Until I have five paintings that I am proud of, I am not going to post anything new.

Saturday Crafternoon

Well, that's it.
A year of blogging.
484 posts.

The girls

Compare and Contast Harold Hollingsworth and Michael Kessler

It is fun and helpful to find both differences and similarities between two painter's oeuvre. For example, Harold Hollingsworth is on a roll right now from which he has presented us with this painting:
Harold has been layering the medium on thick and working the squeegee angle. He pulls the semi-translucent paint with a screed in order to produce the background or field. I can't help but think of Michael Kessler's painting's. Michael has been fine tuning and tweaking his version of the squeegee shtick for decades. Harold's twist is the effervescent graphics percolating in the foreground. It is impossible not to see a depth of field, or space, when Harold overlaps his symbols (culled from fonts and wrapping papers new and old). Michael also applies graphic signifiers across his paintings (usually taped grids). Where Harold's ringlets become opaque layers, floating over the surface, Michael's lines create space in a different way. His planes become windows or veils.

Michael's use of color is indebted to a history of interior design steeped in a Renaissance palette.
Harold is inventing his own palette.

The Woodring Monitor

Have you ever been to Jim Woodring's blog?
I often feel creepy after looking at his work.
And sort of high (leaning towards bad trip).
But I always become engrossed.

Connecting dots and dashes

I've been thinking about Dennis' "generators of abstraction" xyz chart while trying to get the dog to chew on her toys and nothing else. Dennis' quick graph is similar to the Munsell color system in its awkward two dimensional representation.I have been imagining Dennis' system as a construction of some kind. Similar to the Munsell tree.
Imagine a tree where the tints and shades are replaced by slides of historical examples. Scott McCloud has been working on certain branches of this tree for over 15 years. I'm going to quote from McCloud's site now:

In Chapter Two of my 1993 book Understanding Comics, I devised a map of visual iconography (i.e., pictures, words, symbols) that took the shape of a triangle.

The lower left corner was visual resemblance (e.g., photography and realistic painting).

The lower right included the products of what I called iconic abstraction (e.g., cartooning)

And at the top were the denizens of the picture plane ("pure" abstraction) which ceased to make reference to any visual phenomena other than themselves.

The move from realism to cartoons along the bottom edge was a move away from resemblance that still retained "meaning," so words, the next logical step in the progression, were included at far right, thereby enclosing anything in comics' visual vocabulary between the three points.

I found that "The Big Triangle" as it came to be known, was an interesting tool for thinking about comics art...

...and for visual art and language in general! Eventually, I hope to include a Java-enabled interactive version of Triangle here on the site, but until then, feel free to "interact" with Understanding Comics to find out more.
(You can check out Scott McCloud's site here).

Its funny how these things work. Last century, at the American Academy of Art, I taught a class using Understanding Comics as the central text. This week I received a "thank you" e-mail from two ex-students who now write for Sequential Tart, "a Web Zine about the comics industry published by an eclectic band of women. . ." One of them, "Wolfie" also has presence over at deviantART, which claims to be "the largest art community in the world!"

Anyway, if I find the time (down dog, drop it, no bity), I'm going try and place myself in Dennis' tree.

Generators of Abstraction

I came back from my little trip and found that I had missed my favorite kind of blog entry. Of course, it is from the champion of art blogs, Dennis Hollingsworth. If you haven't checked out his balance of insight, slapstick, schmoozing, and painting, click on this sentence.

My Birthday. . .with Miso.

Last Thursday afternoon I picked Zaida up from school and then together we picked Stacy up from work. The three of us drove to the coast. It was dark when we got there. We stayed in a rustic cliff-hanger of a house. This was our morning view: The first thing we did was explore the bay.

It is amazing how one light and a fog machine can strip away your cynicism. Stacy-the-Engineer's first task was to dam the trickling creek. The dramatic flood (and predetermined evacuation route) was just as fun.Then we came back up for a hot tub and some brunch.

We all agreed that we are not Hot Tub People.
I appreciated the close-to-home exotic vacation sensibility nonetheless.
I was more interested in people-kinds desire to see things in driftwood.
Check out this dragon:Pretty cool, but ultimately decorative.
Personally, I found myself studying the foam's logic. Eventually, two other couples and their kids arrived.
Stacy made spanakopeta and we all ate into the sunset.

The next day, Saturday, there was splashing, goofing, treasure hunting, hiking, eating, and the extra bonus of satellite television and the Cartoon Network's Boomerang.

Sunday was the birthday kicker.
On the way home, we adopted a Labrador puppy.

Miso

Thanks to all the well wishers:
Karen Jacobs
Tracy Helgeson
High Low & in between
Lisa Call
Harold Hollingsworth
Bill Gusky
David Lane

I turn 43 today. I'm not going to touch the computer until Monday.

From Wikipedia:

Forty-three is the 14th smallest prime number. The previous is forty-one, with which it comprises a twin prime, the next is forty-seven. 43 is the smallest prime that is not a Chen prime. It is also the third Wagstaff prime.

43 is the fourth term of Sylvester's sequence.

43 is a centered heptagonal number.

Let a(0) = a(1) = 1, and thenceforth a(n) = (a(0)² + a(1)² + ... + a(n-1)²) / (n-1). This sequence continues 1 1 2 3 5 10 28 154... (sequence A003504 in OEIS). Amazingly, a(43) is the first term of this sequence that is not an integer.

43 is a Heegner number.

43 is a repdigit in base 6 (111).

43 is the largest natural number that is not an (original) McNugget number.

• The chemical element with the atomic number 43 is technetium. It has the lowest atomic number of any element that does not possess stable isotopes.

• Messier object M43, a magnitude 7.0 H II region in the constellation of Orion, a part of the Orion Nebula, and also sometimes known as de Mairan's Nebula

• The New General Catalogue object NGC 43, a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Andromeda

• The Saros number of the solar eclipse series which began on April 29, 1513 BC and ended on June 5, 233 BC . The duration of Saros series 43 was 1280.1 years, and it contained 72 solar eclipses.

• The Saros number of the lunar eclipse series which began on August 27, 1482 BC and ended on March 15, 70. The duration of Saros series 43 was 1550.5 years, and it contained 87 lunar eclipses.

Forty-three is:

• The designation of Interstate 43, a freeway in Wisconsin.
• The code for direct dial international phone calls to Austria.
• The number of times Danny croaks "Redrum" before his mother wakes up and Jack starts to break into the apartment in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.
• Part of the title of the historical British comedy show Hancock's Forty-Three Minutes, starring Tony Hancock.
• The number of poppadoms ordered by the nine guests at a curry restaurant in Rowan Atkinson's classic Indian Waiter stand-up comedy sketch.
• Part of the title of a historical short story by Hershel Finman titled Forty-Three Rubles, about Rabbi Zvi Elimelech Spira.
• Idaho was the 43rd state to join the Union

• At age 43, Marie Curie won her second Nobel prize (for the isolation of pure radium). John F. Kennedy became the youngest man elected president

• The number of countries where Madonna's Hung Up topped the charts.

I know that dreams are boring and make no sense unless they are yours but. . .

Last night my works on paper were exhibited with a famous photographer. Well, not famous enough that my dreamworld curator got the right name. As a matter of fact, even my awake self, with the Internet at my disposal could not find the right images. The curator kept saying Muybridge which were definitely not the photographs she was showing me. It is interesting that I can make an animation connection between Muybridge and my ink on matte board drawings this morning. But what the curator was connecting was another aspect of my drawings which is something like the idea of 1000 times spontaneous that mindspriter brought up awhile ago. The curator was showing me black and white photographs of street scenes taken in another century. I kept correcting the curator and suggesting that she meant Weegee and not Muybridge. I was getting her connection, even if I was wrong too. Weegee wasn't the photographer she was showing me either. She was showing me photographs that seemed to be taken "from the hip" and grabbed scenes that appeared to be phenomenal twists of compositional fate. In my waking world I know it wasn't Weegee. It was some photographer who was famous for taking loads of pictures and culling the gems from the accidents. He was sort of a pre-digital camera photographer, not bothering to waste time composing or framing while photographing, but rather had the luxury to shoot a lot a film and pick out the best in the darkroom. This dream photographer of yore took thousands of spontaneous images in order to make a perfect or beautiful one. I woke up thinking that the curator and I were thinking of Cartier-Bresson and his notion of the "decisive moment."
But even his startling croppings of chance-like perfection were not the photographs that the curator was showing me.

Who was the photographer?

Play Date

All the dresser drawers were pulled out.
Many fashionable combinations were tested.
My aesthetic opinion meant nothing.
A simultaneously matching and opposite combination was chosen.
We set forth.
I was simply a protective shadow.
But, wait. . .
where are we going?

We eventually scrambled through the creek, balanced down the railroad tracks, rearranged the toy store, sniffed the book store, and finally found peace at a local tourist trap.
We took turns telling tales.
The object was to mix truth with believable fiction.

I never tried to tell them how lucky they are.

Nature vs. Nurture

Watercolor and acrylic on matte board
9" x 12"
10/14/06

Bark vs. Bright

Ink on matte board
9" x 12"
10/14/06

Mob Mentality

Watercolor and acrylic on matte board
12" x 9"
10/14/06

Blisters

Ink on bristol
9" x 12"
10/14/06

Day Job

I'm working on a non-painting related project right now. It is a nice break. Nothing is as intuitive and I am measuring everything three times. The top image is the original pediment in France. The second image is the raw one here in Ashland. The third image represents the incredible good fortune of how I will be able to carve this out of only two 4 x 8 sheets of foam. The last image is just a rough doodle as I think of how to make the design best hide the three seams.

An Instrumental

Offend by pretending to grasp some essential truth

As I made this drawing/painting tonight I found myself laughing at myself. "You can't do that" I thought. "That is against the rules" I thought. But, alas, my inhibitions were low. I started thinking like a painter.
You get what you get and you don't raise a fit.
I was in a loose groove, and yet I found more importance in the fact that October's Artforum arrived today. Not only had I not finished posting last month's eye catching advertisements, but Walid Sadek is featured in the body of this months edition. Serendipitously, I had posted a blurb about Walid eight days ago.

Here is the rub:
In Ashland Oregon, I'm spending my wee hours of the night pushing around puddles of pigment and thinking about something so goofy as whether a lump of coal has a soul. Walid, on the other hand, in Beirut Lebenon, is trying to make art about something I've never experienced. Here is a snipit from the Artforum article:
Walid "invokes Beirut’s once picturesque settings by reproducing just the informational labels for paintings by Mustafa Farroukh, a prominent Lebanese artist in the ’30s and ’40s who depicted idyllic scenes of the city and the surrounding landscape in the style of academic European art. Sadek’s conceptual installation left ghostly white expanses where the paintings should have hung, the distance between two lines of additional wall text (composed by Sadek) corresponding to the dimensions of Farroukh’s missing canvases. While the pictorial absences double the destruction of those geographical sites—not only has the geography changed but also the very culture that Farroukh’s practice inhabited—Sadek’s act of negation also implicitly questions the ability of visual language to convey loss. In Cotter’s perceptive catalogue essay, she refers rightly to the “mistrust of the image as reliable document of history” among the artists in “Out of Beirut.” Such a mistrust informs Sadek’s pointed refusal to show what has been lost to the past, as if its representation would only repeat the violence by objectifying it, or would further offend by pretending to grasp some essential truth—even while his work, like Joreige’s, still attempts to come to terms with destruction’s lasting effects.

Walid is more sensitive and intelligent than any plein air painter I have ever met. I recommend you go buy October's Artforum and read the feature Out of Beirut.

Here are the advertistments from last month's issue that I'll never get to:
Kuno Gonschior at Stux. I looked at these paintings for some time. I thought I felt some "connection". Chris Rywalt actually stood in front of these things and has a more informed opinion about them. Worth the read.
Who is this guy Andy Moses above who is treading in the same field as my friend Matthew Landkammer below?
I really wanted to do a thoughtful post about what happens when we see other people doing what we do. Victoria Haven tells a story of how she walked into one of her galleries once and mistook another artist's piece as her own. The good and bad, give and take, of artist/human interaction is what I really wanted to focus on. But, instead, I pushed pigment around.