113: Rusty Bloom's exhibition of drawings

Yesterday, there was an opening party for Rusty Bloom's exhibition of drawings that I had to miss due to RL priorities, but I made a mental note to see the exhibition because I was curious about the technique. As I understand it, Rusty -- or as I call him, Handsome Rusty, so people can address the correct one 

when I'm around <grinning> -- took photographs in Second Life and then re-drew them in pencil, scanned the results and imported them back into SL. This sounded to me like an interesting process and I wanted to see the results. Having seen, I can say that they are really good and you should go have a look yourself. The SLURL is here, in Zerenta.

   Rusty built an entire parcel especially to house his drawings -- a Roman temple set in a skybox that includes a dance floor (but of course!) and other interesting features. The drawings are interesting and well-done; they are nude studies of a particularly handsome group of male and female Residents. I liked the technique of repeating the same boundaries for the drawings, the tonal 

quality, and roughly the same perspective for most of the portraits. They all have a kind of rough and smudgy quality that's in direct contrast to the hallucinatory sharpness and clarity of many SL photographs; not a texture we see often in SL, and I enjoyed it.  

   You will notice that there are a couple of snapshots of me on the scene, including a glimpse of the Roman temple the houses the art, pretending to be molested by the statues. I have not shown you pictures of the show itself for two reasons. One is that, as I said, the studies are nude and explicit. My policy is that I prefer that people make an informed choice to see these images, and you can do that by going to the gallery. The other is that as I understand it, unscrupulous people can actually lift the images I photograph and reproduce them for their own purposes. I always try to photograph other people's art only with their permission and I didn't talk to Rusty before visiting. All things considered I think you should see the art for yourself. 

   The images themselves are for sale for a very reasonable price, and having a nice piece of original art is well within your means, I imagine. I myself bought a study of my friend Larry Querrien, and a very nice one at that. 

   I'm not sure how long this interesting exhibition will be available; I recommend you visit in the next couple of days.