts classes, my councilor was a wise woman indeed!!!

I'm into Term 4, hence the official 'malteseDESIGNblog'.
Thanx to all the generous teachers and supportive staff at BCIT.
I've learned so much this year!!!
There's still so much to learn,
and it's an exponentially changing landscape.
That's what's so attractive about this medium.

The following is my first blog entry way back in early October 2006:

The Sand Box

Here I am… in the sandbox, it’s the Sahara-sized sandbox; the World Wide Web.

It’s the Australian-Gold-Coast-sized sandbox and I am immersed in a dive-in-the-deep-end, year long ‘web/CD-ROM development-new media design’ program at the British Columbia Institute of Technology. In the New Media Centre of Excellence, no less.

The sun is brilliant. The water is fresh, clear, but I know there can be potential jellys and great, insatiable sharks in the depths. Imagined threats, my own conjuring of coarse, but none-the-less frightening, and destructive. I often feel that I’m gasping for air, choking on water, deep in panic to keep pace with 10 fingers times my instructors and classmates clapping on the keys, their chorus in high-volume surround-sound while my two fingers dance awkwardly in, still new to them, LCD light.

NOTE TO SELF: Breath deeply Maltese. Grow gills if you must! but don’t shut it down, not even one byte!

The recluse comes out to play…in a world rushing head-long through deep space, and for why? for what? for whom? and for, did I ask, why?

Only the intensity of birth comes to mind…