"It's like Mother Nature: It's going to find a way to express itself."

February 15, 2007 1:36 PM

Philip Martin Chavez is paralyzed, so he creates art using DragonDictate and Paint.
posted by brundlefly (16 comments total)

For the second link scroll down to the second item.
posted by brundlefly at 1:37 PM on February 15, 2007

First link is comin' up broken here.

Nope, wait, tried it again and it's fine.
posted by klangklangston at 1:39 PM on February 15, 2007

I really like some of it, the more minimal stuff, but there's a lot lot lot of crap there too. Oh, and not letting me control+click because This Work Is Copywritten when all I wanted to do was link to the ones I liked? Not everything in your life has to be disabled, dude.
posted by klangklangston at 1:42 PM on February 15, 2007 [3 favorites]

Your links are messed up. You mean Dragon Dictate and Paint.
posted by JJ86 at 2:04 PM on February 15, 2007

I do?
posted by brundlefly at 2:09 PM on February 15, 2007

Not everything in your life has to be disabled, dude.

That was terrible, klang.
posted by cortex at 2:10 PM on February 15, 2007

But better than saying that his art is about what one would expect from a crippled adult or a child in '95, right?
(Sorry, having to write about Frida has made me bitter toward the focus on the biography over the image when dealing with artists).
posted by klangklangston at 2:17 PM on February 15, 2007

No, no, I meant it like "that was in terrible—squirmingly, beautifully, laugh-out-loudly terrible—taste and I wish both to congratulate you and filet you for having beaten me to it".
posted by cortex at 2:20 PM on February 15, 2007

It's a good thing he uses Dragon rather than Windows Vista VR.
posted by Operation Afterglow at 2:25 PM on February 15, 2007

Oh, good. Maybe it can be in your next song. (Good on that, by the way.)
posted by klangklangston at 2:45 PM on February 15, 2007

This is like the lego car factory, or the IOCCC; I can appreciate it as look-what-I-can-do geekery, but not as Art in the fine art sense he's going for.
posted by hoverboards don't work on water at 3:05 PM on February 15, 2007

Not everything in your life has to be disabled, dude.

Not to be a pedant, but one can easily get around this. In Opera. Or by disabling javascript. Or by viewing source. I mean, point taken, but its not like he's the first guy to have this kind of wonkware hooked up, nor the last.
posted by Ogre Lawless at 3:56 PM on February 15, 2007

I don't like his art enough to spend the thirty seconds to get around his moronic restriction. Kinda like how I don't listen to a lot of radio streams because unless I absolutely have to use real player for work, I just kinda figure "Fuck your restricted format."
posted by klangklangston at 4:00 PM on February 15, 2007

(Since I could even see the urls that the links directed to in the status bar on Firefox, and decided I didn't want to bother typing them out, I'm not gonna bother to get fuckin' Opera to do it).
posted by klangklangston at 4:01 PM on February 15, 2007

As a DragonDictate user, I can attest to the difficulty of painting by voice. DragonDictate was not designed with paint programs in mind; I would love to be able to simply say "draw a 30 degree curve and taper the end after three inches", but you're limited to the basic 8 compass directions by DragonDictate, and you're lucky if the cursor stops and starts where you want it.

I use clip art, templates, lots of snap-to guides, filters, plenty of close-up work (and lately, vector graphics) when I need an image for my web sites. Philip Martin Chavez has far more patience than I, as some of those paintings were clearly laid down pixel-by-pixel. But I am just a web hack... he is an artist.

(BTW, the second external link in the Wikipedia article--the one JJ86 linked to--is one of my sites. Shows how many of us still use DragonDictate!)
posted by Soliloquy at 8:57 PM on February 15, 2007 [1 favorite]

Soliloquy writes "BTW, the second external link in the Wikipedia article--the one JJ86 linked to--is one of my sites."

Ha! Either it's a small world or MetaFilter rocks. I tend to think the later.
posted by brundlefly at 10:59 PM on February 15, 2007