April 15, 2006
Leaf Fifteen: Wash
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Leaf Fifteen: Wash, 2006, HTML, 365 x 265 pixels
April 14, 2006
Leaf Fourteen: Fountain
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Leaf Fourteen: Fountain, 2006, HTML, 365 x 265 pixels
April 13, 2006
Leaf Thirteen: Bow
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Leaf Thirteen: Bow, 2006, HTML, 365 x 265 pixels
Berkeley Paintings: a little background
The six Berkeley Paintings I have featured the last six days (compiled on a single page) were made for a large meeting room at UC Berkeley by request; a fancy word for that would be commission-- I just saw it as an opportunity to respond to a situation, make some paintings, and get them shown.
The meeting room has a curved wall with seven windows; in between each window is a section of wall about 36" wide. That's six sections, perfect for six paintings. Outside these windows across an intersection is a corner of the university- buildings, trees, looking uphill, sky. The idea was to use the green and blue Qinglu palette I'd been using in the drawings so much last year (see installation view, Gallery Siano, Philadelphia, October 2005), as it would combine the idea of the colors and spaces one sees out these windows. That idea was well received. The place for which these were painted also gave me titles: Tilden, Cragmont, Panoramic, La Loma, Strawberry, and Ocean View are neighborhoods in Berkeley, though Strawberry refers to the Strawbery Canyon area east of the university with steep hillsides and a looping road, and out of which a creek runs that goes right through the middle of the university.
What I didn't anticipate is that it would take me seven months and six wrecked canvases and six fresh ones to make these, and that these would take such a strong turn towards Chinese landscape painting.
Actually, I shouldn't be surprised by either of these turn of events, I suppose. I really had no idea of the motif I'd use, and I worked through many, so I had to practically destroy six canvases just to find my way to open space again. And the more literal Chinese-influenced motif shouldn't surprise me-- that's been turning up to some degree in all the work. I'm very happy with the outcome, I just didn't think it would be so pictorial. Except...
In December 2004 (see 200411219) I quickly painted four canvases in scummy blue/green turpentine, expecting to take them further. Instead, I stopped, looked them over, put them away and have pulled them out many time to see what they might tell me or point me towards. I ended up leaving them just as they are and giving them an Irish name, Sliabh Gorm (Green Mountain); besides the Chinese reference they also made me think of Co. Armagh in Northern Ireland, where we spent some time in 2000. They are pictured below. I re-photographed and posted about them again on 20050724; I wrote at that time, "Tentatively called "Green Mountain" or, in Irish, "Sliabh Gorm," these are from late 2004, oil on canvas, 16 x 12 inches each. These were made in a matter of minutes from thinned blue green oil. I've left them as is. I take them out every once in awhile to look at and see what I can learn from them and why I want to leave them as they are."
At that time I was thinking about them but didn't know what to do with the information. Well over a year ago they pointed the way toward the Berkeley Paintings, which I didn't know, and at which I eventually arrived. I think there is more to be gotten from them, and from these new paintings.
Sliabh Gorm, 2004, oil on canvas, 16 x 12 inches each
Martin Bromirski & Tao Chi (Shitao)
Martin Bromirski writes to comment on the Berkeley Paintings, notes my connection to the Tao Chi (Shitao) painting, and then points out to me his 2004 painting. Take note:
Martin Bromirski, 2004
Tao-chi: a leaf from an An Album for Taoist Yü, late 17th century.
Ocean View (Berkeley Painting #6)
Ocean View (Berkeley Painting #6), 2006, oil and aluminum Rust-oleum on clear acrylic on linen, 23 x 15 in
April 12, 2006
Strawberry (Berkeley Painting #5)
Strawberry (Berkeley Painting #5), 2006, oil and aluminum Rust-oleum on clear acrylic on linen, 23 x 16 in
Westfall & Sillman in Brooklyn Rail
The Brooklyn Rail seems to be doing lots of things right for the (arts) community there. For example, two interviews in the recent issue: John Yau with Stephen Westfall and Phon Bui with Amy Sillman.
Westfall: I like that it flickers back and forth between whole and fragment. There’s this back and forth between seeing the whole and then only being aware of fragments and being aware that the whole is made up of fragments. And again, in other words, it’s like, humility is both a great and awful word because nobody can wield it in reference to themselves and be humble. You can’t advertise humility as something that exists in one’s process, so you say this vulnerability is there. I believe there’s such a thing as a generous irony as opposed to a cynical irony—in fact we know there’s many different kinds of irony, and we live in an ironic way. But that means there’s also a compensatory irony that is the awareness that there’s a doubleness to things that have history. What I would hope is that when you look at planar abstraction, the other thing that we get, via Matisse, is a celebratory quality that can feel commemorative on a certain level. So you have this celebratory aspect coexisting with the shakiness and maybe a kind of humor comes out of the combination.
Sillman: I haven’t read much of Calvino’s work. What is present in my paintings is never based on a strategy or a plan. I suppose that’s the difference between writing and painting. I don’t know. I just have this perpetual faith that if I make these paintings they will be about something. I think they are now about struggling more than about play. The struggle is more evident. The images that end up showing are very simple: legs, a bird, a tree, a structure, some plumbing. The nameable things in the painting are elemental things, as if a child were trying to recognize the nomenclature and the tangible properties of the world that surrounds them, for sure.
April 11, 2006
La Loma (Berkeley Painting #4)
La Loma (Berkeley Painting #4), 2006, oil and aluminum Rust-oleum on clear acrylic on linen, 23 x 17 in
Tao-chi: a leaf from an An Album for Taoist Yü. See my essay About a leaf from Tao-chi's Album for Taoist Yü, December 2004.
Ernie Kwiat / Creature Ink
Old friend Ernie Kwiat (as in, we've known Ernie a long time, going back to undergrad days around 1979) tags his newish weblog Creature Ink with the following:
If there is one constant element with the art I have created, beginning from the first time I tried to draw until now, it would be monsters and creatures of all sorts.
Check out the grubs (fine drawing) and Ernie's definition of the difference between illustration and fine art.
You should see Ernie's place- plastic painted creatures and figures and monsters, comic books, posters, books, and a bunch of guitars. Occasionally Ernie and I get together and bash out a few songs. He has a wonderful voice and is fun to play with.
If you bought a Sesame Street product in the 90's- a book, a watch, a t-shirt, a bib, some blocks, and on and on- there's a pretty good chance Ernie drew the images on it and did a fair amount of the layout. I have an Oscar the Grouch watch.
I believe he's still making work for Sesame Street. But he's branched out, and has a few select items available at Uncle Ernie's Oddball Collection of T-shirts & Fun, which of course I highly recommend.
April 10, 2006
Essay at Furtherfield by Rob Myers
Late last week I received an email telling me that I had been given a "Furtherfield ID Card!" I had no idea what that meant; there was little info in the email, and only one context-setting line that said, "Update your Artist ID Card." I thought it was some type of commerical pitch, like, "Register with us and start selling your art now!".
I clicked the link, and boy was I surprised: there was a page about my art with two images and an excerpt from the esssay that George Lawson wrote for me in late 2004. Neat. It turns out that "Furtherfield is an online platform for the creation, promotion, and criticism of adventurous digital/net art work for public viewing, experience and interaction," and is a "London based, non-profit organisation. We aim to develop a sustainable model for the promotion and support of networked and distributed creativity."
As I looked through the names of artists collected there I recognized several names, among them Rich White, who I met through -empyre- last June.
Later I looked at my Furtherfield page wondering if I could edit it-- partly because one of the images there is actually oil on canvas not anything more hifalutin' that that, and when I clicked on a button on the bottom of the page labeled "Review" I was taken to something completely unexpected: an short essay about my HTML work by Rob Myers, which is quite wonderful and perceptive; I am delighted to read it. The complete essay can be read at Furtherfield, but I am going to borrow it and reproduce it below so that I have a complete copy here in my archives.
Rob Myers is, among many other projects, the author of draw-something software and the maker of lots of very interesting image types. He also translated or helped translate the essay that Manik wrote about my work almost a year ago, They Are What They Are & Layers.
Two more things before the essay:
First, Rob is the first person besides myself to comment articulately about the connection between my HTML work and the work on paper that I've been saying has been there all along. Thanks very much for that, Rob.
Second, Furtherfield does the same thing most other web sites have done when reproducing my work, which is to force an HTML drawing to become a graphic file. Look at the image on the essay page- the image is a JPEG, and slightly grainy, too. It is made from a screen capture. What's extra odd in this case is that the source of that captured image, Red Hoops of 20060329, is actually made with HTML and an animated GIF in it, so it moves, wheras so much of the rest of the HTML drawings are perfectly static. Because of the site's design, of course, which is formatted to place an image at the top of the page rather than some markup that makes the browser display an image, well, my work is a round peg forced into a square hole, and changed because of that. That's par for the course; in a way, I like that my work has a right place and form of presentation, that there are places where it really can't and shouldn't go.
But no complaints, really. Read Rob's essay; this is nice.
Every day since 2002 Chris Ashley has created an abstract coloured drawing in hand-coded HTML tables and posted it to his weblog “Look, See”. The structured format of a weblog frames these small but often complex works perfectly. Weblogs are an informal medium and personal weblogs often have the quality of a diary or consisting of a confessional nature. This is a deflating context for art, one that in Chris's case allows some of the aesthetic content of high and late modernism to be rehabilitated without bathos. What was once meant to be universal is made personal, not with the knowingness of Neo Geo but with a remixer's virtuosity and enthusiasm. Weblogs are also a highly referential medium, some weblogs consist almost entirely of commentaries on news or links to other blogs. The visually referential nature of Chris's HTML drawings shares this quality. Despite being grid-based geometric abstracts they evoke the heroic universal grids of high modernism, 8-bit computer graphics, or to the colours and forms of scenes of nature or technology. This is quite apart from their titles, which often refer to concrete entities. Again the informality of the weblog's context prevents the problem of how something concrete can be expressed or represented in abstraction from becoming a problem. These are very successful works, and paradoxically it is the limitations of their chosen medium that helps make them so. Grids, especially HTML table grids, are a restrictive format. But this formal limitation can serve to free other qualities such as colour and composition. And formal constraints have often been used as a spur to creativity, by Dada or the Oulipo for example. Looking at the watercolour works that Chris has also posted is instructive. Like the HTML table drawings they are formal but playful exercises in colour and composition. There is a strong hint of Sol LeWitt's geometric abstracts to some of the forms, and like LeWitt Chris's work can be seen as an ironic continuation of high modernism after its death in the 1960s. Where LeWitt's ironisation was in the form, with the platonism of pure abstraction recast as rigid geometric specifications, Chris's is in the subject, with visual referentiality replacing that hermetic platonism. Recently, Chris has added another classic web design staple to his HTML, single-pixel animated GIFs. The result is not limited animation but very succesful moving images. Duration and movement of colour become formal properties alongside hue, saturation and transparency. Falling strips of colour evoke rain, flashing panels of contrasting brightness become lightning or city lights. This is more distillation than abstraction, it is peak shift evocation of visual experience. It is the way that Chris's HTML table drawings hold and animate their aesthetic references that give them the internal complexity required to have a critical voice. Like a political weblog they draw in, interrogate and comment on issues from a larger world, although the world of aesthetics rather than politics. And it is this that gives them their lasting value as art. Look, See - http://www.chrisashley.net/weblog/ Reviewer: Rob Myers
Earlier HTML Drawings - http://chrisashley.net/htmldrawings/
Watercolours - http://www.chrisashley.net/weblog/archives/cat_on_paper.html
Moving Images - http://www.chrisashley.net/weblog/archives/2006_03.html
Panoramic (Berkeley Painting #3)
Panoramic (Berkeley Painting #3), 2006, oil and aluminum Rust-oleum on clear acrylic on linen, 23 x 17 in
Gainsborough's Brushstrokes
In May 2005 I saw Thomas Gainsborough's (1727–1788) The Mall in St James's Park at the Frick Collection in New York. I had never given Gainsborough much thought before, but I was so impressed by this painting, particularly by the qualities of paint and light, and how despite its depiction of a certain privileged class of the time the paint and the painted marks seem so radically gestural, expressive and material, that I wrote a few brief thoughts in Thomas Gainsboroug: How Modern? (see the painting there).
In mid January of this year I spent a Sunday afternoon at the San Francisco Legion of Honor, one of the two Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF), the other being the De Young, with the recently opened new building. On this afternoon I discovered a painting that has probably been hanging in the museum for decades, and one which I probably have walked by dozens of time, being somewhat immune to most portraits. Well, live and learn; always keep you eyes and mind open. Behold: Gainsborough's Mrs. Fitzherbert of 1784.
The image below is a scan; the FAMSF has an online image database that holds a fair amount of the collections, and which used to have hi-res tiling images that allowed a very close look at individual works with a fairly high degree of resolution. The database was hosted and run at UC Berkeley, probably as a research project. However, without explanation this feature suddenly disappeared from the FAMSF website sometime in Janaury, leaving only smaller, almost useless images (but a still useful text), and so my hope of a decent image to write about a bit was nixed, until Saturday, when the musuem member's magazine arrived in the mail, and there inside was a full-page image of Mrs. Fitzherbert. Apparently, I am not the only person who thinks highly of this painting. Although this scan doesn't at all approach seeing this painting for real there are a few things evident here that will give the viewer a good idea of what is going on in this painting. First, take a look:
At first glance the painting seem conventional enough. Mrs. Fitzherbert is caught in her youthful beauty- porcelain skin, good health, intelligent eyes, obviously kind and reflective, caught in a moment of thought or relaxation, full of contentment. As is typical the face gets the most finish (hence, time and the most paint), and next come the hands. After that the clothing is painted in, slightly out of focus or lacking in detail so as not to detract from our lady. Finally, the background gets filled in, appearing to not really matter so, except for the gorgeous red glow of a curtain's edge on the left which has been pulled back slightly to show a hint of landscape and sky along her arm above the elbow, just enough to connect her to the world, to light and air, to property and otherness, a slight opening that breaks the vacuum of an otherwise sealed off setting.
This is a pretty solidly constructed painting; in spite of its looseness in areas in feels like a whole. There is a real feeling of life and breath. The eye takes great satisfaction in moving around the painting, from her face down her arm to out beyond the curtain, then back inside and sliding down her sleeve for a glance across her ambiguous lap to skitter back up the switchbacks of white squiggles in her collar, climbing the rungs of her hair into the erotic darkness around the edge of her neck, and back out to her face. Or you can take that loop in reverse. In this painting you've got your compositional triangles, circles, and cylinders. Gainsborough knows what he is doing.
Painters in these times were basically contractors for hire. A good portrait painter cranked out a lot of work, making appealing likenesses by freshening people up a bit, making them look beautiful or important or powerful or simply visible in a way that these days we take for granted. Now, anyone can have their photo taken. In Gainsborough's time, with some exceptions, typically only the well-to-do were recorded. But a painter, one who is an artist who engages in process and invention, who enjoys the magic of mixing paint and coaxing the paint to make some kind of image, is going to push things a bit, to see what more they can get out of the whole act besides filthy lucre. As any worker wonders, "what's in it for me?" Apparently, what really got Gainsborough going, was brushwork. Look close at this detail below and note what he is up to; this is a big part of what caught my eye in January:
This is some wicked, loose, fast brushwork. Gainsborough loves the brush. Some of the paint here is no more glorified than fingerpainting, except the finger is a paintbrush and it's an extension of him, a master in full control making a few strokes and loops say so much.
Hanging down from the middle top, look at the four or five dark broad strokes of hair; there is umber and white and probably something like ultramarine all streakily applied with a wide, soft flat brush in just a few short, stop-and-start strokes.
Beginning in the upper right corner a white stroke, probably made with a stiffer round brush, cascades down in a few turns and disappears in the lower left, merging into a mass of pushed around strokes with barely any definition. When you see the painting for real this white stroke is brighter and meanders down in one continuous, curvy movement. It's breathtaking in its directness and simplicity and descriptiveness.
In the top left corner compare the hanging dark hair to the lighter hair on the right; it's different in color, and texture, and weight, and it's just the right thing to show by contrast that the hair on the right is closer to us than the darker hair on the left.
And finally, look at the far right about one third of the way down: suspended in the darkness of the background, and rooted in her collar but thrown out into space like a lasso, a single stroke loops around itself and ends, poised like a pipe cleaner, pointing towards the right edge. Look back at the image of the complete painting above and find that stroke-- it doesn't really quite make sense. Sure, it looks like the edge of a part of a layered collar in shadow, but it also just looks like a loopy stroke of painting hanging off in the middle of nowhere.
These strokes are a lot of the territory where a painter like Gainsborough lives. This is where he is finding amazing little ways for paint to do things that someone else may not be able to do. Most painters are trying to do something like this, whether whether with strokes, or paint qualities, or color, or kinds of surfaces. I am reminded of James Elkins' What Painting Is. I'll end with this brief excerpt below, hoping that I've gotten across the point that looking at a painting to see how it's made, to see what the artist is doing, provides essential of information about that painting, its time and place, the artist's attitude and ability, the interplay of representation and abstraction, standards or expectations and individuality, material and application, and the degree to which paint has many levels of resolution: at a viscerally visual level, as physically brushed liquified pigment; at the level of how images as representation coalesce and dissolve; and at an intellectual level, were the physical use of a material in a conceptually framed format is a problem that accomodates many different kinds of solutions.
The sensations I get from paint come from attending to different marks and the way they were made. I am using very small details in this book to to make the point that meaning does not depend on what the paintings are about: it is there at a lower level, in every inch of the canvas. Substances occupy the mind by invading it with thoughts of the artist's body at work. A brushstroke is an exquisite record of the speed and force of the hand that made it, and if I think of a hand moving across the canvas-- or better, if I just retrace it, without thinking-- I learn a great deal about what I see. Painting is scratching, scraping, waving, jabbing, pushing, and dragging. At times the hand moves as if it were writing, but in paint; and other times it moves as if the linen canvas were a linen shirt, and the paint was stain that had to be rubbed under running water. Some painting motions are like conversation, where the hands keep turning in the air to make a point. Others are slow careful gestures, like touching someone's eye to remove a fleck of dirt.
Painters feel these things as they look at pictures, and they may re-encact the motions that went into the paintings by moving their hands along in front of the canvas as if they were painting the pictures at that moment. In a musuem, it is often possible to tell an experienced painter from an historian because the painter will step up to a picture and make gestures, or trace outlines. Those movments are not always done in any deliberate way-- they are second nature, a kind of automatic response like waving to a friend (Elkins, James. What Painting Is: How to Think About Oil Painting, Using the Language of Alchemy. New York: Routledge, 1999. pp 96-97).
April 09, 2006
Leaf Nine: Script
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Leaf Nine: Script, 20060409, HTML, 365 x 265 pixels
Cragmont (Berkeley Painting #2)
Cragmont (Berkeley Painting #2), 2006, oil and aluminum Rust-oleum on clear acrylic on linen, 23 x 18 in