Today, after 11 days non-stop drawing, I completed a large pen and ink drawing of Linda which sorta ‘marries’ my long interest in tiles and spirals with the squiggly cross-hatched drawings of recent years. I think it’s pretty successful and depicts my angelic wife (who doesn’t much mind my long hours in studio) with a vast halo – inspired mostly by Jacques Mellan’s 1649 ‘Sudarium’ engraving (thanks to Jerry Vegder for showing it to me), to Ken Knowlton whose ca 1966 line-printed nude blew me away in the computer lab at the U of PA when I first saw it there in 1969, and to Chuck Close whose large gridded pencil drawn self-portrait shocked me at the Museum of Modern Art in New York around 1973.
So the 'Linda' drawing combines some new and some old ideas and techniques. For whatever it's worth, I have been intensely interested in 'new' ways to communicate image and in process. I am so highly entertained for days on end by the various means at my disposal to precipitate thoughts and ideas into 'reality' -- from my 'mind' in this instance to ink on paper! From abstraction to object and, it seems to me, so very directly! Process is relatively easy to discuss -- aesthetics nearly impossible, so although 'image' is extremely important to me, the underlying process of 'choosing' my images is mainly unconscious or 'felt' and I just don't have a clue how to talk about that. Process for me, however, is conscious and so easier to communicate. I suppose my images of people and other stuff will have to speak for themselves (LOL)!
'Linda' 77x46 inch pen and ink drawing, July 31, 2008
Sense of scale: me with drawing
detail of 'Linda' drawing
Late in 2004 I began to think about the 'spiral'. Spirals seem so... Infinite! Difficult to contemplate! Contracting to the infinitessimal, expanding to the infinite, mind boggling to construct and control! My great friend, Jerry Vegder, saw images of my earliest 'machine drawings' and pointed me to a Jacques Mellan (1598-1688) 'Head of Christ, Sudarium' engraved in 1649.
Jacques Mellan, 1649, engraving, 'Sudarium'
'Sudarium' engraving, detail
Now doesn't this just drive you MAD? I mean, it's quite a trick to hand engrave an image like this, a single line spiraling out from the nose with the width varied to produce the various values in the image, but HOW can one define such a procedure? After worrying this over for a while (four years?), I believe that I now have it all worked out! Although generating a list of movement commands to produce a spiral of any dimensions and number of rotations was quite a stretch for me (a simple interative application of trigonometric functions readily available in worksheets and programming languages), to really prove to myself that I had it more or less under control, I designed 'Linda' of spirals within spirals -- approximately 3,300 'square' tiles (each tile approximately 1x1 inches) pave a spiral in my 'Linda' drawing, and each of them is itself 'spiraled' to produce the values which eventually read to the mind and eye as a person's face.
Studies in Perception I, 1966, Ken Knowlton and Leon Harmon (Bell Labs)
line printer output of value-graded character set applied to grided image
Lucas, 1987, Chuck Close, oil on canvas, 30 x 30 inches, collection of Jon and Mary Shirley
concentric circle grid
Although I 'tried' to constrain my drawing inside the 'tiles' in order to leave a very narrow undrawn margin around each (I considered painting these margins with narrow lines of size and then gold leaving prior to drawing, but that seemed risky as Hell for a first attempt and I decided to leave that for a future work), but I required over 12,000,000 lines of movement code and there were many small errors in my calculations, so the drawing is (aren't they all?) imperfect and the margins between tiles vary because a 'few' of my drawing lines escaped the tile boundaries from time to time.
Still, it boggles my mind to consider that this drawing (and most drawings, really) are produced moment to moment, the tip of the pen rolling from place to place leaving its slender black track as evidence of a long meander.
the 10 'layers' of 'Linda'
The image was designed in 10 layers as if it were a reduction print, beginning with the darkest areas in the image, each subsequent layer is ligher in value and includes the areas covered by previous (darker) layers.
short video showing darkest layer of drawing underway
You can see (if you watch the video above) that the darkest layer is drawn with the lines 'spiraling' very close together. Each subsequent layer is drawn the same way, except the distance between lines increases as lighter and ligher value layers are drawn. In this way, the values in the image are produced by cross-hatching, in this case the lines are all variations on the spiral theme!
the drawing about 40% complete
detail around eye after four layers completed
similar detail of completed drawing
completed drawing on machine bed
-- Mike
Labels: drawing
¶ 2:21 PM 5 comments links to this post
Last March, I began installation of a second CNC machine capable of work up to 60 x 144 inches in my 3rd floor studio. My first machine is now dedicated to wood carving while the second machine is for drawing and painting so I can now work several projects at once.
This turned out to be a MUCH more difficult installation than the first. The new machine is almost twice the size of my first -- all the heavy pieces had to be carried up three flights of stairs and then bolted together like a giant erector set. The rails of each axis had to be carefully and precisely leveled and fastened exactly parallel -- not an easy task with bubble levels and ultimately I bought a laser level which made the process possible -- until then, I was really starting to pull my hair out (and I don't have that much hair to pull anymore)! The bed and vacuum plenum engineering was much more problematic than I'd imagined because they had to be built up from several interlocking panels. In the end, it turned out that there were a number of electonic and electrical problems which I had a LOT of trouble diagnosing and repairing, so most of my work these past several months has been more engineering than art, but the machine is FINALLY complete and I am ready now to make some larger and more complex art...
New CNC machine with bed complete and two of three vacuum plenum panels installed. Holes cut in bed (one visible in foreground) for hookup to vacuum which provides suction through trupan ultra-light MDF surface).
One of the three 4 x 5 foot plenum panels with waffle cuts for vacuum distribution
detail showing vacuum waffle cuts on bottom surface
vacuum plenum complete
July 11, 2008 update...
vacuum hose hooked up to fitting on table bottom
3-zone control of vacuum to table via simple knife gate valves
New CNC machine complete with table planed flat.
All that's left to do now is install compressed air hookup for painting and SWEEP UP!!!
-- Mike
Labels: equipment
¶ 9:48 AM 1 comments links to this post
I don't know that I so much completed this drawing today as simply called it 'done'. Either way, I'm moving on! "Annette" is my mother-in-law and she does NOT appreciate this portrait at all -- she thinks it makes her look too old and wrinkly (she's only eighty-one years old, after all) and just hates it! But _I_ love this image of her even though I had trouble with the drawing from beginning to end! I composed the image during two and a half weeks in December and began actually drawing and painting it January 2, 2008. I stopped work on it this morning after 592 hours of continuous drawing and 34 Sakura Jelly Roll .3mm ink pens. The Sakura pens are advertised to write to the last drop, but that last drop usually happens LONG before the ink runs out -- VERY annoying! Still searching for that 'ideal' writing instrument which leaves a permanent mark, very fine line, and writes reliably until the ink runs out. Not easy to find!
"Annette" next to "Crosby" on 2nd floor of my studio this morning
"Annette", Jan 27, 2008, 70 x 45 inches, watercolor with pen and ink drawing
on Arches 300lb. hot press watercolor paper
detail of "Annette" showing lines and colors
-- Mike
¶ 1:42 PM 2 comments links to this post
"Crosby" okubi-e (big-head picture), 84 x 45 inch pen and ink drawing is complete. This one is by far the most complex and involved drawing I've attempted with almost twice the line density of any previous drawing and over 10 million lines of code required to guide the machine movement. About three weeks to resolve the image and produce the code and almost 400 hours of continuous drawing! I beefed up the darkest areas by re-drawing and called it complete.
Here's an image of the portrait:
"Crosby" Dec 2007, 84 x 45 inches, pen and ink drawing on Arches 300 lb. hot press watercolor paper
-- Mike
Labels: drawing
¶ 9:38 AM 3 comments links to this post
Here's a 'revisit' to an approach I was very interested in a decade or more ago -- black line over color -- inspired by Hiroshige and other ukiyo-e artists (and the comic books I loved during my childhood)...
1996 monotypes with black ink over flat color areas
my wife, Linda and a self-portrait, each image about 16 x 11 inches
When my "Sarah" drawing was first exhibited at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, the founder's wife appreciated it and invited me to create a similar life-size portrait of her husband, Crosby, a giant of a man and huge patron of the arts. I designed the image to include three flat colors, pink, blue, and tan to be painted in watercolor and then overlaid with the squiggly cross-hatched line drawing I've been developing over the past several years. I mounted a pencil in the gizmo I invented to carry my ink-pens and drew the color area outlines, then painted them very loosely with watercolor washes, using frisket to mask the outlines. Then mounted pen(s) and drew the image as usual.
"Crosby" pen and ink with watercolor, 90 x 45 inches
(permanent collection, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art)
I think the color turned out to be very effective, in spite of nasty technical problems caused mainly by uneven dampening of the paper during painting. That caused some expansion in the large sheet of Arches 300 lb. hot press watercolor paper which didn't completely shrink upon drying and left a half dozen large wrinkles which have persisted into the finished piece. Later this morning I'll lay the paper down flat, dampen it carefully (my inks are all water borne and very resoluble, so I'll have to be careful not to ruin the drawing after several hundred hours of work, and then see whether I can press the paper back to flat with a hot iron.
original 'plan' for color areas with mock-up
preparing to paint using pencil outline guides
pink watercolor applied -- belt still needs to be painted
frisket mask painted around area to become blue
Another nasty technical problem was caused by the frisking FRISKET!! Wouldn't you imagine that a product designed to be used on watercolor paper for masking would be non-staining?!? I used a frisket recommended by my local Dick Blick -- their house brand, same stuff as Windsor Newton (which I've found also stains the paper) -- but it left a dull reddish-brown 'halo' wherever I applied it! UGH! Blick carries a WHITE frisket which I hope (next time) will be non-staining! Very disappointing!
blue painting completed, frisket removed
tan painting completed and ink drawing underway -- detail shoes
similar detail of shoes -- drawing completed
drawing about 80% complete -- son Scott, home for Thanksgiving, comes down to watch
-- Mike
¶ 10:19 AM 1 comments links to this post
I've been working for a couple of weeks now on a couple of long-term fascinations of mine -- painting with a limited palette in a grid, and my wife's beautiful face Two older examples, my 1995 4x4 foot self portrait in eight colors painted in half-inch squares 'by the numbers', and 1993 "Nana Rita" 4x4 feet painted 'from life' while looking at a 40x40 pixel grid on the screen of my computer for weeks on end: The acrylic paints I used (from ETAC are, except for the white, trasparent pigments. The overspray from the darks really ate up the lights, and the overspray from the white ate up the darks, so there's a huge variation in dot size and in color which I didn't intend. In order to get this to look ANYthing like the (wonderful) intensity of the 'plan' (don't you just LOVE tiny bitmaps?), I'm going to have to knuckle down and paint the 216,000 dots by hand. Any idea how long THAT might take? Couple of weeks, I suppose... But how COOL will it be with so many little Hershey's kisses paint dollops? Cool, I think. And I want to see that badly enough to just DO it! So... Enough Golden fluid acrylics (so I can apply by syringe, I hope) should arrive any day now and I can get started with some more needlepoint work (now that my stocking is done) in paint instead of yarn... I'm kinda dreading this, but I WANT this painting to be 'right'! Hopefully a GORGEOUS canvas full of bright intense colored dots will eventually become 'real' -- Mike Labels: painting
the needlepoint I've been working on (from Linda's happy design) 
plan for "Linda" 75x45 inch painting in 8 colors
plan colors for "Linda"
"Linda" painting underway -- click image for 20 second movie of painting (0.5mb)
blue complete, crimson just beginning
detail showing blue and crimson dots
airbrushed dots completed on large canvas (75 x 45 inch image area)
“Jim”, 2008, 7 color lithograph on Rives BFK 43.25” x 30 inches
Collections: Springfield Museum of Art, Beach Museum of Art, The Collectors Fund
detail (click image for enlargement)
At the opening of the Kemper Museum "Backstage Pass" show last month, master printer Mike Sims of Lawrence Lithography Workshop invited me to design some images for him to publish. I made half a dozen designs for him and he selected "Jim", a litho using six plates, three of various transparency white inks and three of various transparency black inks on mid-value paper.
I experimented with a number of possible paper colors and decided the Tan was most appropriate for the image, although likely too light -- but I really wanted the paper (not ink) to establish the mid-values as it peeks through all the tiny spaces between lines and through the transparent inks used in four of the plates.
In order to create the mockups I actually created program files as though I were going to make these drawings on my CNC machine. Then I spent a few days writing a new program to convert my drawings into AutoCad DXF files which I loaded into Adobe Illustrator. This was VERY cool (to me) as it allowed me to experiment with various line thicknesses and transparencies and paper colors in order to optimize the films for the plates by 'seeing' accurate previews of the finished print before any plates had been burned or proofed.
I'd originally imagined we could 'dye' white paper a nice mid-gray using sumi or other water-based pigment -- my thought here was to print lighter and darker inks so that the paper color becomes the mid-range of the image, the image being produced from cross hatched squiggley lines similar to my recent drawings.
I tested my paper-coloring idea and abandoned it as beyond me. LLW suggested printing the entire sheet gray, but that was unappealing to me... It's important to me to maintain the 'paper' quality of the paper. So I tested the design, trying out various available papers and decided on Rives BFK Tan which is dark enough for the image and adds a very appropriate color.
In order to accomplish the drawings for the plates, I wrote some (very cool) code to prepare my squiggly lines for a local pre-press shop to produce films from which Mike Sims and the Lawrence Lithography Workshop folk could make the litho plates.
The films for the six plates arrived today and they are pretty spectacular, actually! WOW! I'm SO excited and happy to see these -- and very satisfied to have more or less precipitated my ideas into 'reality' so directly and effortlessly! Here's a photo showing Aaron Shipps (Tamarind Institute master printer and Mike Sims' assistant) with some of the large film positives from which they'll make the plates.
Master printer Aaron Shipps with films for "Jim" lithograph.
Plates were burned from the films yesterday (10-17-2007) and they turned out GREAT! Totally amazing to me what perfectly clear sharp lines appeared when the plates were developed. This is going to be a very successful print, I think, and the scale is terrific. VERY exciting, and very gratifying that Lawrence Lithography is investing such an enormous amount of time and money in publishing my work!
Master Printers Aaron Shipps and Mike Sims develop plate
click on image to
Printing should begin on Monday!
October 25-26, 2007 -- first proofs of "Jim"
pulling first complete proof
Mike Sims (foreground) and Aaron Shipps (background) inspect proofs at LLW
First proof of "Jim" (click image for detail)
amazingly close, I think, to my mock-up (first image in post)
but whites are too cool and perhaps too opaque in the proof...
The BFK paper has turned out to be too light in value to provide the mid-values the image requires. We're considering various measures to darken the paper... Tea-staining the BFK Tan to make the paper darker overall, printing a flat over the entire sheet, printing a 7th plate in a mid-value under the image (I've produced an image for film to accomplish that, but that method is pretty far afield from my 'pure' concept of lightening and darkening the paper through cross-hatched squiggles, so I'd much prefer either finding or producing a darker paper than under-printing the 7th plate...
November 5 and 6 proof on BFK Tan paper which I printed mokuhanga style from two blocks (first printing a cherry block in a blue/green, and then an ash block in a neutralish red which gave the pronouced wood grain). This example now framed and in the collection of the model, Jim.
The proof above might be the direction we follow for the print. In this one, a silhouette in dark brown was printed on top of the mokuhanga style woodgrain printing, then the six blocks in whites and blacks was printed on top. Today, I'll run over to LLW to print four more sheets in a similar fashion, but a bit darker, and we'll try to eliminate the silhouette plate. The middle black in the print above was TOO transparent, I think, and didn't pop properly, so we'll try to fix that as well. Lots of work ahead before it's ready for editioning!
Jim dropped in to see some of the proofs at LLW 11/28/2007
Photos from the 'print signing' party April 13, 2008:
Group gets first look at 'Jim'
signing the edition
signing the edition
Jim enjoyed the party and the recognition, too!
-- Mike
Labels: drawing, Lithography, Woodblock
¶ 5:58 PM 5 comments links to this post
