Look, See: December 10, 2006 - December 16, 2006 Archives

Helmut Federle: Delirious Acceptance

Helmut Federle (born Solothurn, CH, 1944)

Delirious Acceptance (The So-Called Many) 2003
acrylic on linen, 330 x 550 cm
Collection of the National Gallery of Australia
Purchased 2003

"The painting... has an autobiographical reference, since it documents Federle’s experience of encountering overpowering background noise at an Austrian railway station."

Posted by chrisashley at 08:34 AM

Not Prime

Not Prime, 20061215, HTML, 150 x 150 pixels

Posted by chrisashley at 11:59 PM

Where Was I?

Looking back at series of 2006 HTML drawings:

January 2006

This was the last month in which an HTML drawing series did not span an entire month, and the last month during which I wrote some kind of explanation about the series of drawings at its conclusion. During January I made three series: Occidental 1-10, Untitled 1-10, and Wilson Pickett 1-10. On January 31 I let the Wilson Pickett series conclusion stand in for the drawing that day. The drawing on January 20 is Untitled 10 (Wilson Pickett); the singer had died the day before, and so the next ten drawings were based on Pickett song titles.

About Occidental 1-10 I wrote at the time:

I continue to look for and find ways that these small, flat, slick, saturated, light-filled, hard-edged, site-specific HTML images have some connection to the things I'm doing on canvas and paper.

For the past year I have been making paintings that consist of four canvases, and sets of drawings that consist of five pieces. The reason behind four and five is another story, mostly intuitive, something about balance. In these works, which consist of multiple pieces, I am interested in the interrelationships of one piece to another, and of all of the pieces to the whole. Another way of saying this is that I am interested in visual narrative, though it's not necessarily a linear kind of narrative, it's more like hopscotch.

I wanted to kick off the new year by forcing the issue a bit- make some HTML drawings here that would push ahead something in the paintings. And I wanted to be forced to make variety, four times a day, over at least ten days. The challenge with this HTML work is to find something new to do; it's not that easy, actually. Not difficult in that it's hard, but difficult in that there's not a lot of leeway inside this medium.

There are moments in some of these ten sets of drawings when the four pieces become something much more together than they ever would individually. Sometimes the simplicity of the HTML drawings is enhanced by the complexity of putting one thing beside another. I can never make them be much more than what they are: small, flat, slick, saturated, light-filled, hard-edged, and site-specific. The thing for a visual artist to do is to make visual things. It's only by making and making that I can eventually make something that will stick. This day by day practice is about making something sticky, whether here or somewhere else.

Everything I said above is stuff I still think about all the time a year later

I wrote nothing about Untitled 1-10 when this short series ended. They are all the same size. The motif looks like a cartoon image of a painting hanging on a cartoon wall. They a have vaguely crude representational quality, mostly from the shadow under each central image, and from the darker horizontal area that says, "floor." I like some of these.

About Wilson Pickett 1-10 I wrote:

What do I need to say about this series? It's about Wilson Pickett, March 18, 1941 – January 19, 2006. It's about groovin' and movin'. I defy you to listen to Land of 1000 Dances and not sing along. I challenge you to listen to Funky Broadway and not move your feet. I doubt you can listen to his version of the bubble gum song Sugar Sugar and not feel full of the sweetest love for someone. You can't listen to Engine Number 9 and not feel... nasty. 634-5789 will make you take your hand off the wheel and clap your hands.

I left Mustang Sally off the list. And I stopped at ten. But there's much more there in the songbook. These drawings are just a l'il thang. Better to just listen to Wilson.

Actually, in retrospect, some of these images are kind of hot and buzzy. The palette is red, yellow, and blue, but to me the images don't read as so primary.

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February 2006

I had noticed that the main page for the Wikipedia has a different feature article everyday. I like drawing in reponse to something, and I often like not having a choice. Making a drawing everyday in response to whatever shows up on some web page is very freeing; it's like, OK, just tell me what to do. But there's still room in this for me- I have to take that topic and make it visual. I settled on a vertical format of 340 x 220 pixels (which is seventeen rows and 11 columns of 20 x 20 pixels cells). Each day when I saw the topic I tried to visualize something in response- a color, an effect, a shape, a line. In my opinion, some of these are pretty successful.

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March 2006

Here's a twist- animation. I've made a lot of animated GIFs in the past, but not for a long time. I was prompted a bit by some of the animated GIFs Tom Moody was making. I thought it would be interesting to fill in cell backgrounds with shifting colors. My intention was to make things slow and long, so you had to pay attention over time, so it was subtle and so you couldn't get it all at once. When watching some of these you can't ever really quite tell if it's looped yet, if it's done.

This of course violated some rule I had about the HTML drawings being purely code, but I'd already broken that the previous September when I used images as backgrounds in tables.

I started out with the idea that I'd have a handful of small animated GIFs to use repeatedly and simply resize them with height and width attributes as needed, but that quickly got out of control as I got more ideas, and soon I was making GIFs for each drawing practically daily. It was a lot of work, and as the month went on the animation loops started getting shorter and shorter.

Some of these are dumb, some are just goofy, some are one liners, but there are a few in here I find a little mesmerizing. These were supposed to be a break from static images, like a painter turning to video. And when that happens, the question is, "has the painter finally abandoned painting?" Nah.

Some are hard to watch, mostly related to another problem I have: I have a hard time driving when the windshield wipers are on full speed wiping back and forth. The movement and rhythm makes me anxious, it actually kind of hypes me up and spaces me out, like how I shouldn't really drive and talk on my cell phone at the same time. I'm OK if the wipers are an interval setting, but once they become a constant back and forth it bugs me. Some of these animations do the same thing to me.

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April 2006

Thirty drawings, all the same size and same shaped format. The shape feels kind of like an icon, or a panel painting. There is a notch out of each lower corner. I think I've seen a Jake Berthot painting from 1970 or so like this (for example), not that I was thinking of it at that time. I recall just wanting to break the rectangle. I'm also attracted to shaped panels.

I can tell by looking back at these that I wanted more a sense of drawn line early one, rather than shape and area. I also recall that I made maybe six or eight drawings before I started naming them, and so had to go back and name the first few that were called Untitle, and that I wanted simple noun names- things . Some of the images and titles are very literal: Minaret, Cylinder, Ladder. The first page of each title, Leaf, was added to give the sense that these were pages in a book, that this book was a kind of day book, a record of things observed or remembered, and I intended a kind of meditative quality to the thirty pieces, though that didn't become clear until I found the patterns of image and title that emerged after the first few days. This is often how things work.

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May 2006

Everybody Knows This is Nowhere is the title of a Neil Young song. These drawings are all over the place and nowhere. I tried a lot of things and never found a center. Maybe it was because I never settled on a uniform format; I think I had the bright idea that every drawing would be really different. That's not so easy to do everyday. I felt kind of lost. I remember after about ten days thinking, "This is going nowhere," and having told myself that feeling that it was OK to go nowhere, so I kind of let that lack of somewhere just hang out all over. Not that it was really OK, because during this month I had a lot of thoughts about how crappy things were going, and maybe it's time to stop. I kept trying to save this series, but the evidence is there- it didn't happen.

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June 2006

Probably because things went so far nowhere in May, and because I didn't have the nerve to quit making drawings, or maybe because deep down inside I didn't really want to stop, or maybe because I thought, yeah, I can lick this, I thought I'd kick myself in the butt and break my code-only rule again and use photo backgrounds. I liked some from the prevous September, so why not try some more.

Most of these are a response to the photo- they're not just an enhancement, and it's not just collage, but it's an attempt to use some kind of energy, for lack of a better word, or some kind of meaning from the photo, and to have the HTML addition spring out of it, or push the photo further towards what 1 is. I'm am not trying to slap some other stuff on top of the photo, but integrate the two.

In the beginning I had no criteria for selecting images other than stuff that popped into my head and found with Google image search, but I like a structure, so I decided that since the first three days had been about sports (player), fruit, and music (bands)- the first days are Player (Mays & McCovey), Fruit (Lemon), and Band (The Jam)- that I would just repeat this cycle. Please, just give me something to riff off of. I just make this stuff up as I go along- there's no master plan. These are hit-and-miss, but I particularly like Fruit (Navel Orange).

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July 2006

Let me be brief: these drawings are called When I Met You. My wife has been working far away from home quite a bit over the past few months. We've been together 26 years. I missed her. Each drawing is two vertical sections side by side. The subject of each drawing is about something real. I really like some of these. I like the series as a whole. For me these are like photographs, but better. Any sense of the romantic or sentimental is completely intentional.

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August 2006

Don Relyea began developing an app called The Reductionizer, which turns a JPEG or BMP into an HTML table with colored cells. I decided to try it out for the month. I thought I would make images similar to the ones I'd made in the past with JPEG backgrounds, but this time they'd be all code. I thought it would great. And Don is a nice guy and wanted someone else to try out the tool, and my intention was to really give it a good run.

But it also meant a shift in how I make the images in ways I didn't fully anticipate, and it became clear to me that I was not that interested in changing my methods, because they're not exhausted, and having to make somethin while also learning to do it a new way wasn't working for me. Most of these images are crappy. I didn't use Don's tool well. I started using it in some weird way like people who overuse Photoshop filters, and believe me, I'm not really interested in that. I'd committed for the month, and boy was I glad when that month was over.

This is not to take anything from Don's tool or how he's using it (see some examples), but it just wasn't working for me. Open parameters, powerful tools, new possiblities- that's not for me. I'm into rules and boundaries, limitations and restrictions, the crude and simple, and manually pushing and compensating for a process. That exists within The Reductionizer, but it was still too open for me.

One good thing I got from The Reductionzier: work with smaller cell sizes. Very small cell sizes. The drawback is that this makes for miles of code to make an image large enough to see. But you know, in these days of broadband, who wants to worry about download times anymore?

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September 2006

After the beating I took in August, and feeling the need to recoup, I withdrew into reduction and simplicity. September's images are minimal, spare, clean. I wanted these to feel like single sheets of paper- an all white background, and the thinnest gray border defining the edge. All are the same size, 250 x 200 pixels, and I'm using very small cells. Notice this: if the format is invisibly divided into four equal quadrants you'll see that the drawn image is always in the lower right quadrant- it just felt right. They're about finding how little you can do to make a compelling image. They're Tuttle-esque. They feel good.

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October 2006

All untitled, all 200 x 160 pixels, this set has a nice little daily rhythm that feels good to me. These are small drawings, all exploring drawn line, fade, transparency, overlap, shadow, and misalignment or disruption. These are all things I've been using for years. These came directly out of four paintings I made in September, one of which was shown in Tokyo in October. I think all thirty one of these works. It was a nice month. I wouldn't say these drawings are about anything but themselves, but they are referential, even somewhat representational. I like that.

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November 2006

Each drawing has the same dimensions- 310 x 210 or 210 x 310 pixels. I alternated days between horizontal and vertical. It's arbitrary. I just decide these things and then carry them out.

Looking for another path to follow for a month it simply occurred to me that the number of each day of the month might be something to respond to, so I stumbled upon Richard Phillip's web page Numbers from one to thirty-one ... a page for each day of the month connected to his book Numbers: Facts, Figures & Fiction. I looked on each page for each day just looking for a word from some fact or history about each number. For example, on the 27th of November I looked at the page for the number 27 and found "The coloured balls in snooker have a total value of 27." I used the word "snooker" in the title of the drawing for the 27th.

Each drawing is more a response to the word than it is to the number, though often the number figures in some way to the drawing to: the number of rows and cells, a particular shape, the number of figures or shapes in a drawing, a color association. Mixed results: I like Tithe, Sun Spot Cycle, Jury. In the few drawings of the month I know by looking at them that I'm thinking about December and having no clue what I'm doing.

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December 2006

I've already written some about December in yesterday's Where Am I? No drawing everyday this month. Only on prime numbered days. So far, there's no emerging theme. I've already done 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, and 13. They don't really relate much to each other. I will make drawings on the 17th, 19th, 23, 29th, and 31st. Then I'll see what happens on January 1. Looking back over and writing about the past year has been a good exercise. It may give me a clue about what next.

Posted by chrisashley at 03:50 PM

Not Prime

Not Prime, 20061214, HTML, 175 x 100 pixels

Posted by chrisashley at 11:59 PM

Where Am I?

For several years I’ve had a personal policy: post an HTML drawing on my weblog everyday. I’ve generally succeeded, only missing a day here and there, feeling a little pang the few days I did miss. I’ve prided myself on my streak, just not lending it quite as much dedication as Lloyd and his six year and a half year streak (May 5, 2000 to the present).

Only two people have asked me if there is some problem with my weblog right now. They’ve noticed that I haven’t posted a drawing everyday this month so far- am I missing some drawings? I’m glad to see that my devoted audience of two has noticed. It’s nice to know how large one’s audience is, and your names. Now that I know who I’m talking to, perhaps you’ll read the rest of this.

For a long time I have been making HTML drawings in series or sets. Often, at the end of each series I’d write a little bit about my intentions, or the drawings’ subject or inspiration, or about a visual thing I was working on, and so on. For whatever reason, I’ve done little of that this year, and so I’m going to review this past year by month in another post. I’m not sure why this happened. I blame the day job.

The other change this past year is that before 2006 the number of drawings series varied in number. If I had determined to do a series of drawings about some subject that dictated to me a specific number of drawings I would do however many I needed to do, then move onto another series. But January 2006 is the last month I operated this way. I don’t recall exactly why, but starting in February 2006 each series began to span an entire month, which means that I picked an approach or subject that could last 28, 30, or 31 days. I think this had something to do with a desire to settle into longer rhythms, to know what I was going to be working on for the next four weeks. This shifted the sense of dailyness into the parameter of one month within the larger framework of a year, rather than a feeling of endless starting and stopping, starting and stopping. I also think this may have been influenced by the installation of 365 printed HTML drawings, one year’s worth, hung in rows by month, which was titled, funnily enough, 365, which I showed at 1708 Gallery this past May. Maybe that kind of breakdown naturally led me to a way of thinking of time as a frame. Even though this change happened just a few months ago, I can’t remember for sure how and why this happened. Maybe I can blame the day job.

I had this feeling as December 2006 approached, a little bit of a feeling of dread or anxiety or boredom. I don’t really know what the feeling is. But what I decided to do was to break the drawing streak. I decided that I would only make drawings on prime numbered dates, and to not complete my streak of making 365 drawings this year. I decided to intervene on my own behalf, to prevent myself from completing the streak. It’s not that I couldn’t do it, it’s that I decided to interrupt the inevitable- my daily habit and perfect attendance- and wind my way down to the end of the year. But what I’m really teetering on the brink of is a big question: will I keep making images using HTML for my weblog? I don’t know the answer yet. I have to think about it. I have to look closely at my impulses, intentions, needs. I wish I could blame all of this on my day job, but it's about something else. This is just something an artist thinks about- Why am I doing this? Is it played out? Where does it lead? Time to shift gears?

I have received a lot of encouragement over the past several years from many people to take the HTML drawings into other media. Print ‘em big. Paint ‘em. Project ‘em. I really appreciate the thought and attention and encouragement. But none of that is going to go anywhere with this work. These images are meant to be seen only in the place for which they are made- on your monitor framed by its edges, framed by the browser window, framed by my weblog, framed by the chronological time in which they appear, code delivered over a network, assembled by the browser into a luminous blocky image made by pushing at the limits of a very crude medium. A lot of people don’t seem to understand that. It’s like this: we all know that looking at a painting as a JPEG on the web is not even close to seeing the real thing. I feel that not seeing an HTML drawing on the web, within my weblog, is not seeing the real thing. I'm not going to repurpose these images in such obvious, simplistic ways.

I was able to make 365 because the point was not about making a nicely finished printed object for sale. Sure, images are the central point of the work, but underlying it is the idea of accumulation, habit, regularity, variation within limited means, and a kind of representation in abstraction. The idea for that project was about much more than simply making prints, and it allowed me to reuse the images in a way that felt like a logical extension of what I've been doing. I feel that that's the way I need to operate.

I have a couple of future possible exhibition opportunities that may involve the HTML work- if I’m going to take advantage of those opportunities I will need to figure out a way to use the images that, for me, does not violate some natural principles I have deduced from the original context and location of the drawings. That’s not an easy problem to solve, and I don’t know how I’ll do it, but I am not going to take existing images and blow them up to four or six feet and mount them on aluminum or Plexiglas. And I am not going to duplicate them with paint on canvas. Forget about it. I’m not interested. I do have some other ideas I’m mulling over, but I’m not going to jinx it by going into them.

Part of me feels, hey, I’ve got a good thing going here, keep it up. Another part of me feels ready to move on, but to what? Of course, I’m making analog drawings and paintings, so it’s not as if I don’t have work to make, but paintings and drawings are not a very webby thing to do, and this weblog thing has been a part of my daily life, and a signifcant part of my art, for over five years. I’m just thinking out loud here. I’m feeling like I’m in the middle of some kind of crisis, unsure of whether or not throwing something away is the right thing to do. This is the kind of “feelings exposed,” personal, earnest weblog post that I swore I would never do again. But I am just this close to… something, and I felt I owed both of you, my dear readers, an explanation. Thanks for reading. Let's see what happens in January. No promises, but something might change.

Posted by chrisashley at 12:24 AM

Raoul de Keyser


Raoul de Keyser, Kraantje en tuinslang, 1965, oil on canvas, 59.06 x 47.24 in, 150 x 120 cm, Collection S.M.A.K. Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, Belgium	Raoul de Keyser, Wait, 2006, oil and charcoal on canvas, 49 3/8 x 31 5/8 in, 125.4 x 80.3 cm, David Zwirner Gallery