The Oakland HTML drawing is the last drawing in the series "Places I Have Slept," which began August 3, 2003. I saved Oakland for last since it's where I live and a town I like. The series includes 133 places (I know there are more places than this, but I can't remember or name them), a drawing for each place. There are just a few instances where I posted two or three drawings on a single day, usually places that, in my mind somehow, I associate together.
All drawings start with a small table, say 18 x 16, with each cell 20 x 20 pixels. Except for a few drawings most have a strict grid structure of 20 x 20 pixel units. In a few cases I varied row height or column width, but mostly I set out to do pretty straightforward grid drawings. There is nothing fancy here: no tables inside tables, no non-standard table attributes, no layers, no style sheets.
The tables are made with Dreamweaver. Each day I picked a place from the list, meditated on the name, even if briefly, and tried to go with the image that popped into my head, at least as a starting place. What almost always happened is that the image changed a lot through the making as I added or deleted columns and rows and copied and pasted code from one area of the table to another. In some ways it is more like a collage process.
During some periods I'd get in a groove, finding new effects, enjoying the space being created, fretting over too much illusion-like transparency or the hint of perspective. Each time when doing a drawing I'd think of a next step, and knowing that this next step might be a laborious thing to do, and thus undo if I didn't like it, I would copy the current state, paste it, and work on this copy. Sometimes I would have a page, then, with maybe a dozen drawings, each a previous state of the next. A drawing might go through a many changes in the making, and it's interesting to looking back through some and see the stages they went though; I have them all saved.
Sometimes I would make a very complex image, going through eight or ten stages, only to feel that I wasn't getting what I wanted, and so setting off in a completey different direction for the final drawing that might be made in just a few mintues very quickly and very simply, as if I had to go through a very elaborate process to arrive at something direct, even minimal with few shapes or colors.
When I made the list and started this series I had no idea it would last this long. I thought I would do more multiple-drawing days, but it didn't work out that way. I also started out with the intention of all drawings being the same size and dimensions, but I quickly abandoned this as each place is quite different in my memory, and the associations of some were more fond or intense than others. Having them all be the same size or dimensions would have instead lead to a logo-like series, and clearly to me, as some places are more important than others, or feel different, then each drawing had to be somewhat unique.
I have seen painting shows where a painter has a motif, a figure, a layout, and each painting in that body of work is just a different set of colors. Imagine anyone of my drawings repeated ten or twelve times where the only real problem from work to work is color. This works well for some people, but I seem to have a hard time doing this. I've got to at least do enough of a significant variation from work to work so that I have no only a color problem but a drawing problem, a spatial problem, a scale problem, to work with.
It's been nice to have a project with predetermined subjects, freeing me each day to memory, imagining, invention, and discovery.
Nice David Cohen review of current shows by Howard Hodgkin and Thomas Nozkowski.
The answer, I think, is that he is a truly radical abstract artist. There is an incredible sensation in a Nozkowski exhibition that although each painting is unmistakably his from a mile away, no two paintings are really alike. The enigma is always self-contained: The eye is detained and engaged within the picture. Taking to heart Kant's definition of beauty as "purposiveness without purpose," Mr. Nozkowski has found a great means by which to keep himself-and us-busy.
Inisheer
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More, in a way, tooting my own horn, or pointing at myself- Brent Hallard's comment at Tom Moody's weblog:
Thanks. Very much. And yes, I do want something, though I'm not sure it's something "back." It has something to do with the HTML drawings being a component of my overall arts project, but that other components of the project aren't going as well. That's all I'll say about it right now.
See Brent Hallard's site.
Mojave
I have linked to Tom Moody's weblog for a couple of months now, checking in every other day or so. He's an artist, writes about art, and in addition to digital art has interests in other media- film and music, gaming, for example. I find his comments incisive, interesting, and sometimes quite surprising.
I dont' know how Tom discovered my weblog, but he made a very interesting comment about my table drawings way back in late August, extending the logic of Greenbergian flatness, color, and, well, thingness through the minimalists, Flavin, and Lewitt to using code to send instructions to the browser to create a particular display on a monitor. I thought this was an extremely interesting take on the HTML drawings, one I certainly hadn't formulated myself.
Imagine my surprise when I looked at his weblog this morning and found more comments by Tom about my work. He really gets what I'm doing, I think, and I'm grateful, flattered, and reassured at the same time.
He writes about a friend's reaction to the drawings:
I have to admit to straddling this issue a bit myself. My own ambivalence- hope or denial about my own artwork- is betrayed by the series of imaginary gallery views I created from previous HTML drawings this past January. I've long called these drawings macquettes, as if they were models or sketches for things I would produce out of real materials. But I've also always known , and kind of denied, that my method is one where I find the image through it's making. I knew that as soon as I might attempt to translate one of these tables into, say, paint, that through it's making it would become something else entirely, not to mention the fact the mediums themselves- a computer monitor vs. a canvas- have nothing to do with each other. I think I'm learning to let go of hoping to pull these two things together, and instead thinking about what else I've learned that I can use- process, habits, subject matter, and some loose and general ideas about form, color, and space. But the fact remains, the HTML drawings are things in themselves. They are what they are. And I appreciate Tom's take on this.
I'm pretty sure I'm the only one keeping score here- the list on the far left of this page, "Places I Have Slept," contains 133 names. There are two remaining: Inisheer and Oakland. That means this series, which began August 8, 2003, will end on Friday.
What next? Oh, I'm sure I'll think of something.