Mike Lyon's Moku Hanga: Backsliding... "Jim" painting 80 x 44 inches (image area) -- a colorful MESS

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Backsliding... "Jim" painting 80 x 44 inches (image area) -- a colorful MESS

Yesterday (February 13, 2007) I completed a first LARGE painting using an airbrush mounted on my CNC machine to paint 22,000 0.4 inch squares (200 x 110 squares) in four transparent colors on Rives BFK paper. One of 17 simple shapes designed to produce tone in even steps from lightest to darkest was painted in each color over each square in order to produce the image.

click image to pop up a VERY LARGE version or click HERE for a medium size enlargement

movie of painting underway

I programmed a set of the ‘gestures’ (diamonds, and squares in various sizes and an ‘X’ and a ‘+’) to be painted in order to produce the 17 tones in the painting :

It's taken the better part of a month to complete and I've likely now made most of the possible mistakes which show up quite painfully all over the surface. Gigantic blobs of watercolor leaking from my pigment bottle dripped onto the paper and were then blown all over the place by the air brush as it passed over the painting. Watercolor slowly clogging up the airbrush and leaving vertical 'light' areas in stripes. Watercolor spraying out too densely and leaving vertical 'dark' areas in stripes. Lines too thick. Lines too thin. Color too rich. Color too lean. The yellow layer offset a column to the left (the other colors were painted after a programming change which calculated the placement differently). Airbrush too close to the paper and too much paint volume resulted in LOTS of color blown out in tiny little splats. Dirty airbrush left broad haloes of color adjacent to lines. Lines unclear and fuzzy-looking.

Here are some details (click for enlargements) of interesting areas of the painting:

Let me hear what you think, please... LOTS of work to do to get this thing working well enough to make decent stuff, I fear!

-- Mike

PS... My friend, Jerry, just had a look at this page and phoned to say, "I should just keep my mouth shut... But... You're totally back-sliding". After advising me to immediately forward the image to the CIA for their use as 'proof' of WMD in Iran (referencing somewhat similar aerial views of Iraq offered up by the White House some years ago), he directed me to Vasarely images familiar from my childhood before (and I'm condensing here) and suggested that I get on to 'making Art'... Yup... That pretty well sums it up, I think... OK -- I'm getting on with it now...

Labels: painting

¶ 10:21 AM

Comments:

Wow Mike, that is pretty rad! I know the engineer in you wants to figure out how to fix all the "mistakes", but I actually like it this way. The closer you get to perfection, the more it seems to me that you will just have taken a really long path to building your own inkjet printer, at which point it becomes kind of boring.

As an aside, this is worth a look if you haven't seen it:

http://www.hektor.ch/

A reminder that your rig is not constrained to "pixels".

# posted by

Jason : 12:01 PM

Also, my first thought when I saw the video, was that the painting would go a lot faster if you re-ordered the drawing ops to do all the horizonatals together, then the verticals, then the diagonals. That way you'd be making long sweeping movements and not changing direction all the time (sort of like an inkjet). Of course, the mistake patterns would be entirely different that way...

# posted by

Jason : 12:18 PM

Mike,

To err is human...right? There's probably no point trying to convince you that the mistakes are good, but I do like the painting as it is. I like that you have reinvented the pixel. The choice of your "gestures" make the image beautifully Lyonesque. I like seeing the beauty of these nicely executed patches against the streaky areas. For me this is the first time that the struggle with the machine has bought an added poetic element. When carved blocks screw up they add nothing, likewise when the pen runs out of ink.

Of course I now expect you will produce near perfect paintings, but perhaps you could allow for some mistakes? Which raises the question of how a mistake is made. If it is deliberate is it a "real" mistake? Who wears the mistake, the artist, the subject, the viewer, or the machine?

Perhaps you are incapable of making mistakes? Could you delegate mistakes to another party? Surely you could hire an apprentice mistake maker?

Keep going, good stuff ahead.

# posted by

Tom K : 2:38 PM

Fantastic Mike. Really quite amazing. I am quite curious as to what the image looks like from a distance. Can you post an image of the image from, say, 15 feet away. I'm wondering how much the eye smooths the image.

# posted by

AEleen : 12:37 AM

Wow, I'd cut Jim into small pieces and frame them separately, because to me the closeup views of the "pixels" are what's most interesting. The full drawing with its mistakes looks like stuff I've seen come out of my Epson inkjet printer after I've let it sit idle for too long - streaks, blotches, too light, too dark. (the yellow offset is a new one, though!)

I like Tom's idea of hiring a mistake-maker. I'm available, and I make excellent mistakes, if I do say so myself.

Thanks for showing this. It's fabulous!

# posted by

Annie B : 8:42 AM

My own thoughts are pretty well aligned with Annie B's -- the thing is MUCH more interesting 'up close' than far away, damn it!

"Jim" would be 'better' if the left two thirds of him were cut off, I suppose, but it STILL wouldn't be very engaging from a distance. I really do LIKE the saturated colors and the zillion variations on the theme of diamonds, squares, etc, but I DON'T like the fuzziness of the sprayed lines - I want them to be super-sharp and clear (not fuzzy)... AND I want the image as a whole (viewed from a distance) to be as strong as the layers of little parts which produce it...

This "Jim" painting doesn't come close (as Annie said -- and I said the same thing myself -- it looks like my inkjet is having ink cartridge problems -- that's actually pretty close to 'true') so I'm hoping that after some more months of TOTAL CRAP I'm able to produce painted work which approaches the level of my recent pen and ink drawings -- which I feel are far and away the best stuff I've produced so far (kids not included)...

# posted by

Mike Lyon : 10:30 AM

I'm not positive, but I suspect that "fuzzy" might be an inherent quality of airbrush. I hear you that you want a sharper line, but I think that if you could just eliminate the blotching and figure out how to keep the flow even you'd be very happy with your results, fuzzy or not.

I hope you'll keep showing us examples of your progress, as it's pretty fascinating to watch. Good luck!

# posted by

Annie B : 1:04 PM

Great. I really like the mix of engineering and art. This may be going in the direction of an ink jet printer, but I doubt this - all the little engineering decisions are subtly different due to an aethestic intent, leading to interesting effects(diamond pixels).

One possible way through the desire for thin lines would be to have a mask screen with a tiny hole in it. It would get quickly clogged of course, but you could have absorbent stuff wicking the ink away or some thing like many belt sanders continually providing new and fresh 4 sided masks.
Also a variety between crisp and blown lines would definately be pictorially interesting.

# posted by

Andrew Edwards : 8:03 PM

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