Slashdolt wrote:

> I've had mixed feelings about the farm myself.  

Don't, its importance to this image cannot be overestimated.  I also 
grew up in a rural area and you have captured the feel very accurately, 
especially a certain claustrophobia that standing corn can create.
> 
> 
> I spent countless hours working on the textures and finishes. 

It shows.


  but I believe the
> wood texture was a granite and bozo texture stretched out to look like a
> wood grain.  Then I overlayed a stretched agate pattern on top of that, for
> the color variation.  I tried using the woods.inc, but eventually abandoned
> it, and made my own.  Some of them also had turbulence added.  Then I used,
> "warp {repeat 2*x flip <1,0,0> " to flip-flop the textures to look like wood
> veneer.
> 

Interesting read how you did it, simple, but sophisticated.


A comment I disagree with is the one criticizing the prominence of the 
fence against the sky.  On the contrary I think it is one of the great 
contributing details of the scene.  Ultimately, one of the ways that the 
juxtaposition of radios and gravestones works is as a kind of vanitas, 
and the gothic points of that fence, undulating across the sky, form an 
intermediate horizon, and a warning to the vain.  It frames the meaning 
perfectly.

Speaking of gothic, one of the things I enjoyed most in this round was 
the way in which the stylistic handling of the images might allude to 
the period of the technology depicted.  It is exciting because it hints 
at a maturation of cg beyond the imprisoning poles of mathematics at one 
end and photography at the other.  This image plays on american gothic 
traditions, underlaid by surrealism, which are rooted in the decades 
just before and during the golden age of radio.  The synthesized 
strangeness of the image: old radios looking like new, popping up as if 
grave markers in a midwestern landscape, is intensified by the realism 
and consistency of detail throughout.  The accurate description of 
distant farm buildings ( suggesting the world of the present ) resonates 
with the poignant, foreground detailing of radio cabinets past.

Another interesting theme that frequented the images of this round, was 
the portrayal of technology whose medium was sound. Necessarily they are 
rendered silent, not only by time, but by the fact that they can only be 
pictured. This image heightens that reference beautifully with the 
allusion to the selence of the cemetary.

In these ways this picture made use of expressive means that the topic 
brought out in competing artists also, but its startling concept takes 
it to another level.

-Jim

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