Look, See

Mono Hot Springs (2004)

Mono Hot Springs (2004), 2006, HTML & JPEG, 460 x 600 pixels

A Pony for Linda

A Pony for Linda, by C.W. Andersen, The MacMillan Company, New York, 1958

Inside are highly rendered pencil drawings pretty obviously made from photos- there's just a quality of light to them that looks like a black and white photo.

Girl riders, horses, and Linda's gracious gift of the trophy and blue ribbon to the other girl who had to travel farther for the competition after the judges couldn't decide on a winner- I guess this is what you'd call Chick Lit.

But the cover- heavy. Terrific pale green cloth background that feels very spacious and distant, and then the title and images sit right on the surface like they're rubber stamped.

The more I look the more I think, Chick Lit- look at the dainty pointed hooves.

Sherrie Levine

Sherrie Levine, 20060811, HTML, 500 x 600 pixels

What's Inside of Me

What's Inside of Me, Herbert S. Zim, illustrated by Herschel Wartik, William Morrow & Company, New York, 1952

This book is kind of creepy, but I can't decide if it's a good kind of creepy or a disturbing kind of creepy.

James K. Polk

James K. Polk, 20060810, HTML & JPEG, 200 x 200 pixels

This is more fooling around with Don Relyea's Reductionizer, which is my August project here. I've incorporated JPEGs into the HTML work (Sept 2005 & June 2006), but those drawings involve more of a drawing process for me.

I use Dreamweaver, and I make images beginning with a table, filling in cells, control-selecting groups of cells to draw a line or separate areas to insert a hexidecimal code or modifying the existing code to slightly shift colors. I can add and delete rows and cells, copy and paste one area to another, or invert or reverse an image by copying and pasting rows and cells in reverse or into another table. I can change cell and row height and width, and I can put tables inside tables. It's very much of feeling of drawing, though it may not sound like one by my description. To say that it is somewhat like collage may be closer.

But using the Reducitionizer is very different. An image is converted to a table and then I work with this existing image, rather than building up an image. It's modification. The Sept. 2005 and June 2006 series the JPEG is specified in the table attribute "background", so I am drawing on top of the image. Using the Reductionzier the image is in the table, so I am working into the table image. And once a table is rendered as an image with any detail it's a pretty hefty file, so making changes is a little slow and unwieldy. I'm just trying to figure out an approach here, and how to bring in what I was already doing, which I don't want to leave behind, into this new way of working.

This is just to explain that the images so far are pretty different from what I was doing, not close to what I have in mind, and I'm uncertain how to get there so far.

Cowboy Small

Cowboy Small, by Lois Lenski, Henry Z. Walk, Inc., New York, 1949

"Cowboy Small takes good care of his horse, Cactus. In return, Cactus helps Cowboy Small get work done on the range. Together they round up cattle for branding and live the good life. At night, Cowboy Small eats at the chuck wagon, sings with his friends, and sleeps under the stars."

Lois Lenski (1893-1974) is a well known author and illustrator. In 1946 she was awarded the Newbery Medal for Strawberry Girl. A school is named after her in Littleton, Colorado- why? I wonder about the connection between Littleton and her Mr. Small Series.

A sweet little book. Many reviews at Amazon.

Nice touches: like the font a lot, with its subtle narrowing and broadening; the yellow "socks" on the horses legs; the plaid lines of his shirt are the cover fabric; the two dashed lines on either side of the tail; cool chaps; the deep space of the right side (his left) of his hat rearing back around his head; the horse is prancing, like a carousel horse; that little touch of yellow along the edge of the saddle's horn popping right up out of Cowboy Small's crotch.

For a simple drawing it's very complete and articulate- the rope, the saddle, the one spur, the kerchief.

The two clouds over the single sheep crammed into the left side right in front of the horse is a little peculiar; I feel this need to put the sun or a big cloud on the left side between "Cow..." and the tail.

The horse's head looks a little like a burro.

Connemara Tartan

Connemara Tartan, 20060809, HTML & JPEG, 400 x 400 pixels

Don Relyea's Reductionizer

The HTML images I've been posting during the month of August are made with Don Relyea's Reductionizer. Learn more, download, play: The Reductionizer. Don writes:

The reductionizer is a software art project. It was spawned from an email conversation with artist Chris Ashley. Basically I wrote him and said, "Hey I have this script, would this be of use to you?" He was definitely interested and dialog ensued discussing ideas, possible features and suggestions. In it's current state it is more like a photoshop filter than an art tool. The current thinking is to move it into the realm of a simple art tool for creating art on the web. Adding features that give the artist manipulative capability is desirable.

What is it?
It converts bitmap images to html table layouts and provides for easy scaling of cells using sliders and text entry fields. It has a very reductionist lean to it, in that it is easy to reduce a photograph down to a more abstract lower resolution image. It exports to both graphic and html formats. It will have editing functions like a pencil, eraser, paint bucket, hand and gradient tools to allow for more creative freedom. It will have z sort able layers, palettes and an eyedropper.

It also has a component that randomly grabs photos from flickr from random wordlists sorted by interesting. The image absorbed, below was scraped automatically by the reductionizer. I doodled on it with the pencil tool after reducing it.

Eileen Fell & Tim Schwartz

Eileen Fell: yellow leaves, 2005	Tim Schwartz: Tops 2, 2006, oil on linen, 19"x13"

Eileen Fell and Tim Schwartz just launched a new website.

I met Eileen and Tim last October in Philadelphia at the Urban Canvas opening. I wrote about one of Tim's paintings in January, 2006: Tim Schwartz: Untitled (Four Ways). Look at some more past work.

I chose the two images shown here. I decided on two verticals simply because I thought it would make a nicer post. I resized them to the same height so they'd make a more nicely formatted post. I don't know the actual dimensions of the photograph. I wasn't aware until these two images were side by side that, very loosely, they share a kind of compositional wedge shape in the upper right area. The work of these two artists is separated at the website, more like two separate sites. My intention here was not to homogenize the images, so don't let your looking end here, go to their website.

Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel

Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, story and pictures by Virginia Lee Burton, The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1939.

Classic. Captain Kangaroo read this story to me. I was shocked when I saw this book in the library's discard pile.

Since it was first published in 1939, Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel has delighted generations of children. Mike and his trusty steam shovel, Mary Anne, dig deep canals for boats to travel through, cut mountain passes for trains and hollow out cellars for city skyscrapers. But with progress come new machines and soon the inseparable duo are out of work so Mike Mulligan and Mary Anne travel to the small town of Popperville and accept one final challenge — to dig the town cellar in just one day. What happens is a testament to their friendship and to old-fashioned hard work and ingenuity.

Slieve Gullion, Armagh

Slieve Gullion, Armagh, 20060808, HTML, 312 x 304 pixels

How to Play Baseball

How to Play Baseball by Martin Iger and Robert Fitzsimmons, Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York, 1962.

When the last time you saw a boy with a crewcut wearing a cardigan, cuffed pants, and leather shoes with heels swinging a bat?

Yellow sweater, yellow socks- such a stylish dresser!

This kind of printing makes home plate levitate at just below knee level.

I really like the simplicity of the hands.

I like the how black outline is used and not used- it's all around the pants, but none around the bat or arm, none on the forehead or top of nose.

That bat is quite a club.

Nice exposed achilles and lifted heel on the right trailing foot.

The more I look at the right leg sticking out from behind the left knee the weirder it looks. Try it: forget that the right leg joins a hidden thigh- just see it as joined to the left leg. It's like his right leg grows out of his left knee.

I find the ear pretty convincing.

There are a couple of things at work here that aren't too far from my Berkeley paintings: flat areas, use of background as a color, dark outline used extensively but not completely.

The red area defined below the bat, around home plate, up against his stomach, and down to his knee is an interesting shape once your eyes call it out.

That white arm pokes out of the puffy folded sleeve like a bone sticking out of meat.

All photos inside, including part of a photo deeper inside the book on which the cover is based:

Sopa de la Zanahoria

Sopa de la Zanahoria, 20060807, HTML, 225 x 600 pixels

Saving Arnold J. Kemp from the Land of Baloney

Arnold J. Kemp: Daydream Nation
Exhibition dates: July19 - August 19, 2006
Stephen Wirtz Gallery

I get several gallery and museum press releases and curator's statements everyday, many of which are full of such ridiculously grandiose claims that I both laugh and boil. I've been tempted to occasionally post the most offensive ones here, but usually just hit delete, instead. But not today. I saw this show last week and generally liked the work, but there's a problem here.

Here's the first paragraph of the press release:

Conceptual in origin and formal in presentation, these abstract works on paper and canvas are dominated by bold, geometric expanses of solid black. Kemp's refined palette also incorporates ink washes, graphite line, and the juxtaposition of areas of white pigment to create thematic variations. These rigorously balanced and aesthetic constructions exist on their own as strong studies in spare minimalist composition, yet are informed by calculations rife with literal and metaphorical reference to language, aspects of personal history, and politics.

OK, I can live with most of that. But there is nothing in this work seen in person that lives up to the following paragraph. The ideas contained here might be important for the artist, but for the viewer, me, who is looking at painting with eyes and a working knowledge of art history and doesn't see painting as a conceptual prop, it's just baloney:

As a black artist creating black paintings, Kemp activates a conceptual strategy that comments on the notion of established expectations of what black artists should make. Kemp questions the appropriateness of the categorization "black art" while simultaneously exploring the position of his work in a lineage of influence. While acknowledging a rich ancestry of artists who have created black paintings including Barnet Newman, Ad Reinhart, Goya, and Joan Mitchell among others, Kemp also cites a conceptual strategy and slippage of meaning that also resonates in the work of artists such as Adrian Piper, David Hammons, Sun Ra, Igor Stravinsky, Duke Ellington, Alice Coltrane, Mike Kelley, and Lorna Simpson.

I defy anyone to see these paintings cold and have any idea expressed in that previous paragraph pop into their head unprompted, and once it's introduced, for that idea to matter at all in relation to the work, as it's made, with the imagery it contains, hanging in that gallery, standing right in front of it.

Risking playing in the potential minefield of race, what if the press release for Robert Ryman's next show said, "As a white artist creating white paintings, Ryman activates a conceptual strategy that comments on the notion of established expectations of what white artists should make."

Painting, or any art, as a "conceptual strategy that comments on the notion of established expectations" is not only an uninteresting idea, it's an idea that is at least twenty years into solid status as a cliche.

Crap like this is embarassing and makes it harder to convince your relatives that art is actually a good thing.

Joseph Hughes

Richard Schur and me in the mirror with paintings by Joseph Hughes from the mid or late-90's- a dark green one behind us and a yellow one in the entry room of Joe's house, San Francisco, 20060805. Each painting has much more detail and surface and color variation than shown here. And they are impeccably crafted; the details of the work are a big part of the looking and seeing here.

About Joseph Hughes: [1] Takada Gallery; [2] Seeing the Hovering Image: Joseph Hughes' Recent Paintings, 2004Oct; [3] 2004 review.

Icebergs

Icebergs, by Roma Gains, Illustrated by Bobri, Thomas Y. Crowell Company New York, 1964

Great cover- simple, graphic, abstract: subject-specific and referential but still oblique and open with possibility. A rarity- the illustrations inside are just as good as the cover, except of course they have to inform the subject more, so the presence of boats and other human-incidental details spoils the abstraction.

See the absurd simplicity and elgance of #1, the Suess-ian Baroque exaggeration of #2, and the Matissean jazz form and eye-sucking black hole in the middle of the iceberg of #3.

Bldg

Bldg, 2006, HTML, 231 x 693 pixels

Wait For William

Then flop, off came William's shoe, and there he stood with one shoe off and one shoe on. "Wait for me!" called William. Wait for me, my shoe's come off!"

Wait For William, by Marjorie Flack, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1935

Once there were three children who lived in a white house in Pollywinkle Lane in the village of Pleasantville.

The oldest of these three children was a big boy whose name as Charles and he was eight years old.

The middle one was a girl whose name was Nancy and she was six years old.

The youngest was a little boy and his name was Wiliam and he was just four years old.

One summer morning when William was riding his scooter up and dow the walk Charles said,

"Hurry up, William, put away your scooter and we will take you down to Main Street to see the Circus Parade."

Nowhere in my copy is Richard A. Holberg credited, as he is on the cover below: