February 28, 2005
Cezanne's Trees and House: Mirror and Skull
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Cezanne's Trees and House: Mirror and Skull
My purpose in writing is to discuss "hidden" imagery in a landscape watercolor by Paul Cezanne, House and Trees, circa 1890. The topic of unintended images in a painting can be an interesting subject that rapidly turns annoying and irrelevant, but in this case the occurence is so intriguing that it's worth the adventure. The route to this discussion, however, first requires a detour to consider another work of his, a landscape painting on canvas.
Cezanne's late landscapes depict wooded areas that can initially seem rough, remote, and unpeopled, but one often soon notes a distant roof or village, a bridge or road, or even a trail through a wooded area. So his circa 1889-99 painting Forest Interior, a masterful work in the collection of the San Francisco Fine Arts Museums at the Legion of Honor, is a little different in that no trace of humans can be found among the rocks and trees. There is, of course, the assumed presence of the human in the hatched, constructed manner of the paint strokes, and in the painter's stance before this scene to paint it, who remains alongside the viewer while looking at the painting if one acknowledges him. But there is actually no other trace of the human depicted in this painting: there are no trunks remaining from sawed trees, no holes from quarried rocks, no path to walk.
Cezanne's paintings, however, often seem to be operating at several levels: his still lifes can have the characteristics of landscapes, with tablecloths gathered in peaks emulating perhaps his most famous motif, Mont Saint-Victoire; earlier paintings addressing historical subjects get frothy or dour modern treatments; portrait subjects seem ancient, as if carved from stone and dressed in aprons like tablecloths, or stiff and erect as trees; the paintings of bathers are as much about the landscape as they are about the figures. But Forest Interior surprises because the human presence is buried deeply in the painting's imagery, and the painting becomes more about the essential unconscious place of the body in nature, rather than the place of landscape in human consciousness.
The rocks in Forest Interior are pieces of human figures, and there are easily four rock clusters that can be identified as torsos.
- Starting in the lower middle of the painting is a large, half-oval boulder that is a belly with a navel at the lower edge. Above this rock are two small half-ovals side by side that can be read as either breasts, buttocks, or knees, depending on the viewers orientation. This torso, which I'll identify as female, can be extended by the bushes, cleft, and shadow below the navel which altogether read as the pubic area, a pose not far from Courbet's controversial L'Origine du monde, 1866.
- These two same smaller rocks can be read as knees, or a thigh and knee, of the rock-torso just above them to the left. This torso, again female, outlined vertically along its left edge in dark red-blue gray, is sitting up; the green leaves of the tall far left tree half at the right place to suggest a chest or breasts. Above these leaves is an arching vertical line originating in a lighter area, which reads as an armpit.
- The stack of three boulders at the painting's extreme left edge is another female torso, from lower thigh up to shoulder; just below the middle of the largest center boulder in this stack is a fleshy, soft feminine stomach and navel, which leads down past hips into the pubic area. This torso is like a Greek figure that has lost its head and all of its limbs
- One last cluster of rocks is in the lower half of the far right edge, which can be read a couple of different ways. The easiest way is to see the two ovoid shapes as the buttocks of a figure bending over out of the painting. But what I find more strongly suggested is a male torso in profile, facing right, slight bent over with the head and legs out of the picture, and the smaller half-oval shape sent into and conforming to the larger rock that contains it is a large, strong shoulder.
Note that all of the figures are headless and limbless; they are immobile bodies without intelligence or function. Three female figures lay and stand together in one section; the male figure has his back to the other three. The rocks are completely integrated into the wooded scene, but as figures they are monstrous, unnatural. They are casually strewn as if old and long abandoned, yet the color and poses suggest that there is still blood under the flesh. How much of this figuration is conscious on Cezanne's part, how much of this apparent figuration is my imagination, and how much of this figuration is naturally suggested by the shapes and colors of boulders found in southern France?
Now, Forest Interior is an absolutely superior painting, even when just read as a landscape, as a constructed image alternating between depiction and abstraction, as a tightly woven composition, and as a complete, coherent container of the continually resolving and dissolving dichotomous relationship between the painting as picture and object. Certainly there are many who have no patience for the reading of rocks as figures hidden in a landscape, much less as figures that are sexually symbolic, especially as symbols emerging from the artist's unconscious. I'm not sure how much more patience I have for it myself, and my analyst credentials are strictly of an amateur status. But my reading of this painting asserts itself so strongly that it is undeniable, and there is evidence to suggest that this view is not entirely out of line.
Cezanne's alleged fear of women has been much discussed. Evidence of this is found in the poems he wrote as a young man, and in letters he wrote to Emile Zola. Cezanne told Renoir that female models frightened him. Mary Tompkins Lewis in Cezanne (Phaidon, 2000) writes that, "Historians of Cezanne's art have long noted the prominence of violence and romantic fantasy in his paintings from the restless years of 1867-9. A number of these works feature striking scenes of sexual savagery, murder, and death." And although Cezanne did father a son, he did not marry the mother, Hortense Fiquet, for fourteen years, and even after that often spent long periods of time away from his family, perhaps suggesting ambivalence towards his wife.
Given all of this, then, it may not be completely out of line to acknowledge the torsos in Forest Interior. Of course, there's no way to know whether or not Cezanne intended this. Did he himself see the boulders as figures? Did he intend to create a sexual drama? Was he trying to make a point about Man and Nature, which wouldn't have been a stretch for someone who painted other symbolic paintings such as Still Life With Black Clock, and The Abduction?
Let's turn now to Trees and House (Maison parmi les Arbres), ca. 1890, a watercolor on paper in The Henry and Rose Pearlman Collection. Trees and House is on the verso of a sheet, the front of which contains another wooded scene, also titled Forest Interior (Sous Bois), ca. 1890. The image used below is scanned from Cezanne in Focus: Watercolors From The Henry and Rose Pearlman Collection, Princeton University Art Museum, 2003. (A wonderful collection of digitized Cezanne's is online at Expo Cezanne.)
The watercolor Forest Interior presents foliage in the foreground, behind which are several trees, some quite vertical, others arching and intertwining, and there is the indication of a path and perhaps some fence posts. All of this is painted in the diagonal pencil and brush hatching common to the technique Cezanne used to create an overall surface of interwoven marks, allowing blank paper to show through in patches to create depth and light. Trees and House, while much less worked than Forest Interior, uses the same motif, except for the definite human presence of the house at the far right; here is a scene that is less rustic, more domestic in feeling.
This scene at first appears to be a landscape, but because of the presence of the house it instead becomes a view of property; someone has built a house and owns this land. Perhaps the trees on the property have been thinned to create the clearing in the foreground. The artist's position, looking back at house, means he is not isolated, not far from place or people; in fact he may have simply walked fifty yards from the house, turned around, and started working. The pencil lines are roughly, hesitantly sketched, and the thin layers of color are quite liquid and flat without much layering, which takes place mostly in the darkest areas of the thickest middle tree.
It wasn't long after first seeing Trees and House that I began to see buried images emerging. Once I saw and could identify these buried images, and considered their connections to other works by Cezanne and to other themes in art history, I could no longer merely accept this watercolor as a view of a house and trees. The trees and grass in the foreground create the outline an oval that is joined by a handle of pale green from the right; I see this as a handheld mirror. And the house has three windows placed as two eyes and a nose, and a horizontal patch of green is a mouth; I see this as a mask or skull. In the following image I have emphasized these images with red highlights.
The mirror is laid flat, as if on a table or bureau. We don't see ourselves, or anyone or anything else reflected in it. It may reflect the empty sky, or, perhaps it reflects nothing, only holding the possibility of reflection if picked up and used. Its emptiness is ghostly, lonely, almost threatening. Focus on the mirror and the trees emanate in the periphery as beams light or color, as something shining back at the sky. The mirror shape may be a complete accident; perhaps human consciousness is so powerful, that even when looking at inanimate objects we can't help but place ourselves in the scene, as if nature, in our minds, is really there to reflect back ourselves.
The house as a mask or face-- facade-- isn't an uncommon idea. The way this house is drawn-- barely defined, a rectangle not fully drawn but only hinted at-- strongly suggests the contours of a skull. The home, a place of comfort, instead becomes an empty shell, a blank stare, alone and off to the side, when paired with the mirror, which can't reflect the face; that is, the mirror cannot validate its presence of a self. Trees and House, then, turns from being just another landscape to a complex psychological space.
Neither the mirror or skull would be images foreign to Cezanne; skulls especially are featured in many of his still lifes. There is also precedence for mirrors and skulls in the genre of vanitas paintings. Text regarding a still life by 17th century Dutch painter Pieter Claesz in the Getty Collection notes:
To the modern viewer, this small still life appears to be an assortment of strange objects placed on a wooden table. But to the seventeenth- century Dutch observer, this painting conveyed the theme of vanitas: objects that symbolized the vanity of worldly things and the brevity of life. The skull and bones refer to death, the books and writing instruments to excessive pride through learning, and the fragile glass goblet of wine to temporary pleasure. The golden cup on its side suggests immoderate wealth.
The online art dictionary ArtLex provides the following definition:
Vanitas - Latin for vanity, refers to a type of still life consisting of a collection of objects that symbolize the brevity of human life and the transience of earthly pleasures and achievements (e.g., a human skull, a mirror, and broken pottery).
Two noted and well-documented paintings that prominently feature mirrors are Jan van Eyck’s Wedding Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini (1434) and Diego Velázquez Las Meninas (1656). In both of these paintings the images reflected in the mirrors reflect action related or ancillary to the event the painting depict but that can't be shown directly to the viewer who looks straight ahead at a scene, not at a 360 degree environment. Van Eyck shows objects around the remainder of the room that can't be contained with the picture. Velasquez uses the mirror to reflect an image that is also outside of the painting: the painter who is making the painting we see, presumably a self-portrait. And there are plenty of examples of mirrors in paintings: Manet's Before the Mirror (1876) at the Guggenheim and Le Bar aux Folies-Bergère (1881-82) at the Courtauld Institute Galleries, London; Picasso's Girl Before a Mirror (Femme au miroir) (1932) at MOMA; Balthus' Les beaux jours (1944) at the Hirschorn; and any number of Roy Lichtenstein's paintings and sculptures featuring the mirror image, for example, Mirror #2 (1970). These are just a few examples of many that can be named.
The mirror in Trees and House is different from these other examples in that it appears as a second image; the mirror, a tool for seeing, is "depicted" here by not actually being depicted, and it reflects nothing. It is an image-- a clearing among trees, and an abstraction (oval and line), a construction of paint with multiple associations. And it is a symbol, but a more pure and less obvious kind of symbolism. One has to find the symbol, and then when found and read as a mirror, and taken in the context of art history and symbolic imagery as precedents, the mirror-symbol is in a complex psychological relationship to the equally abstract house as found symbol, which is a skull, and these together evoke reminders of the condition of life, death, vanity, and temporality, and the human as a piece of nature, frail, vulnerable, and feint.
As with the San Francisco Forest Interior first discussed here, it is of course impossible to know Cezanne's intentions regarding Trees and House, unless perhaps he wrote about it in a letter to someone, or told someone about it who recorded his thoughts. I know of no such record. Certainly, Scott Alan, one of the many commentators about various works in the Cezanne in Focus catalog, makes no note of this in discussion of the watercolor. I find it extremely fascinating that, as far as I can tell, what I have just pointed out has not been discussed; fascinating, hopefully, in that this has not been noticed before, and not fascinating, I hope, because it reveals some psychological wackiness is me. But let me go a little further.
Years ago a friend working on a PhD in psychology was required to administer multiple standardized tests as practice with voluntary subjects. One test was the Rorschach test, which is a standardized ten card set. As I took the exam I freely described image after image I saw in the first few cards, requiring her to furiously record my answers. Finally she looked at me with just a hint of exasperation and asked if I was making this up. No, I wasn't; I thought the point was to be open and give it my all. I didn't know that there was supposed to be some limited range of images, so I figured the more the better. Nothing was too much of a stretch; if some reading later proved irrelevant it could be discarded. So that's what I want to do with the Cezanne, just push it a little farther. At the risk of taking a plausible discussion about buried imagery into the realm of fantasy, let me point out two more buried images related to the vanitas theme that I've identified.
First, in the thickest middle tree, right in the middle of the trunk, is a dark section built up from several washes that is half of a smiling face, split almost right down the middle; I have colored it in blue and black. Submerged, a little ghostly, this puckish face, a little mischievous or even devilish looking, looks directly at the viewer, a kind of taunting jester. Are we being mocked or enticed? If we feel mocked it is because this character puts us in our place. If we are being enticed, it is in reaction to the dangerous risk of being held captive to vanity and youth while ignoring our mortality and responsibilities. By being half-hidden the face never fully reveals its state or motives. The woods were, I think, quite lively places for Cezanne; is this a man-in-the-moon, man-as-tree kind of anthropomorphism?
Secondly, the forked tree, second from the left, is a wishbone, which I have outlined in green. The wishbone is of course a symbol and object of chance-- fortune, luck, and loss. The shape also echoes the mirror shape, but as a wishbone it furthers the theme of vanitas suggested by the presence of mirror, skull, and laughing head.
Despite being a wonderful little landscape study, I think Trees and House is most interesting for the other ways it can be read, and for the ways it shows us how better to read paintings. I don't think it is possible to look too deeply at paintings, nor to look at them in too many different ways. These paintings by Cezanne, in particular, reward this kind of deep looking, and the tack I have taken here-- probing hidden imagery, wondering about sub- or unconcsious motives-- is only one of many different ways of looking.
February 27, 2005
Recognition: Correction
On February 09, 2005 I wrote:
Look, See is not an artblog as that label is coming to be understood: a weblog about art; it is instead a place for an art practice. And that is what makes my weblog different than, as far as I can tell, any other weblog.
This not entirely true. At the time I wrote this I had already known, thanks to Tom Moody, for several months about abe linkoln's and jimpunk's Screenfull, another weblog which is an artwork, a web space in the weblog format-- regular posts in reverse chronological order-- totally devoted to being an artwork, not a place about art:
Screenfull is a media mashup, a collision of borrowed (stolen) images, video, and audio that have been cut and torn and jammed back together, maybe in the mode of Brion Gysin's and William Burroughs' cutups, not to mention Schwitters and Rauschenberg, Negativland, Bruce Conner and Jess, and Superbad. But Screenfull had slipped my mind, or I had blocked it out, perhaps because even though Screenfull is a work(s) that takes a form I know well and understand, it is not exactly my cup of tea any more.
Not to take anything away from abe, jimpunk, and Screenfull, to be sure, but the pop quotation, the smirking ironic comment, the technique of ripping five things into several pieces and reassembling them into something raw and casual, just isn't something that interests me a lot as an artist; I see that in my past as juvenile, puerile, mean-spirited, and obvious.
This assessment does not mean, however, that I don't check in with Screefull a couple of times a week. And you, dear reader, might consider doing the same. Turn up the volume!
I have added this text as an update to the February 9, 2005 post.
February 26, 2005
February 25, 2005
February 24, 2005
February 23, 2005
February 22, 2005
February 21, 2005
February 20, 2005
Serape
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February 19, 2005
Serape
Serape Instructions:
- Copy the complete body of HTML below
- Paste into a plain text document (for example, on Windows use Notepad, on Mac use TextEdit)
- Save the file to the Desktop as "20050219Serape.htm" (no quotes)
- Locate "20050218SquareRainbow.htm" on the Desktop and double click to view in browser
URL (http://www.chrisashley.net/weblog/archives/week_2005_02_13.html#000686) in the message (depending on how you send it and how they recieve it the recipient will hopefully see a nice picture rather than many lines of code).
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Chris Ashley: Serape, 2005, HTML, 379 x 393 pixels
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Serape, 2005, HTML, 379 x 393 pixels
February 18, 2005
Square Rainbow
Square Rainbow Instructions:
- Copy the complete body of HTML below
- Paste into a plain text document (for example, on Windows use Notepad, on Mac use TextEdit)
- Save the file to the Desktop as "20050218SquareRainbow.htm" (no quotes)
- Locate "20050218SquareRainbow.htm" on the Desktop and double click to view in browser
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Chris Ashley: Square Rainbow, 2005, HTML, 340 x 340 pixels
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Square Rainbow, 2005, HTML, 340 x 340 pixels
February 17, 2005
Untitled 1-8
Untitled 1-8, 2005, HTML, 420 x 580 pixels each (source)
:
On 20050207 I posted two drawings, one from 20030207, the other from 20030903, that had been inserted into one of my goofy fake gallery views. I had forgotten about these drawings, but the great thing about weblogs and photo album software that scans your disc is that you find things you hadn't thought about in awhile
So I looked at these drawings, and remembered how they're done. These are from a period when I would draw little motifs in fields in HTML tables, and then copy and paste small sections all over the table, and then copy another small section and paste it in areas around the table, building up a kind of density, repeating small sections over other sections. It's a technique almost more like rubber stamping, and there's a kind of building-up of density and a patterning that can emerge, but the repeated images get halved, disrupted, broken.
I describe an easy technique to try, but it's also kind of maddening to actually get a decent, final, coherent image. It often requires a little manual tinkering to make a composition that feels contained within the four sides of the rectangle.
So there are several things I wanted to do with the eight drawings in this series:
- Use the technique describe above, see how it worked for me this time.
- Make an integrated image, one that feels whole, despite its collage-like process.
- Do some more drawing with the blue and gold palette inspired, in particular by Wang Ximeng's (1096-1119, Song Dynasty) A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains (see 20040905 post this weblog).
- Work in a horizontal format, which is not my tendency
- Enliven an image with another color- the red: how to work that in, make it fit, and still be both disruptive and coherent.
Documentation
Sliabh Ruadh, 2005, oil on canvas, 16 x 12"
In progress, 2005, oil on canvas, 18 x 14"
Untitled (Red & Gray), 2005, oil on canvas, 16 x 12"
February 16, 2005
February 15, 2005
February 14, 2005
Untitled Pair
Untitled Pair, in progress, oil on canvas, 18 x 14" each
Album 2 (Blue & Green)
Album 2 (Blue & Green), 2005, watercolor & ink on paper, 5 leaves, approx. 10 x 8.75" each
Album (Red & Blue)
Album (Red & Blue), 2005, watercolor & pencil on paper, 5 leaves, approx. 10 x 8.75" each
Album 1 (Blue & Green)
Album 1 (Blue & Green), 2005, watercolor & ink on paper, 5 leaves, approx. 10 x 8.75" each
Carpenter's Blues
Three of four canvases, in progress, tentatively titled "Carpenter's Blues," oil on canvas, 18 x 14" each.
February 13, 2005
February 12, 2005
February 11, 2005
February 10, 2005
February 09, 2005
Recognition
Folks who have known me for some time know my weblogging practice has changed a lot in the past couple of years. Folks who only know me via this current weblog would probably never know my practice changed. What has changed is that I don't link to other weblogs anymore, which for a weblog is deadly, since linking is the juice that makes the traffic flow.
This weblog, Look, See, is an art-centered weblog; I post a daily HTML drawing, the occasional written piece, and occasional links and images of work that interests me. Look, See is not an artblog as that label is coming to be understood: a weblog about art; it is instead a place for an art practice. And that is what makes my weblog different than, as far as I can tell, any other weblog (20050227 update: see note below). Look at any of the weblogs linked from, for example, Modern Arts Journal; not a one is art itself; they are about art. Look, See is the studio wall, the studio floor, the racks, the filing cabinet, the slide library, the hours alone sitting on a chair staring, the worry about subject matter, the search for meaning and something interesting to look at.
My first weblog, XYZ, was a Manila site hosted on the NT desktop machine on which I worked at the time. That weblog is no longer accessible. I have the archives but I don't need or want to make it accessible. XYZ lasted about ten months, from approximately March 2000 to January 2001, during which time I developed the daily habit of writing, quoting, and linking. Many of the posts were about educational technology, the field in which I worked.
After XYZ, I moved to another Manila site hosted at Berkeley by the Interactive University (a group I worked with through December 2004), called A Place to Write, Nothing Fancy, launched February 21, 2001, and which eventually became, as art and HTML drawings took over, A Place to Work, Nothing Fancy. In the first year or more of APTWNF I still wrote a lot about educational technology, and in particular about weblogging and community, weblogging and personal authoring, and possible roles of weblogs in education. The knowledge gained through regular weblogging resulted in two articles written for Berkeley Computing and Communications: Weblogging: Another Kind of Website (July 2001); and Weblogs: A Swiss Army Website (March 2002).
When the idea of making simple images with HTML tables first occurred to me sometime in 2000 on XYZ, I of course had no idea that this would result in work that would completely take over my weblog and choke out any other content. But it makes sense; what I see, what I make, what I want to do comes first. That is my temperament as an artist, the same attitude I had working in my studio alone all during the 80's after getting out of art school. And so Look, See, begun in October 2003 under my domain name in order to move away from a university hosting service, is a central place in my life, and a place of my work.
I write all this as a way of explaining why I don't link to others, even when there are some who deserve linking and pointing out and a pat on the back, except for a few static links on my nav bar (I have come to hate all of the weblog terminology: "blogroll," "blogosphere," and just the word "blog," all so new, different, out there, separate; most people who write about weblogs and use this terminology don't seem to have a real clue about the voice of the author and the meaning of personal authoring and ownership of one's own production). I sometimes wonder if I'm missing something by not engaging in the kind of dialog that can be core to weblogging, something I well understand and once practiced, but I also know myself well enough to have decided for now that the best thing for me to do is to try to avoid distraction by putting my head down and plowing ahead without the sword of strategy and the girdle of theory, and without worrying about how well I'm explaining myself and who I am including.
And also I write all this as a way of setting the context for the remainder of this post, which is a list of links to other sites, most reciprocal, actually, as many of these sites have mentioned or linked to Look, See recently. In fact, a smattering of very recent links to Look, See and emails from a few folks made me decide to point back and highlight what a few others are doing.
- Tom Moody in NY (an artist who also write about art) routinely writes rigourous, informative and/or critical posts about art, music, and politics, and also shows his own recent and past work. Tom has occasionally featured and commented on my HTML drawings, most recently in "Too Much Failure Around Here" (thanks, Tom; at least someone doesn't think I'm a failure, and I really appreciate your interest in the work). It seems a little too tit-for-tat at this moment to praise Tom's work (the ol' "I'll link to you if you'll link to me! 8-[)"), but I do follow his weblog regularly, appreciate his writing and scene coverage, and more importantly, his artwork and his stance about his work interests me. All produced on computer with simple paint programs, printed and collaged with low budget materials, some of the work is quite complex, can be monumental, and is in the realm of post-painting abstraction having to do with patterning, mechanical drawing, exploded diagrams, alloverness, flatness and space. Even though they are drawn on the computer it is important to emphasize that the work is hand drawn, hand made, and are real objects. Also, check out Tom's animations and look for posts of his music (example).
- Lloyd Nebres (Mauai/Berkeley) recently posted a bit about a recent series of HTML drawings. He's always been very supportive of and has a deep understanding of the personal nature of the drawings and this daily practice, and occasionally links to or shows my drawings at his weblog. Lloyd's weblog, The Free Radical, is founded upon Lloyd's commitment to supporting and understanding not only his own inquiry, sharing, and opinions, but that of the (hundreds?) of high school students who have been through his Internet Classroom's during the past many summers at Berkeley. He is a a selfless pioneer, and truly understands the notion of mentoring and community through weblogging. I once wrote about him as a kind of DJ, and I think he is a model for what is possible in terms of the uses of technology for education and supporting others through writing and public publishing, but what makes his model work is heart, not the just the tools. Even more, Lloyd is a great thinker and writer, generous in spirit and action, and a wonderful photographer. The past few months have been challenging because of the loss of his mother, and I followed as much as he would show and tell all the way. Coming up on five years of straight posts, eh Lloyd? Here's to five more!
- I'm honored that Sally McKay of Toronto has had a link to Look, See at the top of her weblog for a very long time. Sally's images, animations, cultural critiques, and scene coverage are worth the regular check-in I make.
- Paul Prudence recently contacted me about the HTML drawings. His link to me introduced me his work, which he said in an email, is, "generative, procedural oralgorithmic art. That is using code routines to produce output that can be interacted with and often with a degree of randomness withing a set of predefined limits. i like the idea of infinte variations of a painting, so ill code a peice then work backwardsand add random procedural elements that allow unique works to be generated on each view. but it MUST still fall within my defined limits, total randomness is useless in this respect." Fascinating stuff at Transphormetic, and his weblog is at Data is Nature.
- Painter Mark Dixon in Montreal wrote me today, saying he had been referred to Look, See from another site and was making sure I didn't mind if he linked to me (I don't; hi Mark). His weblog is To Leave a Mark and his paintings are at http://www.markdixon.ca/. I will be contacting Mark about his paintings.
- Dr. Web Weblog carries a post about the HTML drawings today in a post titled "HTML-Picasso," and posted an image; it amuses me that folks take a screenshot of an HTML drawing and create a graphic to show it rather than use the HTML. I had to use Google translator for a lousy English translation of Sven Lennartz's German text: "Is HTML suited for the art? Can one paint with tags? Chris Ashley is proper possessed by this idea and can refer in the meantime to an expanded work. With the help of the good old table almost daily a new work develops; some of it after models, other one the own fantasies risen. Which comes out thereby and is dargeboten in a Web log, may be able to be quite seen. Variety, color, form and expression strength go far beyond that which one so far in occasional experiments saw. Worthwhile also the view into archives (11/04 - 01/05) and - understands itself here automatically - into the source code."
- The Philly Artblog recently linked to Look, See in a post. Roberta Fallon & Libby Rosof do an amazing job of covering the Philadelphia art scene, and should get some kind of MVP award for the art review and information service they provide, all with good cheer, good writing and hard work, and genuine support for artists and galleries.
- At teleculture's top tips Frank Dietrich writes, "Finally, let me recommend the sites by two artists who are courageously and uncompromisingly investigating the thresholds to bold and promising new image territories. Chris Ashley paints and also creates html pictures that are dominated by big bold blocks of colored pixels. Some have the innocent feel of children's drawings, others in the series come across as visual products of a somewhat stubborn artistic credo. Follow the title of his blog and Look and See!" I wouldn't say that my artistic credo is somewhat stubborn; my aritist credo is fully stubborn. And I think Frank gets what I'm doing.
- Look, See is listed among the links in David Crawford's syllabus for his Visual Communication at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. One thing I notice about this list is that many of the links are institutions, services, and businesses, rather than artists or other individuals.
- Look, See was featured on 26 January 2005 at the Generative_Graphics_Portal.
- Look, See is listed on Dr. Reinhold Grether's list of Net Art Links
- Thane Plambeck linked to Look, See January 25, 2005, saying, "An admirable effort to find art in simple blobs of HTML."
- Painter Dennis Hollingsworth does not link to Look, See. But his weblog detailing his painting progress, posts about other artists, life in Tossa, Spain, and other topics is a regular visit for me.
- Vincent Romaniello has been posting video profiles of Philadelphia-area artists; look and see.
- Friends Raymond Yee and Laura Shefler are on photography rolls and are doing cool things with Flickr (RY) (LS). Tech-minded people might want to read more about fooling around with Flickr and other cool things having to do with prototyping scholary tools for the digital age at Raymond's wiki.
- Richard Schur, Munich, has posted some images of new paintings, which are getting denser, wackier, and seem to be shifting a bit in palette.
- The juxtaposition of two of Brent Hallard's recent drawing templates is literally bent, funny, perverse, and jarring.
Updated 20050227:
On February 09, 2005 I wrote:
Look, See is not an artblog as that label is coming to be understood: a weblog about art; it is instead a place for an art practice. And that is what makes my weblog different than, as far as I can tell, any other weblog.
This not entirely true. At the time I wrote this I had already known, thanks to Tom Moody, for several months about abe linkoln's and jimpunk's Screenfull, another weblog which is an artwork, a web space in the weblog format-- regular posts in reverse chronological order-- totally devoted to being an artwork, not a place about art:
Screenfull is a media mashup, a collision of borrowed (stolen) images, video, and audio that have been cut and torn and jammed back together, maybe in the mode of Brion Gysin's and William Burroughs' cutups, not to mention Schwitters and Rauschenberg, Negativland, Bruce Conner and Jess, and Superbad. But Screenfull had slipped my mind, or I had blocked it out, perhaps because even though Screenfull is a work(s) that takes a form I know well and understand, it is not exactly my cup of tea any more.
Not to take anything away from abe, jimpunk, and Screenfull, to be sure, but the pop quotation, the smirking ironic comment, the technique of ripping five things into several pieces and reassembling them into something raw and casual, just isn't something that interests me a lot as an artist; I see that in my past as juvenile, puerile, mean-spirited, and obvious.
This assessment does not mean, however, that I don't check in with Screefull a couple of times a week. And you, dear reader, might consider doing the same. Turn up the volume!
I have added this text as an update to the February 9, 2005 post.
February 08, 2005
Three 1-6
Three 1-6, 2005, HTML, 260 x 420 pixels each
This short series of six drawings came out of a desire to use the triptych format in response to a visit to the Legion of Honor on Saturday, January 29th to see Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet!
There are two specific works I've been thinking about. First, a panel by Luca di Tomme that is not actually a triptych but the composition of which divides into three areas (see below), left, center, and right. I'm attracted to the two clumps of figures, the primary colors, the way the mountains in the back split apart and form as they get higher a gap that is a heart shape. The women are on the left, the men on the right. There's neat movement and tension in the three figures on the left of the cross and the two figures on the right of the cross; Jesus looks down at the collapsing Mary, which pulls the eye down and to the left, in a kind of softening or release, and the two rigid men on the right, their weight on their left feet (our right), shoulders high on our left, low on our right, anchor the cross and Jesus, pulling the viewer back to the right. This painting is only about 16 x 23 inches. It's easy to imagine that it's a single panel from a larger work of many panels.
The second work I've had in mind this past week is one for which I can't find a digital image or any record (at thinker.org), and I didn't write down anything about it; I do want to find out more about it and am researching that. Is is a free-standing, portable, triptych altarpiece, roughly two feet wide by sixteen to eighteen inches high, that is not painting at all; it's enamel on panel, probably copper, all black and white, or grisaille. I am guessing that it's French, 16th century. It stands in a case around which one can walk; the back side is rough black wood, and it's obviously meant to be closed for travel so that it can be setup as needed as a temporary altar. It is a beautiful, lustrous work with terrific drawing, texture, and light.
A little searching found this, which is very helpful:
All the enamel before this date (end of 15th century) had been sunk into cells or cloisons. Two discoveries were made; first, that enamels could be made which require no enclosing ribbon of metal, but that merely the enamel should be fused on both sides of the metal object; secondly, that after an enamel had been fusedto a surface of metal, another could be superimposed and fused to:the first layer without any danger of separation from each or from the metal ground. It is true that such processes had been employed upon glass on which enamel had been applied, as well as upon pottery; and it is probably due to the influence of a knowledge of both enamelling upon metal and upon glass or pottery that the discovery was made. In most of these enamel paintings the subject was laid on with a white enamel upon a dark ground. The white was modulated; so that possessing a slight degree of translucency, it was grey in the thin parts and white in the thick. Thus was obtained a certain amount of light and shade. This gave the process called grisaille. But strange to say, it was not until a later period that this was practised alone, and then the model-ling of the figures and draperies became very elaborate. At first it was only done in a slight degree, just sufficiently to give expression and to add to the richness of the form. For the enamellers were thinking of a plate upon which to put their wonderful colours, and not only of form. The painting in white was therefore invariably coloured with enamels [http://15.1911encyclopedia.org/E/EN/ENAMEL.htm].
Searching on a few names in the article referenced above one of the closest images I can find, in terms of the enamel grisaille technique, and from the same period, is I by Jean III Penicaud, mid-16th Century, French:
http://www.insecula.com/oeuvre/O0008156.html
February 07, 2005
Gallery views
Here are two totally fictional gallery views that I made in 2003 but never used. I had forgotten about them, but thanks to Picasa I can now see every image on my hard drive. Coincidentally, the top one is dated exactly two years ago today- 20030207. The bottom one is dated 20030903.
February 06, 2005
February 05, 2005
February 04, 2005
February 03, 2005
February 02, 2005
February 01, 2005
Making a Ghost 1-9
| Making a Ghost 1-9, 2005, HTML, 280 x 240 pixels | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I had heard a poem on the radio titled "How to Kill" while driving to work in the morning.