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
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