Today I received an e-mail from a post-graduate (MFA) student at the University of Alexandria, Egypt. He's doing his master's on "The 3-D Illusion Effect in Printmaking". This is one of those cases where the Internet is such a wonderful thing - thanks to the web my artwork is getting scholarly attention in Egypt.

I can't tell you how many times the situation as arisen where I have wanted to find a particular old blog entry to refer someone to and struggled to find it. Typically I'd employ one of three methods to find an old post:

• making a rough guess at the date and looking through the subject lines for the months near when I think I might have made the post,
• making a rough guess at the date and looking at the image folders on my server for a picture in the post, then going to the month in the archive and finding the post, or
• grepping my backup (I run a Perl script nightly that downloads my entries) to find the post.

Grepping is quickest but the results can be so ugly that the other two methods are often more effective. So, today I decided to write a search utility that gives nice, clean results. Finding things in my blog is now a snap. And as it gets bigger (there are already almost 3,000 entries) this will get more useful.

There is also another level of utility to it as well. More than just being a useful tool, it was an exercise in using Perl to pull together elements from my Lotus Domino server, a third-party website, and the file system in a nice, seamless way - which is exactly what I am going to need to do for the leverage the work already done with the artofadornment store for selling prints. There is a plan, it all fits together eventually.

I created an RSS feed from my portfolio (http://www.mbarrick.net/rss/rss-artwork.xml) and syndicated it here at: mbarrick_art. Add the feed and you can get my latest additions to my portfolio on your friends page without having to read the rest of my prattle.

Looks like I'll be doing a few (13) illustrations to be used in Dark Canada, each one depicting a different subculture sub-genre.

I've created a feed for the news off my website and syndicated the feed on LJ as mbarrick_update. If you have me on your friends list, or you want to keep abreast of new artwork posted to my website without having me having access to your friends-only posts, add mbarrick_update to your friends list.

Thanks to the miracle of the LJ tag system, I've created an area on my MBarrick.net creative site for active projects where, with tag filtering, I can effectively have a blog of each project as I am working on it.

Michael was born and raised in the city of Duncan on Vancouver Island. He began his formal, post-secondary art-education at Malaspina College in Nanaimo, B.C., later moving to Vancouver to attend Simon Fraser University and complete his B.A. in Visual Art (1994). While he has participated in group shows in civic and academic galleries such as the foyer of the Cowichan Theatre (Duncan, 1985), the Nanaimo Art Gallery (Nanaimo, 1990), and the Simon Fraser University Gallery (Burnaby, 1993), Michael has preferred over the last decade to show in café galleries, nightclubs, and alternative venues. Some of these venues in Vancouver have included the Atlantis nightclub in Yaletown, The Cave alternative theatre space off Commercial Drive, and Ironworks Studios in Gastown.

Even well before his formal university education, Michael's artistic influences developed along two disparate threads. One the one hand he has had an interest in science and mathematics since an early age and began working with computers in the late 1970's and to study computer science at the university level concurrent to working toward his visual art degree. On the other hand he has long been interested in the "Bohemian" artists of the "Belle Epoche" of 1890's Paris-- an interest that infamously inspired him to separate from a tour group in Montmartre in order to "see where the artists really lived" when he was only eleven. Michael's continued interest in Bohemianism also manifests itself in his involvement in the contemporary alternative nightlife of Vancouver as a regular photographer and, on occasion, travelling as far afield as Chicago, Toronto, and New York to find inspiration for his Bohemian inspired work.

His two threads of interest have come together in several different lines of work. They include digital work based on 19th century stereographs, and nightclub paintings inspired by Renoir and the early work of Picasso that are worked from his own digital photographs. Some of his early "landscape" work is painted from images generated by computer programs he wrote himself and these lead directly into his more recent "forest" series of paintings also inspired by the early work of Piet Mondrian. His drawing styles are diversely inspired by the "low brow" art popular in the alternative nightclub community and the various late 19th century and early 20th century illustrators.

Michael's paintings, drawings and photographs hang in private collections from Vancouver to New York. His on-line portfolio can be viewed at http://www.mbarrick.net and he can be reached at mbarrick@mbarrick.net or at  (604) 684-8372.

Cornelius Huysmans is an ancestor on my maternal grandmother's quarter of the family (her maiden name was Huysmans and one of her middle names was Cornelia). Here's what the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica has to say about him:

HUYSMANS, the name of four Flemish painters who matriculated in the Antwerp gild in the 17th century. Cornelis the elder, apprenticed in 1633, passed for a mastership in 1636, and remained obscure. Jacob, apprenticed to Frans Wouters in 1650, wandered to England towards the close of the reign of Charles II., and competed with Lely as a fashionable portrait painter. He executed a portrait of the queen, Catherine of Braganza, now in the national portrait gallery, and Horace Walpole assigns to him the likeness of Lady Bellasys, catalogued at Hampton Court as a work of Lely. His portrait of Izaak Walton in the National Gallery shows a disposition to imitate the styles of Rubens and Van Dyke. According to most accounts he died in London in 1696. Jan Baptist Huysmans, born at Antwerp in 1654, matriculated in 1676-1677, and died there in 1715-1716. He was younger brother to Cornelis Huysmans the second, who was born at Antwerp in 1648, and educated by Gaspar de Wit and Jacob van Artois. Of Jan Baptist little or nothing has been preserved, except that he registered numerous apprentices at Antwerp, and painted a landscape dated 1697 now in the Brussels museum. Cornelis the second is the only master of the name of Huysmans whose talent was largely acknowledged. He received lessons from two artists, one of whom was familiar with the Roman art of the Poussins, whilst the other inherited the scenic style of the school of Rubens. He combined the two in a rich, highly coloured, and usually effective style, which, however, was not free from monotony.

Seldom attempting anything but woodside views with fancy backgrounds, half Italian, half Flemish, he painted with great facility, and left numerous examples behind. At the outset of his career he practised at Malines, where he married in 1682, and there, too he entered into some business connection with van der Meulen, for whom he painted some backgrounds. In 1706 he withdrew to Antwerp, where he resided till 1717, returning then to Malines, where he died on the 1st of June 1727.

Though most of his pictures were composed for cabinets rather than churches, he sometimes emulated van Artois in the production of large sacred pieces, and for many years his Christ on the Road to Emmaus adorned the choir of Notre Dame of Malines. In the gallery of Nantes, where three of his small landscapes are preserved, there hangs an Investment of Ltixembourg, by van der Meulen, of which he is known to have laid in the background. The national galleries of London and Edinburgh contain each one example of his skill. Blenheim, too, and other private galleries in England, possess one or more of his pictures. But most of his works are on the European continent.

I didn't know the Art Institute of Chicago has any of his work. I know the Metropolitan in New York does, but we forgot to look for it when we were there. Obviously, not knowing that it was even there, I wasn't looking for this as we wandered through the AIC. It's a smaller piece (about 8" x 10" or so) and was hanging unceremoniously in a hallway connecting the galleries in the European section of the museum. The name caught me out of the corner of my eye and I exclaimed, "Holy shit!" rather loudly. My uncouth exclamation got the attention of a guard who then stood by confusedly watching me excitedly snap pictures of a small, minor piece by a largely unknown artist hanging in a connecting hallway in a backwater of the museum.