Look, See (2003-07)

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Pulse 2006: Lost in Translation

STYLE WEEKLY: ARTS & CULTURE

http://www.styleweekly.com/article.asp?idarticle=12312

RICHMOND.COM

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May 28, 2006

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Studio

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Gainsborough's "Study for Diana and Actaeon"

A few weeks ago I saw an exhibition, Judging by Appearance: Master Drawings from the Collection of Joseph and Deborah Goldyne, at the SF Legion of Honor. This collection is huge and wonderful, with many terrific examples. One piece, a Gainsborough landscape drawing, has been on my mind since I saw it. As far as I know, no image of the drawing is available online, and I'm sure my memory of the drawing is poor. I believe it is from the early 1780's and is made with his typical drawing materials: cream or buff paper, black and white crayon or chalk, and ink wash. Seeing the drawing spurred me to look closer at Gainsborough recently, which I'd intended to do more of anyway since I had recently written about his painting Mrs Fitzherbert, also at the Legion, in a brief essay called Gainsborough's Brushstrokes, and also since a year ago when I wrote Thomas Gainsborough: How Modern?, about his The Mall in St James's Park in the Frick Collection, New York.

In Gainsborough (Thames & Hudson, 2002) William Vaughan writes that in comparison to many of his figural and landscape, which we may now superficially see as sentimental, the contemporary eye:

"...might find it easier to appreciate the other apsect of Gainsborough's work that seemed to contemporaries to mark out his genius. This was his drawings. Gainsborough was a natural draughtsman of great verve and facility. Whether he is making a direct study of some natural form-- such as a tree or a cat relaxing-- or mapping out a spirited imaginative composition, he amazes and delights us with the brilliance of his line and the aptness of his markings. He, himself, saw this as the most personal and intimate side of his art. It was a sign of this that he would never sell his drawings, and only gave them to friends as tokens of affection. He was also insistent that it was the individualism of his handling-- whether in painting or drawing, that made his 'genius' most evident."

In The Art of Thomas Gainsborough : "A Little Business for the Eye" (Rosenthal, Michael. Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Arts. Yale University Press. 2000) three studies are reproduced for an unfinished history painting called Diana and Actaeon, a genre rare for Gainsborough. The drawing below, Study for Diana and Actaeon, in the Huntington Library collection, is a terrific example of what Gainsborough could do. "Verve" is a good word for what is going on here. The same kind of mark and energy seen here are what draw me towards the Goldyne drawing, Mrs. Fitzherbert, and The Mall in St. James's Park.

In particular, see the two details below of the trees on the left and right. In the left example look at the short, looping, swirling calligraphic line; there's real economy and character here. These marks are very distinctive and compelling, just slight strokes and flicks. Compare the right side, where the dense buildup of ink and white chalk suggest trees thick with leaves hanging over the group below, to the left side, which is open, airy, and spacious. The figures feel solid, and the water they stand in is reflective. The tree in the left detail is like some feathery peacock on display. In fact, the two tree trunks on the left are almost figurative, and vaguely threatening in a very seductive way. Of the two trunks on the left the right one is scaled to the figures, and bent over, beckoning as if to join the figures (and one sees in other studies of the same scene that, indeed, that tree isn't a tree, but is Actaeon!). But the tree on the absolute left is on dazzling display, opulent and preening, obviously enticing the figure in the center of the composition, and perhaps causing a little hesitation in the rest of the company. Much of this strange narrative, and the tension that comes from it, is created by the kinds of marks that Gainsborough makes. This is an incredibly rich little drawing.

Artists Interview Artists: my turn

The interview I participated in as part of J.T. Kirkland's Artists Interview Artists project has been published as of today at Thinking About Art. Eileen Wold from Washington, D.C. asked the questions. The questions I posed were answered by Michael Grayeagle in an interview published on May 7, 2006.

Read my answers.

Screen capture of Red Machine, 2006, HTML & animated GIFs (10 seconds, looped), 380 x 380 pixels

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Gustave Courbet

Last year, at the SF Legion of Honor to see Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet! (22 January 2005 —3 April 2005), I wondered about the historical use of the palette knife. Did anyone before Courbet use it much to paint with? Perhaps I've found my answer. In the catalogue Courbet and the Modern Landscape for the exhibition of the same name which just closed at the Getty, Mary Morton writes (pp 6-7):

Courbet's fascination with painting technique was given free reign in the genre of landscape, a genre more open to experiementation than figural painting because it was not the heart of Acdemic practice. In contrast to the more routinized and methodical preactice of studio work, the freedom to leave the Academy and studio, sit outside alone, and record one's personal visual impression was part of th appeal of landscape paintings. Many artist continued to paint landscapes as a means of maintaining freshness in their studio work, but Courbet brought it to the center of his pictorial discourse. It was his ideal genre.

Part of the excitement of Courbet's landscapes, and an essential feature of their modernity, is their revelation of process, of the artist's technical exploration. He often painted in large scale, working quickly and applying paint with a range of gestures and a variety of tools: large and small brushes, the palette knife, rags, even his thumb. His completed pictures were often roughly finished, intentionally defiant of the polished fini charateristic of Academic paintings. The self-effacing elimination of all traces of the artist's labor was antithetical to Courbet's project.

The lack of finish in Courbet's landscapes belies their technical complexity. Critics frequently referred to Courbet's unusal manipulation of dense amounts of pasty pigment, scooped up with the palette knife and smeared onto the canvas. For all of their surface texture, however, Corubet's paitings maintain a surprising smoothness. Though a painting like The Gust of Wind looks crusty and thick from afar, it is surprisingly even in surface. His technique involved building up layers of transparent glazes, and he scraped away paint as frequently as he applied it. At close range one can see primary, secondary, and tertiary layers laid bare, with regular adjustments made between them inspired by a referent in nature and/or exigencies of the paint itself.

Courbet achieved a range of nuance and drama with the palette knife that was without precedent in the history of painting. Traditionally, the knife was used to mix paint on the palette, not to apply paint to the canvas, a task considered too delicate for the knife's blunt edges. It was this tool that enabled Courbet to work on a larger than average scale, covering wide swaths of canvas quickly. The hard turquoise glow of Courbet's skies was achieved by the even coating allowed by the knife, as Courbet laid on paint much as the mason trowels cement into place. He also used the knife to create a distinct evocation of texture through scraping and scumpling paint, wet in wet and wet over dry. In contemporary criticism, Courbet's use of the knife was associated with his speed of execution, his spontaneity, and his vigor.

Gustave Courbet, The Gust of Wind (or the Approaching Storm(, ca. 1855, oil on canvas, 56 1/2 x 89 15/16 inches, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

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Don Relyea

Below: Don Relyea's automatically generated Space Filling Curve Generative Abstract Geometric Art, 2006

Below: My Mojave XV, March 16, 2003, HTML, 356 x 655 pixels (JPEG representation; more)

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The GIF Show, again

A week ago I wrote about not seeing The GIF Show. In that post I copied and pasted from the gallery's hours from the gallery's web site" "WED - SAT 2:00pm - 6:00pm."

So I was thinking of running over today to see the show, and wanted to call ahead to make sure the gallery would be open, but now the hours have been changed. It now says:
WED - THU 3:00pm - 6:00pm
FRI - SAT from 9:00pm
by appointment by calling (415) 756-8825.

Are they making this up as they go along?

So now I've got a three hour window on two midweek afternoons, and apparently endless time after 9pm on Friday and Saturday, when this gallery adopts its "Wine & Sake Bar/Lounge" persona, which of course is the perfect time to get a clear view of the art.

Aargh, I may have to settle for curator Marisa Olsen's del.ico.us page that links to most of the pieces in the show.

Top right: Guthrie Lonergan, Non-stop Icon Marathon!

Bottom left: Olia Lialina, accordiol.gif

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Painting the Digital River

I am just getting into Painting the Digital River : How an Artist Learned to Love the Computer by James Faure Walker. I'm not at a point where I have a lot to say about the book, but I think it will be of interest to anyone who looks at this weblog; who likes, painting, or used to like painting, or now hates painting because it's old and obsolete; who is interested in the question of the death of painting; who is interested in new media; who is looking for another medium; who wants to understand how painted-like image making can move beyond the easel; who wants to figure out how computers do and don't change approaches to image making; who is wondering if painting has a life; who wonders about the intersection of painting and digital images; who is wondering what the future of image making might be; who... whatever.

From Walker's bio at the Digital Art Museum (I'd never heard of this online museum before):

James Faure Walker (UK) b 1948 was a founder of Artscribe magazine in 1976 and editor for eight years. His writings have also appeared in Wired, Studio International, Modern Painters, Mute, Computer Generated Imaging, Art Review, and in catalogues for the Tate, Barbican, Siggraph, and Computerkunst. He is Senior Research Fellow in Fine Art at Kingston University; in 2002 he won a major AHRB fellowship for research into painting and the digital studio.

From Amazon:

This book is about art, written from an artist's point of view. It also is about computers, written from the perspective of a painter who uses them. Painting the Digital River is James Faure Walker's personal odyssey from the traditional art scene to fresh horizons, from hand to digital painting--and sometimes back again. It is a literate and witty attempt to make sense of the introduction of computer tools into the creation of art, to understand the issues and the fuss, to appreciate the people involved and the work they produce, to know the promise of the new media, as well as the risks. Following his own winding path, Faure Walker tells of learning to paint with the computer, of misunderstandings across the art and science divide, of software limitations, of conversations between the mainstream and digital art worlds, of emerging genres of digital painting, of the medieval digital, of a different role for drawing. As a painter and computer enthusiast, the author recognizes the marvels of digital paint as well as anyone. But he also challenges the assumption that digital somehow means different. The questions he raises matter to artists of every background, style, and disposition, and the answers should reward anyone seeking insight into contemporary art.

Calder at SFMoMA

The Surreal Calder at SFMoMA until May 21, 2006 fills four large galleries, plus another gallery at the entry to the exhibition which sets the context by inlcuding works by Ernst, Miro, Giacometti, Picasso and others. The museum site says:

Living and working in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, Alexander Calder was naturally influenced by the burgeoning surrealist movement, and some of its most prominent voices — including Joan Miró, André Breton, and Jean Arp — became his close friends and associates. In recent decades, however, Calder’s relationship with Surrealism has been all but forgotten. Presenting rarely seen pieces from the Calder Foundation as well as a sampling of works by Calder’s surrealist peers, this exhibition recasts the artist and his work in their original context. The resulting showcase highlights the wit, inventiveness, and improvisation at the heart of Calder’s art and rooted in the legacy of Surrealism.

Before reading the statement above I had three words in mind to describe what I saw, and they're in that paragraph above: wit, inventiveness, and improvisation. It's amazing just how much fun Calder can be, how surprising, and how visually dazzling. His work is really about seeing, physicality, balancing, directness. While the work here certainly comes out of the Surrealist milieu, it really feels that the meaning of this work extends far beyond that time, unlike many of the real Surrealists. As Kenneth Baker wrote in his SF Chronicle review:

Even at his darkest, Calder toys with the sort of nightmare and spookiness that fascinated the Surrealists rather than wringing terrors from them...

"The Surreal Calder" emphasizes the cosmic visionary aspect of Calder's art, one of the most remarkable qualities shared by toylike constructions such as "Constellation" (1943) and darker, more congested pieces such as "Black Frame" (1934). Several works, such as "Croisière" (1931) and "Parasite" (1945), suggest solar system models or star maps. They hint that at an unconscious level, a planetary perspective always threatens to invade, or liberate, our most intimate vantage on things.

Nestled in among all the larger works, and the wire, the primary colors, the hunks of wood, in the smallest of the galleries, is a painting, a vertical rectangle perhaps 30 x 24 inches. It is untitield, oil on canvas, dated 1930. All washy gray, it has nothing more than a line that starts in black at the bottom left heading up diagonally across and makes a big loop while turning to white and then back to black before exiting the near the top right corner. Because platforms for the sculptures abut the wall the viewer can't closer than three or four feet to the painting. But it caught my eye.

The paint is darker at the top and thins out slightly towards the bottom. The line appears to be drawn in charcoal, and the white part of the line might have been made simply by scratching through to the white ground. It's a painting that may have taken no more than ten minutes to make. But it's a beautiful, simple little thing, colorless, open, with a line in space that transitions as the eye follows it. Everything feels about it feels just so, a moment suspended, everything fitted together, no fussing. And it was contained with a hand-made frame made with what looked like 2 x 2 inches stock wood painted white, abutted not mitred.

Of course I can't find a picture of it, so here's a crude approximation of it I made:

After Alexander Calder (Original: Untitled, 1930, oil on canvas, dimensions unknown, ca. 30 x 24 inches), 2006, JPEG (made in Photoshop), 460 x 358 pixels

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Deborah Butterfield at Paule Anglim

Four horses by Deborah Butterfield at Paule Anglim, San Francisco, May 2006.

The GIF Show

When a gallery website says they're open "WED - SAT 2:00pm - 6:00pm" I expect the place to be open when I show up at 3:00pm.

When I make the extra effort to get there, take time out of my busy schedule, buy a ticket and take BART from the East Bay under the SF Bay to the big city, walk a few blocks, and find the address for a place I've never been to before, I expect the doors to be open.

And when I find the address, and I see from across the street that the big metal gates in front of the door are closed, I'm still hopeful that the gallery is open, and that the gates are just the smallest barrier guarding against random traffic in an iffy neighborhood.

And when I walk up to this big gate and see that it's padlocked from the inside I'm still expecting to get in, because, after all, they've been open since 2:00pm.

But when I shake the gate, and look for a bell or something and find no way to get in, I finally realize I'm not going to see the show I made a special trip to see.

So I kick the gate, mumble something, and walk way in frustration knowing I'm not likely to see the show unless I again take time out of my busy schedule to come back and see it before it closes on June 9.

You'd think a gallery would stick to their advertised hours.

This is what I came to see:

The GIF Show, an exhibition opening May 3rd, at San Francisco's Rx Gallery, takes the pulse of what some net surfers call 'GIF Luv,' a recent frenzy of file-sharing and creative muscle-flexing associated with GIFs (Graphic Interchange Format files). Curated by Marisa Olson in a West Coast Rhizome collaboration with Rx, the show presents GIFs and GIF-based videos, prints, readymades, and sculptures by a range of artists, including Cory Arcangel, Peter Baldes, Michael Bell-Smith, Jimpunk, Olia Lialina, Abe Linkoln, Guthrie Lonergan, Lovid, Tom Moody, Paper Rad, Paul Slocum, and Matt Smear (aka 893/umeancompetitor). GIFs have a rich cultural life on the internet and each bears specific stylistic markers. From Myspace graphics to advertising images to porn banners, and beyond, GIFs overcome resolution and bandwidth challenges in their pervasive population of the net. Animated GIFs, in particular, have evolved from a largely cinematic, cell-based form of art practice, and ! have more recently been incorporated in music videos and employed as stimulating narrative devices on blogs. From the flashy to the minimal, the sonic to the silent, the artists in The GIF Show demonstrate the diversity of forms to be found in GIFs, and many of them comment on the broader social life of these image files.

I wanted to see the show particularly because I am acquainted with Pete Baldes (curator of the Pulse 2006 show at 1708 Gallery I'm in right now) and Tom Moody.

And I wanted to see the work by Jimpunk and Abe Linkoln because I've seen lots of their work online, and because I was, uh, kind of on an -empyre- panel with them last summer for the month of June.

And there's a bunch of other well known names, too, all those others, you know, as they sing on the Gilligan's Island Theme Song, "...the Professor and Mary Ann."

There's a myspace site for the show; seriously, see if you have enough RAM to handle it.

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More 1708 photos

Installation photos of the other five artists in Pulse 2006 at 1708 Gallery in Richmond, VA, curated by Peter Baldes and Kristin Beal . All photos Pete Baldes.

Below: Brad Hampton:

Below: Rachel Hayes:

Below: Steve Karlik

Below: Lisa Fletcher Rundstrom

Below: Anna Von Mertens

Berkeley Paintings Statement

Berkeley Paintings 1-6 installed, 2195 Hearst, UC Berkeley (see photo of each painting)

Six Paintings for a Room in Berkeley

These six paintings were made with Room 200C in 2195 Hearst at UC Berkeley in mind. In this room there are seven windows in-between which are six short walls, each approximately three feet wide. Looking out through the windows one sees an intersection, buildings, cars and pedestrians, trees and hills. From the beginning it was my intention to make six paintings to hang between the windows using a blue and green palette. In making these paintings I determined that these paintings would refer to the Berkeley landscape.

Qinglü 青 绿 (also called qinglübai or qinglü shanshui) is a style of Chinese blue and green landscape painting made principally during the Sui (581–618) and Tang (618–907) dynasties. A rich and powerful color effect was achieved using two mineral colors— azurite blue and malachite green. In Fantastic Mountains: Chinese Landscape Painting from The Shanghai Museum, Liu Yang writes that this style “developed during the Six Dynasties period (222-479) to become the prime mode for landscape painting,” and “enjoyed its heyday during the Tang dynasty but remained vital thereafter.”

These paintings use a variety of ways to directly and simply make a painted image. The paint is applied in dots, gestures, drips, strokes, line, and filled-in shape. The black outlines are calligraphic and have different qualities: smooth; thin; barbed; abrupt; flowing. The blue and green don’t blend or mix, so the colors remain distinct and clean. The linen ground is not hidden, providing a warm background in which the fabric is plainly visible. The aluminum paint seems to both give off and flatten light; its contrast with the linen points to both the natural and the artificial, which is what paintings are.

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365 at 1708

More installation photos of my installation of inkjet-printed HTML drawings called 365 at 1708 Gallery in Richmond, VA, thanks to Pete Baldes; more at Flickr.

This is probably the most encompassing shot; there isn't a single photo that captures the whole thing:

George Lawson: New Work

George Lawson: New Work

Ivory 16 (left) & Ivory 18 (right), 2006, oil on linoleum, 10 x 8 inches each

Sassetta: Le bienheureux Ranieri délivre les pauvres d'une prison de Florence

Stefano di Giovanni dit SASSETTA: Connu à Sienne en 1426 - Sienne, 1450
Le bienheureux Ranieri délivre les pauvres d'une prison de Florence

Neil Young: Living With War

It's good. I've listened to it a couple of dozen times. Released on Tuesday, I bought it right away. It's great. Neil is right. He has a big heart. Hear it all streamed. It's very moving. I like it a lot. Immediate, raw, feeling.

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Popel Coumou at ACF

Popel Coumou
Amsterdam Centre of Photography (ACF)
13 May - 10 of June, 2006
Opening: 13 May at 17:00.

ACF
Bethanienstraat 39
1012 BZ Amsterdam
+31 (0)20 622 48 99
www.acf-web.nl
Hoiurse: Thursday till Saturday from 13:00-17:00

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1708 Pulse 2006 announcement

The announcements for the 1708 Gallery show Pulse 2006 got to me late, or else I would've posted this earlier. The image on the card and the catalogue (a scan of which I'll post later) is my image from the February 2006 Wikipedia series 18. Political Integration of India.

1708 installation photos

Views of Pulse 2006 at 1708 Gallery Gallery in Richmond, VA. The show just opened last night, May 5, 2006. All photos Pete Baldes, who curated the show with Kristin Beal. Lots more at Pete's Flickr page. A few other shots at http://pulse2006.blogspot.com/.

I'm showing an installation called 365- 365 inkjet prints of HTML drawings spanning one year, March 2005 to March 2006, installed in twelve rows, one month each, plus a 365 page slide show of the same images on a monitor, that takes over half an hour to view.

Below: My installation on the left, Brad Hampton on the right, that's Steve Karlik and his wife Syndy standing in front of Rachel Hayes' work looking at Steve's two paintings. In the left middleground on the floor is Lisa Fletcher Rundstrom's work, and the platforms on the right are Anna Von Mertens'.

Below: view of my installation of inkjet prints with monitor playing slideshow.

Below: the opening, shot through front window, and my drawing installation. See what looks five blank pages in my installation just above the woman's head left of the center of the photo? Those five blank pages represent the five days I was in Philadelphia October 2005 for the Gallery Siano show when I didn't take my laptop with me and had no internet access.

Artists Interview Artists

I am participating in J. T. Kirkland's project called "Artists Interview Artists." It works like this: Artist A poses five questions that are randomly assigned to Artist B to answer, and then five questions from Artist C are randomly sent to Artist A, and so on. No artist answering questions knows who asked the questions until the interview is posted on J. T.'s weblog. It's a terrific project that has already resulted in over fifty short interviews, and connects artists of various media, aesthetics, and intentions. My five questions were answered by Michael Grayeagle. I have answered five questions already, but won't know who posed them until they're published on J. T.'s weblog. Grayeagle's answers are clearly from a good heart and mind, and I'm thrilled with his answers. Read.

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Berkeley Paintings Installation

Berkeley Paintings 1-6 installed, 2195 Hearst, UC Berkeley

Tom Moody/Room Sized Animated GIFs/artMovingProjects

Tom Moody/Room Sized Animated GIFs/artMovingProjects
Williamsburg/166 North 12th Street/917-301-6680
May 5 - June 25, 2006
Opening: Friday, May 5, 7:00PM - 9:00PM
Music Performance/Lecture: May 19th, 8PM
See ArtCal
Note: gallery closed June 8-11

Tom Moody, Double Centrifuge, (2004-06?), animated GIF, 333 x 580 pixels (reduced 50% for display here)

Animated GIFs, the tiny, blinking, often annoying image files that draw your eye to particular parts of a Web page, have been around since the Net's early days. There is a sizeable do-it-yourself culture built up around them, which now includes a second generation of Web and gallery based art using them ironically and/or proactively.

For the past several years, Moody has been drawing GIFs in a simple paint program and posting them on his blog at http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody. The gallery will be projecting one of these pulsing, but defiantly lo-fi animations huge on one wall of the space, while others will be displayed on monitors scattered throughout the gallery.

The gallery will also feature a lecture/performance by Moody on May 19, where he will present some of his music and music-based videos. These compositions, made with a combination of old computers such as the Macintosh SE as well as more current soft synths and samplers, have a punchy concision similar to his GIFs. The styles range from videogame Electro to a string quartet piece written for a softsampler.

I also recommend Tom's Quicktime Guitar Solo.

Tom is also in The GIF Show at Rx Gallery in San Francisco; see the announcement and the heavy duty, potential browser crashing MySpace page for the show. Also see curator Maria Olsen's de.lio.us list of works in the show.

ORDERed at Gallery Siano

I know quite a few people in the show ORDERed opening tonight at Gallery Siano in Philadelphia. Curated by Julie Karabenick, it includes Vincent Romaniello and Joanne Mattera and a number of others. The catalogue essay (PDF) is by Roberta Fallon (of Fallon & Rosof's Artblog fame).

From the essay:

From a vocabulary of regular and repeating shapes and lines, the artists build visual structures that hint at chaos and point to the age-old need of humans to impose order on the world. The works in the exhibit range from hard-edged, bright and almost industrial in nature to soft, nuanced and obviously handmade. Throughout, each artist speaks with an individualized vocabulary of shapes, colors, and lines; yet this does not create a Babel-like cacophony. For the unifying spark that flows from one work to another is the idea of the mind ordering these mini universes into visual relational databases, with hierarchies or perhaps non-hierarchical links, but networked, gridded, mapped and fixed as if in a snapshot from some ongoing greater whole. I suppose this could be the anti-entropy show: The artist as warrior against the forces of inertia.

The artists' personal constructs have almost free-associative charm. What you see is a circle, but what you get — unlike what Frank Stella said in his youth** — is not just a circle. The circles, squares and lines in these abstract paintings are not math or science, but painted visual hypotheses about the world.

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Six Paintings for a Room in Berkeley

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Preview: 1708 Gallery

Curatorial Statement Painting has always used pictorial representation to enact the metaphor of the window, employing painting as a metaphor for the window, and the window as a metaphor for painting. This classical screen was established as a place for the images of the world to be recorded. The images of our world are now developing through new interactive technologies. We believe the resilience of painting reveals itself through its ability to adapt its fundamental practices to new mediums. Our primary curatorial research and communication was done via the Internet. This interactive window/screen has become our window into artist studios as well as our primary source of communication throughout the selection process. Through blogging and other Web 2.0 services like del.ici.ous and flickr we were able to instantaneously share information. Blogging as curating; uninhibited; taste takes over. This allowed our bookmarks menu to become our curatorial point of view. Formal issues (color/form/space) seem to be enhanced by the computer space, while the informal nature of checking artists' websites allowed us the breathing room necessary to look at works. These artists borrow from the history of art through their formal practice while also remaining firmly planted in contemporary culture through their use of materials as well as by their presence on the web. From Chris Ashley, whose work is literally made from the web to Steve Karlik's references to technology through hard lines and grid patterns. These artists don't stray from the history of art, rather they further it. Their works have become a hybrid of both the computer space and real space. Peter Baldes Kristin Beal-DeGrandmont

 

 

 

 

Posted by chrisashley at 12:52 AM

May 01, 2006

Thirty Leaves

 

 

 

Thirty Leaves, April 2006, HTML, 365 x 265 pixels each

Above is a GIF representation of the Thirty Leaves drawings made during April. This is not an accurate representation. In reducing this representation to 50% some of the details are lost. For example, some of the lines of the internal figures in the first drawings in the first and second rows are lost. The second drawing in the second row is unusally crunchy. As always, a compilation page has been made where you can see the drawings at full size in HTML.

These thirty drawings were made during April 2006, one each day. This practice relates to the previous two months, during which the drawings I made spanned an entire month, resulting in 28 drawings during Feburary and 31 drawings during March. Making a series that spans a month seems a good way to go because it sets me up for something that will fit on the calendar with a definite beginning and ending, and the length of the series forces me to commit to and extend something over a long time.

I didn't set out with any thought other than using this kind of winged rectangle kind of shape- a rectangle with two squares notched out of the two bottom corners. This shape echoes a series made in June 2004 called 18 Hummingbirds. This choice was influenced by the fact that in February all the dimensions of the drawings were the same shape, and each that March drawing was a different size, but they all had the animated GIF in common. The shape I chose for April could be repeated the entire month and also be something a little more dynamic than a strict rectangle, even though they didn't continue the use of an animated GIF.

It wasn't until I did the sixth drawing, Minaret, that I recognized a kind of theme, which I'll identify only by saying that the single-word noun and verb titles seem very apt to the season and month during which Easter occurs.

 

 

 

 

Posted by chrisashley at 07:19 PM

Siegfried Schreiber, video

 

 

Another terrific video by Vince Romaniello:

Siegfried Schreiber, video

If universal themes like time, love and the cosmos interest you, go see Siegfried Schreiber's kinetic sculpture. This weekend the Wood Turning Center in Philadelphia hosts a series of events that include lectures and demonstrations. Mr. Schreiber turns wood into perfectly crafted sculpture that is beautiful to the eye and meditative to the soul, and since he is only visiting our area from Germany for a short time, this is an opportunity that you don't want to pass up. Use the links below to watch a short video which only scratches the surface of what Siegfried Schreiber is all about.

 

 

 

 

Posted by chrisashley at 07:15 PM