Brushed

My Book Review of: The Great Disruption

2011-10-24T16:33:00.000-06:00

Gilding's new book, The Great Disruption-Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World, provides a comprehensive current state overview of our world situation. This is an abstract of key parts of that book; my comment at the end.

First, the evidence that we currently are over-using the planet's sustainable resource limits (140%!). Second, the earth's population (as of October or November this year) of 7 billion will almost certainly grow to 9 billion in less than 40 years. Third, the average global temperature is rising due to anthropogenic forcing (use of fossil fuels resulting in CO₂e (carbon dioxide equivalent)) today's reading of nearly 400 ppm while 350 ppm, correlating, with 1 degree C of planetary warming, is a limit if we want to have an earth with an environment rather like we have had for our tenure here to date.

Fourth, GNP, the measure of Gross National Product is the guiding light for current government and business policys. It is the wrong measure since it says nothing of human values in that it fails to measure much that, in fact, we do and aspire to, that we actually find gives a positive quality of life-a measure of happiness or fulfillment..

The notion that more stuff, higher status on the envy chain of society, measures that are quantifiable in dollar terms (GNP) equates with quality-of-life happiness is not supported by studies of that question.

Economic Growth is the measure of success in the economic and national policy guidelines of most nations. That Growth is now over-as of 2008, 3 years ago.

The combination/interaction of the above factors, overuse of resources, exploding population, Climate Crisis and the governing notion of Growth measured by GNP ensure within a very few years (it has actually started) a quite sudden change, the "Disruption" in our conduct and economic lives. This will call for "The One Degree War", an effort to make the changes necessary to limit global warming to 1 degree C instead of either "business as usual" or a two degree limit, currently being talked of as perhaps politically feasible by 2050; 2 degrees correlates with 450 ppm CO₂e and leads to a world that essentially is over the cliff so far as civilization as we know it and wish to extend it is concerned.

How all this is addressed and can work out is much of the books/s important content. It is challenging, well researched and ultimately positive. Sustainability, in every meaning of that concept, is a central concern as a realistic way that corporations, governments and people's initiatives function.

I have been studying this overall problem since the late 1960's and have read many of the books and papers dealing with it. This is one of the best updates and correlations available for anyone (everyone!) who cares to be well informed.

Mel Strawn, October, 2011

Spain Trip

2011-04-07T16:44:00.005-06:00

A month in Spain-got back March 11. Three weeks near Granada pursuing fugitive printmaking processes (unyielding technical problems), then 6 days in Madrid and Barcelona. In 1967 we were there and the amazing Sagrada Familia cathedral by Antonio Gaudi has been much added to since then. Spain is in their version of the Recession, called by them The Crisis: 20% unemployment, vast development and public works projects on hold, the construction cranes stand silent (except at Sagrada), no workers seen. The hills are still covered by extensive olive tree orchards and the Almond trees were in bloom. Mimes make city strolling a delight-as does the often elaborate street-wall art and grafitti, not to mention the museums in all the cities. A slide show is at my Picassa site:
http://tinyurl.com/3k9ellq
(NOTE: copy it and paste in your URL address box)

Art in the current New World Order

2011-01-11T13:03:00.001-07:00

In two books I'm reading concurrently, Argüellis's Transformative Vision and Hedges's Death of the Liberal Class, art, in all its manifestations, is discussed from two perspectives: Vision's New Age analysis is of its role in a techne-psyche, left brain-right brain divided world. In this techne, linear, cause-effect, verbal logic modes and values trump and overwhelm psyche, right brain, wholistic, intuitive-the arts in general modes of doing and knowing; that is the state of our society today. Art is, he says, by and large, failing to right the balance required for a healthy humanity.

Liberal Death's thesis (re art) is that it, in leaving popular (and representational-illustrational) imagery in favor of abstract and conceptual styles and forms, art and artist (the whole art world) has betrayed its mission to humanity. Both arguments are well done and very complex.

They, on one level-mine as practicing artist who has lived through much of that period, pose a simple, challenging question: why am I (you-other artists) doing art that the 'general public', presumably We The People in both men's works, find alienating?

Attempts to answer are as complex as the question and its implications (of irrelevance and a kind of betrayal). British philosopher, poet, critic Herbert Read (I think) said that art as politics is politics, art as business is business, etc., etc.. So what is art as art?

My perhaps simple-minded position is that art serves many masters, some of them engaged, as is Sid Chafetz in his satirical works and as was Goya in the Disparates and The Disasters of the War (which could not be printed during his life time). A quick study of plate 2 of the Disparates, The Folly of Fear, is posted here. The more troubling question is how (and why) much art, world wide, since the early 1900's has been and continues to be 'abstract' or not easy for most of the public, including much of my own? The New Age take (Argüelles') calls for the artist, in his balancing of techne role, to preserve 'mystery'. Some, including Zen thinkers, call it 'suchness'-and refer one to 'nothingness' (excluding from ones' self all worry of the distracting details of life-while calmly accepting them as no big deal). It is richer than that; life is a mystery; an import lies there-and it is this that 'art as art' may offer. So called 'abstract' works, so troubling to both authors, are in fact objects in our world with forms and a self-consistent coherence, order. (It is what we study in design courses). The seemingly non-image, not name-recognition works are themselves the image-and they look very much like things and events we all know. They are based in and expressive of the things and events of the only world any of us know. They present movement, color, texture, the drama of light and dark, of balance and transformation -and an unusual overall look that may not be like the foto-optical, perspective-object of ordinary views. They present configurations that suggest those we are already familiar with. What is artful (a uniquely human value) is more than the superficial skill of rendering; it is the degree to which a sense of wonder, of mystery (not telling all, making it banal) is embodied in the forms and qualities the artist uses. This is true of image art and non-image art, abstract art. The simple comparison of (abstract) music, music without words, like Bach cantata, Bartok Quartet or Dave Brubeck jazz, with abstract painting is not used by either author to enlarge their discussion of (abstract) art-only that visual art is not a value in the general life of the people. One can only ask: whose fault is that?

Surfeit and Scarcity

2011-01-02T21:58:00.001-07:00

I, like most artists these days, have far more pictures and other made to look at things than I have interested viewers, not to mention collectors. No longer essential like, perhaps, artist-shamans were, I (I'll leave the rest of the tribe out of it-they can speak for themselves) pursue irrational activities and call it art-making, painting or print making or drawing... At 81 plus, I begin to try to make some sense of it all; two good women artists, on-line colleagues, have voiced concern about running out of time to do what should be done (as artists). If we have dealers to show our work it is often the case that they have expectations of having an image, a style to sell (they are in the selling business). José Argüelles, in The Transformative Vision faults many, actually most, artists with developing that style-image and then never adventuring beyond it. Those, no matter how prominent, flirt with the danger of becoming basically non creative, imitating their own success. Some, like Cezanne I think, limit their processes of making while developing subtle and sometimes radical extensions of their developing insight, their vision; they have a recognizable style but avoid repeating themselves. Others, and at times in my life I'd put myself among them, seemingly move from one visual look to something quite different, baffling those who see "consistency" as the only and expected virtue. This is restless searching not without its pleasures and surprises. While I don't have infallible insight as to why this seemingly inconsistent behaviour occurs, I simply think new ideas and new avenues of exploration (including techniques and media) may well go together and are not strange in a complex world. British artist Ben Nicholson is famous for doing both abstract and representational works. Playing hooky from art school, he hung out in pool rooms. some of his mature abstract works feature sharp angles on flat fields and colored round shapes... ) In any case, we do what the times, tools and our imaginations foster-while hoping for the other 50% of the art process, the viewer's part which might include a response or challenge or both.

Here are a couple of current efforts - on the way, in one intended process, to being solar etchings. Both have sources in drawing (football players on TV ) and foto of downed trees for Vulcan's Mirror.

Image and abstraction

2010-12-27T20:51:00.000-07:00

A recent letter from Sid Chafetz dwelt on his choice to remain an image-maker through much of the era of abstract art. (I can't find the letter so this is from memory)... A strong designer, he says he often starts with an abstract structure, but it always ends up being an image. Any descriptive analysis (what does one actually see there?) of a Chafetz work quickly yields a powerful shape-line-tone structure, the inner architecture that gives power to the final image, even if most viewers don't consciously register that formal design. Goya's work, especially the prints, etchings and lithographs and drawings are almost always monumentally simple, made of nearly geometric shapes-which incorporate the figures. They are, like Chafetz's, seldom static, "well balanced", but are built on acute angles, movements which follow the narrative thrust of the event depicted. Conventional photo-optic perspective plays little part in either man's work. Picasso, too, while pioneering some of the art and practice that led to completely abstract, non-representational (no image) art, chose not to go there himself. The social contexts and implications of image-based or abstract art over the last 120 years has been and remains an issue. One extreme is the "accuracy" of the photograph, often emulated in hand-made painting. The other is the precision or immediacy of a formal construction, say, by Mondrian: ruler straight black lines, severe rectangles of red, yellow, blue maybe a gray. Some scholars or critics consign the latter to a role of mere decoration, not necessarily trivial, but not engaged in the fully human, ongoing scene. Lay viewers of a Picasso, Goya or Chafetz cannot miss the human-image subject and perhaps the content (its socially reflected significance), but may, while perhaps affected by it, be blind to the formal means at play which carries the image (Goya's grouping of many figures into a few simple geometric blocks of dark or light).
José Argüelles tries, intriguingly, to correlate such contrasting modes of art with the underlying societal
forces-and thus infers distinct roles played by art (and artists). Since I have straddled the image-vs-abstract divide through my whole life (more than 80 years, so sharing much of the same world events as Picasso and Chafetz), I want to add my own comment here, and in the context of Argülles's concerns. He holds that in the hands of artists (all arts) lies a life-affirming task, that of psyche, which is much needed to balance the (dominant) forces of objective science (techne). C.P. Snow called it the problem of The Two Cultures.
Now my comment: it has to do with the non-decorative function of non-objective, abstract art. "Abstraction" is a terrible term, off-putting to say the least, and is the alienating clothes much of society, including Marxist critics (i.e., critics addressing social issues of art content), drapes on the abstract artist. "Decorative" is the bow tie pinned at the throat of that assigned suit. The artist's task, properly understood, is life affirming. The vital argument is that this is not adequately or wholly addressed by science (which is addressed to removing mystery). Art, I argue, in its life affirming role, presents exactly an opposite, the sense and form of mystery, showing in both image-based and "abstract" (we lack a better term for quick communication), its presence, celebrating it-and avoiding, if possible, explaining "what it means". The non-decorative, non representational work (think music as well as image, or poetry in its sly, wry play on words) presents the sensory configuration and orchestration of an event. As we perceive it, participate in it, it is, in itself, life affirming. The calligrapher knows this, realizes this in his or her dance with the brush. The character brush-danced is an abstract, life affirming form that is not an image. Or, all configurations are 'images', some have no mirror image counterpart in other materials.

Secret Lies

2010-12-26T11:46:00.000-07:00

Reading at this year's end a 1975 book by José Argüelles, The Transformative Vision, In Chapter 9-Caricature as Truth: Seeing Beyond Official Truth, I find this, paraphrased: "according to (William) Blake the most stifling and repressive influence on art is the belief in the primacy of money...(by this) true art, the work of the eternal imagination, has been driven underground: it has become a secret. ...the materialist drive for progress at any cost requires increasing secrecy on the part of society's leaders. Political secrecy lies behind the public lie-hypocrisy. "
These linked together bits are but pointers to a much more coherent and extensive discussion of the disastrous split in our human mentality, a divide between what he calls 'techne', essentially material science, and 'psyche', essentially imagination, the arts of knowing and living.
It is apropos our current world situation as exemplified in the Wikileaks controversy - secret lies, etc. in which the messengers(s) are attacked as criminals while the (heretofore) secrets revealing criminal behaviour are ignored. Go figure. Sophocles: "None love the messenger who brings bad tidings.".
C.P. Snow was once in the intellectual news for his thesis regarding these same disjunctive topics, The Two Cultures, again the "objective" left brain quantitative, descriptive, cause and effect sciences and the "subjective" right brain, arts and humanities. Snow's message was that this is a catastrophic divide in human affairs. Both Snow and Argüelles are messengers Sophocles would understand. Our woes are not just left vs right, but are rooted far deeper in our culture; we need to be better miners and perhaps use caricature as picks and shovels.
These thoughts are dedicated to Sid Chafetz, master artist and caricaturist who, as Professor of Art (Emeritus), Ohio State University, was not, is not afraid, in his art, to hold an acid-etched mirror before his own institution and self. And the rest of us....

One of Sid's 1970's woodcuts:

Bikes

2010-12-05T22:20:00.000-07:00

An SD14* digital foto of a Fisher Bike led to an interesting series of digital prints. converting the original color shot to black and white, then embossing it and simplifying color versions (back from the monochrome version into RGB color space) and then combining it with the word BIKE. The last is an interesting piece to view; up close one is involved with the details of the bike image while the word is there but strangely subordinate-while viewed from a distance the bike image is lost and the word shouts out with poster strength. Interesting to me for this change in perception and scale depending on distance viewed and also by the shifting interaction between image and abstract word, 2 ways of saying the same thing. Show and Tell.
*SD14 - A Sigma digital camera which uses a Foveon full color RGB chip technology. Google it....

JD Jarvis' - Digital Art & Divination

2010-11-01T09:52:00.000-06:00

New Mexico colleague and artist, J.D. Jarvis has posted a thoughtful, small essay on digital art and divination. It revisited for me a number of my own ports of call: chance, randomness, John Cage, Zen and my own speculative ventures in making art. (Maybe all art making is speculative to the extent that it is creative work). The digital part, of course, refers to one use of the digital computer in the art-making process. And maybe this can be conflated with divination, the throwing of bones, as JD calls them, I Ching style, or invoking pseudo random number events in a program designed to yield images (unpredictable by us) or instructions to act with art materials in sequences and ways the artist did not anticipate or preconceive. The core of J.d.'s position is that the artist is ultimately the authorizing factor. I once made a welded steel sculpture (now owned by Sally Perisho near Denver) of thin rods and random scraps. After a performance by Cage I told him about it. He said, to paraphrase, 'W'ed probably wire it up to hear what kind of sounds it makes'. Why do this sort of thing? To free oneself, empty oneself from one's own pre-wired habits, thoughts and forms so that surprise and maybe wonder can enter the scene.
A stick and sand or brush and paper or computer code and processor (computer, maybe a connected printer or projector or sound system) are all technologies which are potential means to creative action but which are just inert stuff without the artist's involvement in various ways.
The image, Geos, here is the first I did, before owning a computer, using chance and randomness to determine which of 4 shapes and five shades of gray would be executed (by hand in oil paint on a large canvas) in each of the grid spaces available, top left to lower right, in strict order.

The non-gray row just below the horizontal center was determined by me, not the tossing of coins and plucking of 4 numbers from a hat... The result of each chance/random number operation was recorded on a chart; the actual painting then followed the color/shape coded notes on the chart. Each of the 4 grey shapes, to stay in the digital atmosphere, were designed on an 8x8 grid like simple, binary alpha-numeric characters which can be stored in computer memory-and invoked as one types on the keyboard. Limitations can make you free.

Drawings2 link

2010-10-02T09:50:00.000-06:00

http://tiny.cc/9s3qw

Creativity Trialogue

2010-10-02T09:40:00.000-06:00

Creativity (in my art). This is one of several mini-essays on creativity initiated by Joe Nalven (Digital Art Guild) and Scott Ligon, the other two artists writing similar tomes, intended to prompt a sharing of thoughts on digital creativity.

For starters, I need to indicate the sort of context and intent that attend my efforts to do something creative, to make a work of art. An awareness of what has been done including a near career-long study of Asian art centered in Zen-ga painting and calligraphy stands as a source and a challenge.

Using today's rather techy tools such as computer and digital camera, having the ability to create a palette of infinitely variable bits of energy which can become color or sound, image or object-with the appropriate peripheral tools such as printers or oscillators I find myself studying Zen ink painting and calligraphy while preparing to travel to make prints in Spain this winter. And I continue to use the techy tools while moving toward a way to make very non-techy images.

The work shown here in 3 steps evolved over many years. The first, Branch, is a wax crayon and ink resist drawing. It is abstract, an invention based in a fascination with branching and fracture patterns in nature.

The second, Branched Stone, started with a digital copy of the 'original'. Once in the computer I regarded it as a point of departure, with a history but with no holds barred on the future. What was done is fairly simple, essentially an enrichment and elaboration of the digital copy, using an altered version of itself (background image) in layers and combined in some of the choices Photoshop provides. This stands as a new version more complex and varied in color than the original drawing. Not better, just different and providing a different viewing experience.

The third, derived directly from the second version, involved a selection of shapes and the radical lightening of the rest of the image, and through isolation (in the lightened field) revealed a play of shape and texture more open and with a different kind of space and immediate impact.

You can see the entire number of steps in the screen shots of, at bottom, the background image (Branch) and the 3 other layers used to modify it into the other two versions. Click on the image to see it large enough. Each version shown has a number of layers to the right. The little boxes on the left show which layer is affecting the version image... Play with these interacting layers was part of the creative process. For me the process is heuristic, that is, 'try something, evaluate, repeat until satisfied'.

I feel that no step in this sequence is a more or less creative step than others. And I've just given a barely adequate description of steps in a process. The process has little to do with Plato's notion of art as mimesis (and of minor value by virtue of being but an imitation). I question if sheer technical skill constitutes creativity. I guess I mean sheer imitative skill with the photographic model of "reality" as the norm in our society. It could mean, as anthropologist Margaret Mead pointed out, the repetitive skill of manufacturing (by hand) forms and patterns of an ethnic art (she was talking about the art of Bali and felt that it was no longer a creative art, however skillful).

In short, I feel that what motivates me is a desire to shape a new image to experience. Sometimes that is defined as a new take on known images. When working on an image of known things, if one is aware, there are available an enormous number of strategies leading to a new image experience, a new realization. When a tension is set up between one's normative experience and passive knowledge of a chosen subject/object, and the way it is reified in a work then something has been created. That something is a felt comprehension that includes cognition (recognizing) and an appreciation of the unique properties of the image and awareness that they are not the same as, but related to the thing imaged. The creative tension is this awareness. If the work is not representational then the tension, the creative-kick-tension involves a working out and, for the viewer (including the artist) an awareness in what is unique in the work and perhaps how it is a kind of imaginative analogue to what is experienced in the 'real' world. The tension is like a parallel universe in which the experience is one's own. Creativity, for me and I think for everyone, is a quest to bring about this vital tension and self-realization, i.e. the art value is in one's own experience not in the object viewed.

Mel Strawn

September, 2010

2010-04-13T12:30:00.002-06:00

One to Ten - Among Many Things to be Thankful For

The Sunday turned out to be a bit bleak. We packed lunches anyway and drove across the bay to pick up Sabro. Then across the Golden Gate Bridge and on up the coast to Jenner where the Russian River finds the Pacific Ocean. Our objective was the north beach, always a wonderland of bleached driftwood trees. To my initial chagrin we found a wasteland of charred wood, the remnants of a substantial fire in our former tree, sand and water retreat. It was windy and cold with a still leaden sky. Sand was drifting - and making our sandwiches live up to their name. We chose to stay for some time, walking about, looking and, I at least, lamenting the loss of the ghostly, sculptural, pristine, polished, bleached wood that had always been there and that we had driven for hours to show my teacher.

Earlier, when I went to his room to pick him up, Sabro asked me in and invited me to sit down. There was a paper screen opposite my place on the floor. A large, black and white ink rubbing with the texture of wood grain was the image on the screen, the only art in sight. After looking for several minutes, I asked, "what is it"? Sabro said "nothing". Gradually I came to understand it to be Mu, the Japanese (and Chinese) character that signifies 'nothingness' or 'emptiness'.

Leaving the charcoaled, sand-drifting beach we drove back down the coast, stopping once in a while to watch the surf pound the island rocks below us. A bleak day. Almost empty, almost nothing.

I had promised to print a lithograph for Sabro and had told him - "anytime, the stone is prepared'. I had my own press and several lithographic stones - on which the original image is drawn for later transfer to paper. On Monday night after supper Sabro appeared at our door and said he wanted to start the print. The stone was large and, like all lithographic stones, had a somewhat irregular edge. This is traditionally ignored, being marked off with a non-printing rectangular border inside the stone's edge. Sabro, however, started by placing a big sheet of paper over the stone and then rubbed around the edge with crayon, making the first mark that of the irregular edge itself. He then cut ten holes in the paper and taped it to the stone.

A necessary technical point: a lithographic image is made by drawing with a greasy crayon (or liquid) on virgin, grained limestone. The part touched by grease resists water. The untouched stone is physically and chemically treated with gum arabic, basically to resist oil and accept water on the open parts and to accept oil-based ink and reject water on the marked parts.

In the cut out spaces, Sabro wrote the numbers one to ten in Japanese characters, using a rectangular litho crayon instead of a brush. He then protected them (and some surrounding white space) with strips of cellophane tape. Some parts of the stone were still open - not covered by paper mask or tape. In these areas he stenciled greasy liquid tusche through our landlady's liberated lace curtain, which he found in the basement where I kept my press. The "controlled accident" of this process left charred-looking blotches of textured black and white.

On the second day the paper mask came off and the stone's edge was touched with grease, making the outline image of the stone itself susceptible to printer's ink. It would print, revealing the stone's natural and irregular shape. In the newly opened space between the cutout and numbers shapes Sabro gently drifted hard crayon across the finely ground, textured stone surface.

The print, which resulted, "Numbers One to Ten," is expressive of the wind, sand, charred wood Sunday picnic.
Trees became the numerals - well, one can see it.

The artist was Sabro Hasagawa, or Hasegawa Saburo in Japanese convention, possibly the first modern abstract artist in Japan. A world-traveled, world-class teacher, scholar and artist, he lived, studied, worked and taught in the United States and Europe as well as in Japan. He wanted to understand everything and to provoke consequences for future art of both East and West. It was 1956; he was my graduate teacher. In 1957 he died. He is still my teacher, although I am now considerably older than he was then.

This short note was prompted by discovering the "Numbers One To Ten" print reproduced in "Scream Against the Sky -Japanese Art After 1945 ", by Alexandra Munroe, Harry Abrams publisher, 1994. A final note on the making of the print: After pulling the first proof the stone was closed. I opened it two days later, re-inked it and pulled a second proof - which had darkened, losing some of the silvery delicacy of the first proof which, of course, Sabro had seen. I took the new, darkened but richer version for him to see, full of foreboding that I had ruined it. He listened to my tale of woe about what had happened, and then took a rather long time to study the new version. Finally he said, "It is better. Print the edition." - which I did. In the reproduction in Munroe's book, the full image is given, including the irregular stone's edge. (I have seen it elsewhere, in his own, posthumous history published in 1977, with that edge cropped off - an unfortunate publisher's
error. ...)

Mel Strawn

Something old, Something new

2010-04-01T19:20:00.005-06:00

Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Something Old-Something New
In the 1990's, before the advent of today's high resolution and archival printers, I did a lot of pretty low resolution abstract prints using pre-Photoshop® software on a now obsolete computer platform. Some used only 16 colors (vs today's millions). They were output on a small office Xerox 2020 color inkjet; the inks were dye-based, fugitive and the paper was thin, roll-fed copy paper. The resolution was a small fraction of today's 300ppi more-or-less standard imaging. Treated with de-acidifying spray and kept out of the light, many have survived in good shape and are visually interesting (at least to me and few other artists who have seen them). That is the "old".
The "new" is as follows. By either scanning or digitally photographing an old, low res print at 300ppi and similar size-about 9x12" or 7x9" and loading them into Photoshop® the old images become a point of departure for further investigation using any and all of the image manipulating tools and procedures offered in that software. Why do this? Because there was something of interest, even something a bit distinctive in the old images. They were just "technologically challenged", waiting for the tools to catch up.
Most of these are 'abstract' while most of the digital prints done between 1996 and today were essentially digital collages, using digitized 'stuff' including photographic
and hand drawn sources, usually retaining representational images.
One old print can yield many and surprising variations... examples shown below, the blue one is the "old", the other 2 are variations....

Old/New-samples

2010-04-01T19:07:00.003-06:00

"And So We Left Them"

2009-05-12T10:11:00.007-06:00

This is an image for a possible solar etching digitally "re-purposed" from a small pencil drawing (below) I did in Korea,1952 of a Chinese POW waiting to be admitted to the field hospital (UN POW Camp #1, Koje-do). The title reflects a personal feeling about the transitory nature of our contact with prisoner-patients. They come, get tagged for admission (my job), then they go....
The two images are different each with its own qualities; I'd be interested in how you see them or feel about the different versions.

Night Wheel

2009-04-28T17:25:00.004-06:00

A new digital/solar print, Night Wheel 8x10", done today. It is twice the size of the previous solar prints - and so offers more to look at... Trying a warm "oxford brown" ink tone. How does that strike you? (click "Comment.. button below).
Cheers,
Mel

Bark of Pythagorus (ghost version)

2009-04-24T16:32:00.006-06:00

The hard-to-do print...is done. there is enough discussion of the print itself in earlier posts. Today, trying to hold the subtle detail in the very light, flattened can (the Bark...) in a series of 4 plates (!) adjusting contrast in the light zone in Photoshop and then exposing for less time which yields a darker print, I arrived at a version that I like. It is deeper/darker than the digital source image but this is a different end product and it works. Accepted.
Final print is a shown with the digital source image and the plate at inking station. Now I need to find a math buff who can't live without art...

Solar problems

2009-04-23T20:05:00.002-06:00

Just in case another solar printmaker is watching - I'd promised an update on how the print version of the Pythagorus image I'd posted turned out. Spent the day (and two expensive plates and a number of papers) trying to get it right Failed, so back to the task another day. Detail in very light areas is getting lost... the rest is good-looking rich and O.K.. Art isn't automatic...
Stay tuned.

Psychedelic Denver

2009-04-19T19:32:00.004-06:00

On the Denver forced stopover - we went to the DAM to see, in a skeptical frame of mind, the big show of posters from the sixties. Well, mostly posters but also other related items like tickets and fliers. Mostly hand drawn or composed as collages, extending DADA and earlier modernist strategies, and printed in basic, well-crafted techniques like lithography and silkscreen, they were, far out even if now from 'way back.
Of interest are a couple of questions; one raised by the author of a history of this era of posters - whether they are "fine art" and one of my own on the creative process and techniques used in relation to our now ubiquitous digital processes of image making and composing/designing. Two much earlier poster periods were clearly invoked by the 60's (and later) artists: Art Nouveau (think Toulouse Lautrec, Aubrey Beardsley) and 19th Century western "wanted" and circus/vaudeville posters. Juxtaposition is the major strategy. One picks and chooses images and text from diverse sources, times and places and puts them all together in the instant mindspace of the poster. For one thing there were far more hand drawn images and components in the 60's posters than one finds in current digital art, poster or not.
The visual strategy that links them is the way in which images are collaged. A major 'advantage' of digital process is the ease with which transparency can be employed and the high degree of photographic enhancement, distortion and other manipulation which can be used to create very seductive, complex illusions which merge, meld and modify the time and space effects of the work. Lacking this, the 60's posters are direct, simpler (although often far more detailed than many digital works!), more graphic, i.e., flat areas of color and strong, contrasty shapes. And the color is a major means to the intended communication. And that intent almost always included an optical challenge to the senses that referenced the stoned state celebrated by the personalities and the music it was all about. The classic figure-against-ground clarity of 'normal' art is confounded by making background spaces as strongly colored as image or letter shape parts, and by high frequency patterns rendered in high intensity color, often using 'conflicting' hues which set up optical vibrations.... hence 'psychedelic'.

Both the 60's works and much contemporary work in digital media (prints paintings and video/film) use time and space disassociation for psychological/narrative effect. This is not really new; it was a trait of medieval and later periods of art, notably surrealism. In summary, the 60's versions are often complex but direct, gutty, even crude (on purpose). The digital present offers much slicker (elegant?) fare in which the message is often romantic mystery or sci-fi fiction; but I'm not talking digital posters just typical digital art works...

Copyright laws prevent a show to go with this tell.

nonTrip

2009-04-19T17:46:00.003-06:00

A funny thing happened on our trip to San Francisco last Friday. A bit of very wet snow descended on DIA (our Denver airport) causing a bit of a wait - for thousands of people. After five hours, two of which were in seat 2E of our airbus, the flight was cancelled - 8PM or so. In the terminal campground there were many models - all fidgety. Here are a few.... better luck next time. Back home trying to do art again.

Arpeggio-the process

2009-04-13T21:52:00.012-06:00

This is a new solar print, Arpeggio. The image was created using digital photographs composited with various computer processes including a bit of hand drawing. That "original" is the top, left image. It was then printed out onto transparency film with an inkjet printer; the resulting positive transparency was then exposed to the solar plate, shown here at top right. Below that is the plate, developed, inked and ready to print - and the final print is bottom, left, allowing us to compare the intaglio final print with the digital "original". A digital print from the digital file is more precisely accurate, that is, optically close to what one sees on the computer screen.

The intaglio image version, as you can see here is quite accurate. It is printed using a traditional, manual press and has its own qualities which include, at least for the artist (me), the intrinsic memory of all the stages and qualities - photographing, computer, image combining, altering, digital printing, plate exposure & development, inking and judging various factors including paper & press pressure. While sensitive viewers cannot have the same involvement, looking will reward one with subtle revelations of what is special or typical of each kind of work. (Hence the comparison given here...)

Bark of Pythagoras

2009-04-12T20:34:00.003-06:00

One of the files for a Pythagoras print.... the waves are grain in the table top... the geometry speaks for itself...we'll see how the print turns out next week. So far the prints are about 5x7", roughly the size of Goya's Disaster of War etchings, one of which I own.

PythagorasMiroNews

2009-04-12T19:45:00.003-06:00

Pythagoras meets Miro in the Dali News - is a quirky bit of fun which started from a flattened, rusted tin can and the pattern in our kitchen table top. On the way to being a solar etching, this bit of a variant with color against the black and white. April 2009.

New/old prints

2009-04-09T23:02:00.001-06:00

After a long absence, I'm back. I've recently changed my major technical mode of operation from large scale digital prints to small solar prints; so far, intaglio (etching) images developed from a variety of sources including some older drawings and digital prints and photography new and old. I've also been doing more painting - acrylic in various sizes-and I'll post a few of these along with the first batch of solar prints.

On solar prints: in traditional etching, acid is used to eat away the to-be-printed lines and tones of the image on copper or other metal plates. Solar plates, now copper colored (!), are thin steel plates with a coating of polymer; the polymer is photo sensitive, hardening when exposed to UV (sun) light. To make an image one either draws or paints directly on the polymer with tones of black ink which blocks the sun, or on a transparent sheet, glass or plastic typically, using various ways to get the light-blocking, positive image onto the sheet. This transparency with the dark image on it is placed on top of the polymer plate which is then exposed to the sun for a short period of time. The plate is then washed with water which removes some of the polymer not hardened by the sun (the image parts that were various tones of light-blocking black). The plate is then inked like an ordinary etching plate and run through a press to transfer the image to paper. The process was developed by Dan Weldon in the 1970's. Many thanks to my local artist colleagues Nancy Vickery, Jude Silva and Conrad Nelson for tips on getting me underway.

2009-04-09T21:16:00.001-06:00

Nothing Inside

2009-04-09T12:08:00.003-06:00

Pond Totem

2009-04-09T11:53:00.002-06:00

Colorado Abstract

2009-02-09T13:50:00.000-07:00

January 2009 saw a major publication, with accompanying exhibits, on historical and contemporary abstract painting in Colorado. It is: Colorado Abstract - Painting and Sculpture, Fresco Fine Art Publications. I have work represented as does Bernice and Ben (wife and son, sculptor and painter...).

Japan-2

2008-06-10T09:08:00.003-06:00

Some more images... calligraphy is a particular passion for me - and to see its variations in ordinary, commercial life is fun - even the graphisc design using the characters...

Japan Report

2008-06-10T08:36:00.003-06:00

Back from Japan and re-acclimated. For the most part I'll try to let a few images convey the experience. Some now and some to follow. Overwhelming overall impression: precision and pattern. Four cities: Tokyo, Takayama, Kanezawa and Kyoto.Excepit for Tokyo we stayed in Japanese inns, Ryokan - for as little as staying in Super 8 motels here.
Mel

Japan trip & Denver Exhibition

2008-04-25T10:12:00.002-06:00

After some 46 years, when I was last in Japan on a Ford Foundation grant, B and I are going to see and absorb as much as possible. May 7-20. Tokyo, Takayama (Japanese alps town), Kanazawa (west coast), and Kyoto - including the Miho Museum designed by I.M. Pei.

It is an interesting coincidence that several of my very early sumi-e 'abstract calligraphy' works were chosen for a concurrent exhibit, opening May 16, at the Sandra Phillips Gallery in Denver. Among others of this early group to be in the exhibition (see 'Down' above), 'Conflict', is in "Drawings". A book signing and discussion/presentation is also scheduled for May 31, 2-3:30 pm. You are invited.
Mel - April 25

New article online re 'remote printng'

2008-03-28T08:59:00.003-06:00

3/28/08
I have recently participated with colleagues in different states in testing the possibility of doing 'original fine art prints'(including mine) using a remote printer. A report on this is now online at: http://www.dpandi.com/features/newmarkets

One of the new prints shown is shown better here: "Sonata"

Sonata Notes

2008-03-27T09:13:00.000-06:00

'DRAWINGS' Page

2008-02-23T17:31:00.003-07:00

France and Spain page

2008-02-14T17:30:00.000-07:00

Cross Dot

2008-02-12T15:22:00.000-07:00

Thresher

2008-02-10T22:42:00.000-07:00

re Drawing Transformed

2008-02-09T10:56:00.000-07:00

-an image, here a drawing, is just a point of departure on a journey of digital transformation. The computer invites both simple and complex ways to 'amplify signals', combine them with other images - and discover new images, new qualities, new meanings. With a large inventory of drawings, I am enjoying making such transformed works..
Click on the image - or any of the posted images - to see larger & more informative version.
MS 2-08-08

Transformed drawing

2008-02-08T23:43:00.000-07:00

Drawings book

2008-02-07T16:55:00.001-07:00

"Drawings" is a book of more than 130 works covering most of my lifetime. I put it together in January, initially as a way to archive a collection of drawings that are scattered in various collections, a few now lost and many in sketch books that are to go the Denver Public Library (as "my papers"). It is a "print on demand" book, published by Create space, an Amazon company. One can access it in two ways: < http://createspace.com/3331535 >
- or <http://www.amazon.com/> , then enter 'mel strawn' in their search window. This offers a search inside the book for a bit of browsing.
I'll post a few pages from it on this blog from time to time....
Mel