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Posts Tagged ‘gloucester’

Martin Del Vecchio narrates his beautiful drone shots of Gloucester, Mass.

As Greg Cook writes at WBUR’s show the Artery, drones have as many uses as human creativity can devise, some good, some not so good.

He focuses on the photography and art applications. “In April, a graffiti artist going by the name KATSU used a customized drone to (illegally) scrawl paint high up on a Manhattan billboard that had been thought inaccessible to taggers. A video posted to YouTube in March, shows a bicyclist riding high up along a cliff in (according to the post) Sedona, Arizona. People have brought back astonishing footage from flying drones into fireworks and active volcanoes.

“Video by video, drones are transforming how we see the world — and this new view is changing how we understand the world.

“ ‘It’s not a fad,’ says Randy Scott Slavin, founder of the New York City Drone Film Festival. ‘Flying cameras are here to stay for sure. Because the perspective they get is great.’ …

“[Slavin] fell for drones when he got a Phantom a few years back. ‘I would shoot everywhere I went. Every time I went on vacation, I would shoot,’ he says. ‘Before I knew it, I started showing it to some of my director friends and they were like, “Shoot for me.” ‘ ”

Helen Greiner, CEO of Massachusetts-based Drone maker CyPhy Works says, “You’re just seeing the world the way a bird sees.” More here.

Photo: Greg Cook/WBUR
As drones have become cheaper and easier to fly, many people, like Martin Del Vecchio of Gloucester, are exploring the creative possibilities.

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These two murals are from Somerville and Gloucester. Do you get the feeling that the towns themselves have different personalities? One seems to record the history of the city in a formalized way. The other is more about people’s lives today.

If you know more about the genesis of these murals, I’d love to hear it. In both cases, the murals seem to have been created with permission. I wonder if you think that permission subverts the subversiveness of street art?

Makes me think of the kids in eighth grade who were asked to create nice Halloween paintings on shop windows so the windows wouldn’t get soaped as a Halloween prank.

The goody-two-shoes kids painted windows with pumpkins and witches. The rough kids still soaped windows.

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Sunday we drove up to Gloucester to the Cape Ann Museum to see Marsden Hartley‘s Dogtown paintings. I have always liked the spooky quality of the rock formations as represented by Hartley somewhere on the continuum between abstraction and realism. I love the strong outlines and the ambiguous puffy clouds, which convey either hope or irony.

The museum itself is charming in an eclectic way, and I was happy to renew my acquaintance with the work of children’s illustrator Virginia Lee Burton, who spearheaded a local artist collaborative called Folly Cave Designers, creators of wonderful fabrics.

Walker Hancock‘s plaster version of the angel-and-soldier war memorial at Amtrak’s 30th Street Station in Philadelphia is also in the museum. Not to mention all sorts of dories and fishing implements and seafaring works by Fitz Hugh Lane.

We enjoyed walking around Gloucester, the Beauport of Kate Colby’s recent book of poetry. I got a blueberry-lavender lemonade.

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