Look, See (2003-07)

5. sing, strum

 

 

 

 

 

 

20040627 drawing

 

 

Untitled, 2004, watercolor & pencil on paper, 7 1/2 X 6", scanned

This past weekend I did a bunch of ink and watercolor things on 11 X 8 1/2" and 7 1/2 X 6" paper, all with a sumi-e brush. Most of the watercolor things were red and green, and all of the ink work was black. The problem was I simply didn't know what I wanted to do, and never really felt like I got anywhere. They're all trash, except this one that, when I looked through the stack of paper yesterday, jumped out at me as maybe the beginning of something, and somewhat related to how in my mind I jump from HTML drawings to drawings on paper, something more in spirit than literally a visual interpretation, and which I haven't yet figured out how to do physically.

This is five slow strokes with a very dry brush that's about 1/2" in diameter with hairs about 1 1/2" long. Almost as soon as each stroke was brushed it was already dry. The darker red at the bottom of each stroke is a second pass with a still dry brush rubbed in almost dry watercolor from a well in the palette. The pencil was ruled after, with a yellow #2 pencil, corresponding to the stroke. The paper is from a stack of card stock I have sitting around, the same used last year for a series title "Energy" produced for Rudolf's Diner.

I like the clear character of each stroke, the supporting straight line, the modesty of means and lack of presumption, the sense of air and breath, the pace of the eye through the five figures, and how the structure is not far from the grid I've been using so much for three years now but not overbearingly present. This is not a finished work, but I think there is an idea in here that I can use.

 

 

 

 

new page

 

 

This domain has a new entry page.

 

 

 

 

4. purr, rustle

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. mumble, murmur

 

 

 

 

 

 

2. drone, moan

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. hum, croon

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hummingbirds 10-18

 

 

 

---

The above image is a .gif. When I compile a series of HTML drawings, such as these nine, they are formatted in a way that is way too large for a monitor. After compiling the drawings I take screenshots and then produce a much smaller graphic representation of the series, making a picture of the HTML drawings, not the actual HTML drawings. However, when I do this I always include a link to the HTML compilation file; click the above graphic and a rather large web page will load with the nine drawings in full, glorious HTML, much too large to be viewed at once on any monitor. This is just my little friendly way of being helpful to the viewer.

 

 

 

 

Hummingbirds 1-18

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hummingbird 18

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hummingbird 17

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hummingbird 16

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hummingbird 15

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hummingbird 14

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hummingbird 13

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hummingbird 12

 

 

 

 

 

 

Joanna Pousette-Dart at Charles Cowles, New York

 

 

New York Times:

Joanna Pousette-Dart
Charles Cowles
537 West 24th Street, Chelsea
Through June 26

Joanna Pousette-Dart has been making high-quality, nonironic abstract paintings for more than 30 years. But in the last 20 she has had only three solo exhibitions, counting this one, and her last was nine years ago. So this excellent show is something to savor.

Why Ms. Pousette-Dart waits so long between shows is hard to say. The paintings here — compositions of flat, curvy shapes and fat, swooping lines on two-part canvases shaped like shields, boat hulls or billowing square sails — give the impression of having been made with effortless grace. (Late Willem de Kooning and recent Brice Marden come to mind.) But maybe that is crucial: in art as in sport, it is hard to make it look easy.

Ms. Pousette-Dart is serious about Modernist abstraction, but there is nothing too sober or sanctimonious about what she does. Her paintings have lovely, slightly dry eggshell surfaces and a colorful, slightly muted palette with pastel tendencies. They have been made with a caressing touch that suggests thoughtful spontaneity. While the compositions of loopy shapes and lines fit tightly into the eccentrically shaped panels — in some cases evoking Northwest Indian design — they don't feel cramped; they convey a buoyant, free feeling. There is a mutually responsive relationship between the container and the contained — or between body and soul — that is a pleasure to behold.
KEN JOHNSON

From the Charles Cowles press release:

POUSETTE-DART describes this body of work as informed by landscape but less about the physical reality of landscape than about, "the experience of moving through it, and about certain inherent primal relationships that are a constant. After traveling and working in New Mexico, I began moving away from the rectangle to shapes suggesting anomalies of space, distance, and horizon. I saw the alignment of the shapes as a momentary stance within an encompassing event – an idiosyncratic conjunction implying imminence and the lie of completion. I wanted the shapes to interlock with the drawing inside them to form a continuum. The image is generated from the place where the panels meet. It knits them together while unraveling them from within."

 

 

 

 

Posted by chrisashley at 11:28 AM | Comments (0)

Hummingbird 11

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hummingbird 10

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hummingbirds 1-9

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hummingbird 9

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hummingbird 8

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hummingbird 7

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hummingbird 6

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hummingbird 5

 

 

 

 

 

 

Birds and Flags 1-9, June 2004

 

 

Nine drawings: pencil, colored pencil, watercolor, and ink on 100% cotton fiber acid free archival thesis paper, 11 X 8 1/2" each, scanned (see notes below; click each for a larger view)

Nothing conclusive here; an exercise in line, color, brushwork, gesture, movement with variations on a triangle motif. Did the top three on Saturday, June 5, the middle three on Sunday morning, and the bottom three Sunday afternoon. No do-overs. Usually to get nine drawings like this I'd easily do 20-25 drawings. This time I settled for what came out, awkwardness and all; I want to look at that, think about what makes something right or wrong.

Each drawing started with a simple freehand drawing in pencil over which are laid three roughly-ruled colored pencil lines. The watercolor is laid in with a small flat brush in short strokes, forming an area that surrounds the triangles but doesn't make a real background, trying to find an incomplete completeness. The final act is the free-hand ink outline that anchors but doesn't encompass the central painted field.

Each drawing has three colors, plus black and graphite. After doing the first three I re-used the same color combinations for the next two sets of three. I rotated the sequence of the color combinations in each row without a lot of thought.

This is smooth paper, easy to draw on, and comes in boxes of 100 sheets for around $12.00; I bought it at the UC Berkeley student store. The watercolor goes nicely on this paper, allowing long enough to move the paint a bit before it kind of sucks up the water, which helps retain the look of the brush strokes.

There are a lot of birds flying across and in and out of our backyard. A branch hanging over our fence holds a nest in which we can watch parent robins land with big juicy worms to feed two shaky, wide-open, triangle-shaped baby mouths. Neighbors down the street have Tibetan prayer flags and another string of peace flags hanging above their long porch. Leaves are fluttering from branches, loads of apples and plums are growing and hanging. Telephone wires are diagrams across the sky, drawings from pole to pole zigzagging down the street. Large and small planes fly over to and from Oakland Airport.

These drawings were originally going to have a different format; behind each drawing would be another piece of paper turned horizontally, centered and aligned with the top sheet at the bottom edge. For an idea of what I mean see the recent HTML drawings "Three Edges." Once I did the drawings though I realized as I made them that I'd completely ignored this idea, and so each drawing just didn't sit well. I'm doing another set with that format fully integral to the entire process.

 

 

 

 

Group Material and Reaganism

 

 

Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes lists some links, "because it's been a week of remembering one life more than 21,000 deaths." I add the work of Group Material, a democratic art collaborative working at the height of Reaganism whose are practice was, simply but essentially, curation.

From Franklin Furnace

In the Democracy project for the DIA foundation, 1988, installations on education, electoral politics, cultural participation, and AIDS were tied closely to round table and town meeting discussions which were later compiled with other writings into a book. After this project, Group Material work on AIDS continued in the development of the AIDS Timeline first installed at Berkeley in 1989.

See the Berkeley link; the AIDS Timeline was installed at BAMPFA as MATRIX/Berkeley 132, 11/1/1989 - 1/20/1990:

The AIDS Timeline, a mixed-media installation by the artists' collective Group Material, reconstructs the history of AIDS as embedded within a web of cultural and political relations, primary among them the federal government's response to the syndrome. According to Group Material, the timeline, "indicts the government's inaction [on AIDS] and society's complicity in that inaction."2
The exhibition calls upon a variety of art objects as well as cultural artifacts, including images and texts from the popular media, the government, and grassroots political activists, to create a chronology of the syndrome. Using this breadth of representational materials, the timeline suggests that AIDS has been constructed through both a bio-medical discourse of infection, incubation, and transmission as well as a cultural vocabulary of innocence and guilt, dominance and deviance, threat and threatened, self and other.

It was a powerful and memorable exhibition and event in the Bay Area at that time.

 

 

 

 

Preview: Clyfford Still

 

 

I am currently writing about this Clyfford Still painting at the Berkeley Art Museum:

 

 

 

 

Hummingbird 4

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was born June 10, 1957 at 3:17 p.m.

 

 

Forty-seven Birthday Drawings (and one to grow on)

 

 

 

 

Drawing: June 10, 1984

 

 

This drawing is dated June 10, 1984:

 

 

 

 

Hummingbird 3

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hummingbird 2

 

 

 

 

 

 

Three Edges I-IX

 

 

The title refers to three sets of edges surrounding the central image: the square outer framing line, the edges of the vertical and horizontal rectangles, and the darker square formed by the overlap of these two rectangles.

 

 

 

 

Hummingbird 1

 

 

 

 

 

 

Canvases

 

 

 

 

 

 

Three Edges (Rose) IX

 

 

 

 

 

 

Studio 20040606

 

 

 

 

 

 

Three Edges (Black) VIII

 

 

 

 

 

 

Three Edges (Blue) VII

 

 

 

 

 

 

Three Edges (Gold) VI

 

 

 

 

 

 

Three Edges (Gray) V

 

 

 

 

 

 

Three Edges (Rose) IV

 

 

 

 

 

 

Visual Problems & Solutions (Rudolf's Diner, June 2004)

 

 

Visual Problems & Solutions (for Rudolf's Diner, June 2004)

The making of any visual arts, or any art for that matter, is always about solving problems. Whether it's how to depict an object, how to use color, how to convey meaning through an image, or even what to make art about, an artist is is alway confronting problems, asking questions about what to do, and posing possible solutions, which leads to more questions and, hopefully, more solutions.

Nearly four years ago I began writing in a weblog almost everyday. My original weblog, which is now not on the web, began as a nine month experiment in educational technology as part of my work with the UC Berkeley Interactive University Project, an initiative to make university resources accessible and useful to the K-12 world using Internet technology. It wasn't long, though, before my writing turned to more personal content. And then it wasn't much later that, being an artist, I wanted my weblog be a place to post images.

I knew that I wanted the images to be lightweight, meaning not ony that they downloaded quickly, but that somehow I didn't want to be a maker of digital images. I didn't want to get involved in using graphic software, as I'm no great fan of digital imagery; there is something inherently untrue about digital images that simply does not appeal to me. In addition, I didn't want to create additional graphic files in addition to the web page beause of the need to upload and host the images separately. I didn't want to make photographs; I'm not a photographer, and I'm not able to frame things well through a camera anyway. However, knowing HTML fairly well it occurred to me that by using this simple code I could make tables that are rows and columns of colored cells, and that I could work in the language of somewhat minimal, non-representational imagery, a form with which I already had lots of experience and for which I have a great interest and affinity. The beauty of this was that the image itself only existed as code, and was embedded in the webpage so that no additional files needed to be created or loaded.

I already knew how to make hand-coded HTML tables, but given the potential complexity of code required to make an image I knew that I could make these drawings fairly quickly in an HTML editor. For all their supposed simplicity, it's not as easy as it looks; the hardest part is, of course, the question of what what to make.

HTML can be fairly straightforward medium. For example this string of code
will be rendered by a web browser as a black square 100 pixels high and wide:

<table bgcolor="black" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"
border="0" height="100" width="100"><tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr></table>

But there are also extreme limitations to what one can do with HTML: everything is on the grid, right angles only, no diagonals; everything is hard edged; there are a limited number of colors (216 web safe colors; although one can make more than 216 colors, the number of colors actually viewable varies a lot from monitor to monitor); because the color is seen from a constant light source (the monitor) it tends to always have the same intensity and saturation; it is impossible to depict texture; and an image larger than one can see on a monitor without scrolling isn't very effective. The most difficult thing is pushing to find slight variations so that the medium sustains an expressive, ongoing art practice. It is this restrictiveness, though, that I find quite freeing. I enjoy the limitations and boundaries because I am presented with a set of solutions that I can't do anything about, that I accept.

The weblog in which I learned to make what I have come to call HTML drawings, A Place to Work, Nothing Fancy, ran for three years, during which I created several series of drawings. I have found that a weblog can a very effective work space that, for my purposes, became a studio, gallery, and archive, Last fall 2003 I decided to retire APTWNF and move my educational technology writing to AtWork, and my drawing activities to LookSee, where I've recently worked through several series of drawings.

Recently I found myself posting images of old paintings of mine. One painting, Untitled, is from 1981 . I found it interesting to look back at this painting, to remember making it, and also to feel how relevant it is for me now, and I began feel it feeding and motivating me. This painting is composed of several canvases, which do not line up to make the painting an overall rectangle. Instead, the composition is more like a cross turned on its side. I nicknamed the painting "Hammer."

One of the things I experienced when looking at this painting was seeing how two panels, one narrow blue panel on top of an identically-sized black panel, created a kind a movement and tension, a visual instability or slippage, and at that moment it so happened I was feeling a personal, emotional instability, even an inability. This gave me the idea to make a series of HTML images of things not quite connecting or aligning, and I wanted to work through these in the hope that I could make images with this kind of tension, while also working through my own "slippage." I called this series "Don't Know How," and I hoped by making them I would figure out how to do something, both visually and emotionally. There are two sets of nine, each drawing made one day at a time over eighteen days. Set 1-9 is below (click image to view in HTML). Set 10-18 can be viewed at LookSee.


I make one HTML drawing everyday and post it on my weblog. It has become a habit, a practice, and by doing it everyday it's interesting how the drawings accumulate, how I move from one to the next, repeat things, and find new things to do. By working in series I have developed a large body of work that I often refer to and think about how to reuse. In this sense my weblog is a sketchbook, and I have been working through making images that deal in content beyond just form and color, but also about people, places, feelings, attitudes, and memory in a restrictive medium.

For awhile I have wanted to begin using the HTML imagery in paintings and drawings of a more traditional type. This has actually been quite difficult, as there are a lot of questions to answer. How much should a painting or drawing mimic or replicate the HTML drawing? How will I handle edge and surface? In cases where I have emulated a kind of overlay or transparency in HTML, do I want to draw or paint this with mixed color or by laying one transparent color over another? Using paint I have much more nuance availabe in terms of color and touch; do I want to mimic the intensity of monitor color in the HTML drawings? The HTML drawings are based on a grid; do I want move away from the grid to something more handmade? And so on.

The following six images are small studies I made to help me begin to tackle
the problem of answering these questions. I know that I will only be able to solve these problems by making these images over and over in a variety of media. All drawings are May 2004, and can be clicked to view a larger version.

 

Chris Ashley lives in Oakland, is a former teacher still working in education, draws in his personal weblog "LookSee" everyday, and writes in his work weblog "AtWork."