In 1991 I was in Japan with a group of US, Canadian, and European karate guys led by Tsutomu Ohshima.  Ohshima Sensei organized a fabulous and exhausting tour which included visits to Hiroshima, Miyajima, Kyoto — we met and watched demonstrations by elderly masters of kyudo, judo, kendo, were wined and dined in traditional Japanese fashion, and ended in Tokyo where we participated in the 60th anniversary of the karate club at Mr. Ohshima’s alma mater, Waseda University.

One evening we dined at a wonderful sukiyaki restaurant where groups of four or five of us sat around low tables with hot braziers.  I must have appeared to be the senior in our group,  because our very young waitress singled me out to receive instructions for preparation of our meal.

My Japanese is limited to counting, karate words, printmaking words, “please, thank you, excuse me, where is the …”, etc.

Wakarimas-ka? (do you understand?).
Wakarimas (I understand).
Wakarimas-sen (I do not understand).

The movie, “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” had premiered a year or two earlier and the youthful fad of that time was to append a sarcastic “NOT” to the end of statements — like — Don’t worry, I love you… NOT!  So this waitress, pointing with hashi (chop sticks) to each different meat and vegetable and to the metal pot of boiling broth in front of us gave long and detailed explanation of each step.  A full minute or more of monologue and I didn’t understand a single word of what she’d said, but I listened intently and, at the end, she asked, “Wakarimas-ka”?  Now THAT was something I understood and, Bill and Ted style, I made my first effective joke in Japanese. YES, I replied with enthusiasm — “HAI!  Wakarimas… SEN!”  And our pretty young waitress in her beautiful traditional kimono fell over on the floor laughing, tears streaming down her cheeks, her hand fluttering in front of her teeth and another waitress, ancient and wrinkled scooted over, scolded her, shooed her away and looked after us for the rest of the evening with boring decorum.  Sigh.

So I’m reminding you that, although this LOOKS a bit like an oddly colored photographic portrait of a talking head, it is NOT.  It is ‘merely’ a collection of completely abstract lines and squiggles drawn in ink on tinted paper using many ink-pens and NOWHERE is there a face, a shirt, an eye, a button, a tooth, anything plaid, etc.  ONLY ink on paper!  But organized in such a way that, in spite of the completely non-representational nature of the marks, their whiteness and blackness, the unexpected pinkness of the paper — our eyes and minds effortlessly re-integrate all this into “Joel” – if you knew Joel, you’d recognize him.  It’s the same with all portraits, paintings, sculpture where there’s some meaning encoded — although there is NOTHING human-like in the ink, paint, marble, etc — our minds are expert at associating our visual experience with things we ‘know’ and in a weird way we think we are seeing, in this instance, a person.  Just sayin…  This is Joel…  NOT!

The white ink on this rose tinted paper POPS. I prepared the large sheet by painting it with several washes of quinacridone red pigment plus a bit of carbon black pigment mixed into water. I drew the brightest 2/3 of the image with white ink squiggles and the darkest 2/3 of the image with black ink squiggles. So 1/3 of the image is white line over rose tinted paper, 1/3 of the image is black line over rose tinted paper, and 1/3 of the image is white over black over rose tinted paper.

"Joel", completed Mar 20, 2011, 87 x 45 inches, white and black ink on tinted watercolor paper

My model, Joel Goldman, is an attorney turned novelist. We’ve known one another since childhood. He’s a great guy – clever, articulate, sarcastic, interesting. You can see all that and more in the portrait, I hope. He likes the drawing. The other night, we had dinner with his sister, Susan Tivol, who, it seemed to me from her reaction to seeing an iPhone image of Joel, didn’t much care for it.  I think it was the particular image, catching Joel in mid-something she (subtly) objected to — and this is a shame, really, because she has a GREAT face and I’ve been trying to convince HER to model for me. Maybe SOME day… Meanwhile, if you’re interested in Joel’s books, have a look at these:

Technically, this is another drawing in light and dark on mid-value ground. I continue to follow some giant footsteps including:

I spent several months working on the image and calculating all the miles of ink squiggles – this one was a huge challenge for me and I made a number of experiments in advance of my final push to complete “Joel” (see previous articles). The actual execution of the drawing took only about 230 hours. Here are some photos of the work in progress…

detail of white/black interaction

detail of white/black interaction

March 10 - second layer of white contours goes down

March 14 - one more day of white ink

March 15 - black ink begins

March 19 - as the sun rises - about 20 hours of drawing still ahead.

I first painted the paper black with sumi ink.  Then I gilded the clothing area in silver leaf.  My plan was to paint black on the silver leaf in order to define her clothing and to build white acrylic in layers to define her skin.  After completing my plan, I dug back into the darker areas of her skin with black acrylic and then repainted with the white.  It improved!

Now I’m very much looking forward to my next Peregrine project which is ready to begin now.  It’ll be an 18 x 8 inch accordion-fold book of 16 pen and ink drawings of Peregrine in this same black and silver sequined bunny-dress.  The plan looks spectacular.  Maybe an edition of three of these?

Peregrine, painting in acrylic and sumi ink on silver-gilded paper, 90 x 38.5 inches, completed April 17, 2010 (collection: Bishop-McCann, an award-winning brand experiences agency)

detail

Closer detail showing paint application white over black over white over sumi in face and black over silver gilding in clothing

This and the previous painting of ‘Lee’ completed a few days ago are experiments in the sort of light and dark over mid-value drawings which were popular in Europe 400 years ago.  I’ve selected two examples from the Goldman Collection of Italian drawings.  I was lucky to see the exhibition of this wonderful collection at the Chicago Art Institute last year — you can obtain the FABULOUS catalog of the collection from Amazon.com well worth the $47 price!

My approach is very similar to the tack I took with my “Jim” lithograph — overlapping layers of line to communicate the value gradations of the image, but the paint makes these much more tactile — the paint builds a very heavy impasto as it overlaps and makes an interesting if somewhat bumpy surface — I LIKE these!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMydBVkprok

the painting begins with white acrylic paint applied to tinted paper

here the white painting is about half done

the white painting is complete

painting of black is about half-done -- LOVE those moire spirals!

detail showing the Paasche Flow Pencil painting black over heavy impasto

painting of black nears completion

the painting is complete

detail of painting

'Lee' and 'Joanne' complete

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWWuUOdYOZ0

The painting nears completion as black paint is applied over tinted paper and white paint.

'LEE' 35 x 21 inches, 2009, acrylic paint on tinted paper.

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

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.

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.

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!

I started making gridded paintings in 1992, first painting ‘visually’, as if from a still life, the colors of very simple bitmap images of my family. As I continued, I began to abstract the images into ‘paint by numbers’ monochromatic portraits in squares (each number representing a value). Later, I learned how to calculate an image using any palette of paint colors I liked — usually white, black, cadmium red, alizarine crimson, ultramarine blue, cerulean blue, cadmium yellow medium, and sometimes cadmium lemon or pale (the limited palette I’d used as a student at the Kansas City Art Institute under Wilbur Niewald).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giRXf8kSyeo

“Linda” painting underway

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.  Maybe.

Well, I didn’t so far as to actually paint this on black velvet (which would have been pretty nice in a retro-leisure-suit sort of way — but I’m just not that ‘cool’ I suppose).  So this is painted on stretched linen in transparent titanium white acrylic on a carbon black ground.  I first painted the entire canvas black, then applied many layers of white paint in order to build whiter and whiter lines out of previously painted white lines — so each successive overpainting made that area whiter and more opaque.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKalkd_FMKM

Self Portrait, 2007, 60 x 40 inches, acrylic on stretched linen

Just getting started

painting nears completion

I first painted the entire canvas black, then applied many layers of white paint in order to build whiter and whiter lines out of previously painted white lines -- so each successive overpainting made that area whiter and more opaque.

The only dark values in the painting come from the black underpaining -- nothing but successively more opaque white was used to produce the image.

Up close, it's pretty intense and interesting because of all the stringy white squiggles and circlets from which the image is constructed...

Mike with Mike in studio

BFK is a very soft paper — because the tip of the flow-pen actually touches the surface, the paper becomes abraded (deeply abraded) as the tip repeatedly passes over the same areas. The very rough and sculptural surface is quite attractice in this painting — everyone who’s seen it wants it. My wife, I think, got ‘first dibs’…

I’ve been working on this painting continuously since I first posted the images above on July 1 (by continuously, I really do mean 24/7, of course). The paper just couldn’t take any more physical contact — it had become extremely abraded and fuzzy — so I switched over to using an airbrush and painted it in many layers alternating between a deep blue-black acrylic in the mid to dark areas and white in the light to mid areas. That beefed up the color in the abraided (dark)areas. The development of color, texture (quite genuine sculptural texture, albeit fuzzy), an unusual impasto, and a kind of battle between white and black through all the layers of light and dark is VERY INTERESTING to me and has stimulated me to move in some new (actually ancient — I’m thinking mid-value ground with light and dark scribbles defining the image out of the mids, like renaissance chalk drawing, maybe) directions which I’ll continue to experiment with later this summer.

In the meanwhile, gentle reader (always wanted to write that somewhere — now seems as good a time as any, right?), here’s the current (and final) state of the painting I first showed in my July 1 post…

Using the Paasche Flow Pencil to apply acrylic paint to paper

another view of the Paasche Flow Pencil jig in use

A second attempt on BFK about halfway through

detail of finished painting with many layers of white over black and black over white

self portrait in gestures, July 3, 2007, ca 59 x 32 inches, acrylic on Rives BFK

painting underway -- starting to lay down the blues

detail of area around eye -- three colors down

detail of area around eye -- completed

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVVqzAelb9g

In the movie and several of the photos, three colors have been painted in order: black, yellow, red. A final color, blue, is starting to go down along the left side of the portrait.

I suppose I could’a figured this out in advance, but it seemed to me that coffee or tea stained paper would make a good first trial image and clean-up would be very easy… WRONG! WHAT A MESS!

So viscosity about like cream works quite well.

I removed the little paint-pot which came with the flow pencil and replaced it with a water bottle I’d modified for the purpose. The cap has the paint outlet mounted in it and I mounted a vacuum-relief/pressure port (to force more viscous paint to flow using a bit of air pressure) on the side (a tube runs to the ‘bottom’ of the bottle so air can get in). This allows me to fill the bottle with paint (or whatever) without making a mess, mount the cap, and connect the hose to the pen before inverting the bottle and allowing paint to flow. Works well.

Because the pen doesn’t have many parallel surfaces — it’s all cones and curves and joints, it wasn’t easy to conceive a way to hold and actuate it. In the end I decided to make it easier for me to construct the gizmo and so I made it to kinda work backwards (power-off allows paint to flow — so when it stops, paint keeps running). A single solenoid both lifts the pen off the paper and releases the trigger, stopping the ink flow while the pen is moved to a new painting location. When the solenoid is ‘off’, a spring pushes the pen down onto the paper or canvas and actuates the trigger at the same time.

The paper surface on my 2nd attempt is now badly abraded with ‘fuzz-balls’ all over the surface in the darkest areas — next attempt I’ll use a heavily sized paper and adjust the height of the flow-pencil so it JUST BARELY TOUCHES THE PAPER!

I’m VERY excited about the possibilities for color work, both directly (painting flat areas of transparent color), and especially indirectly (using weighted gestures again) since the flow-pencil produces a VERY sharp-edged line — much cleaner edge than my airbrush!

"Jim", painting completed March 3, 2007, 43 x 24 inches, acrylic on Rives BFK Exhibited in "Figuring it Out" at the Beach Museum of Art, April-July, 2009

detail of forehead and hair

early state -- yellow has been completed, red uderway

detail of eye and ear

detail of neck and shirt

early state with red uderway

early state -- closeup of red going down on yellow

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9f97mAYf92s

The 17 gestural values (16 from darkest to lightest in equal ‘steps’ plus blank/white) overpainted in four transparent colors are capable of producing 83,521 (17^4) unique color patterns. From some distance, the painting is a fair likeness of Jim and I like this image very much. But close up, the patterns dominate and I think they’re remarkable and intensely interesting — much more so than the image alone — quite compelling to me, really!

I’d like a better balance between these near and far views, but I suspect that viewing this sort of work up close is always going to be more exciting and thought provoking than the overall image… I’ll have to give this some more thought!

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.

"Jim" painting 80 x 44 inches (image area)

Excel spreadsheet I created to calculate value densities using 9 gestures (in rows) combined to produce 16 'tiles' (illustrated at bottom of each column) in roughly equal steps from darkest to lightest values.

screen shot of the program I wrote to apply gesture subroutines to bitmap values to produce program for CNC machine -- the program is built to move to a corner of the tile, then call a subroutine for the value which in turn calls the solenoid on/off and movement commands for one or more of the nine gestures defined to build the tile at that location. Worked very well!

detail -- forehead and hair

detail -- dark side eye

detail -- dark side face

detail -- dark side body

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:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFGEnbVuDTY

movie of painting underway

– 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…

PPS… I’ve consolidated an earlier post below:
My new 17-value airbrush characters seem to be working – now if I can only get my airbrush to not clog up after an hour or 30 minutes or 90 minutes – otherwise it’s gonna require constant supervision which ain’t worth it (and BORING)!

Here’s an image of my spreadsheet calculations of area – I’ve made a set of ‘gestures’ – diamonds, and squares in various sizes and an ‘X’ and a ‘+’:

The ‘X-area’ column is the list of gestures D for Diamond, S for Square, X for diagonals, and P for Plus and the 3-digit number is the area in thousandths that an eighth inch line produces in a 1 inch box.

These are designed to be overpainted in each of red, yellow, blue, and black according to the color and value content of the corresponding area of an image. I’ve got a sample image partially painted in yellow, blue, and red now and it’s pretty much electrically brilliant! There are 17 to the 4th theoretical color possibilities (83,000 plus variations), so PLENTY of variation!

THEN I had to write the program to analyze the image and write the ShopBot code – my code reads an initialization file I wrote in ShopBot code which defines the characters and the subroutines to call them, then the program goes on to analyze each pixel in the image and generate the ShopBot code to position the machine to the pixel and do the painting. The SO,3,1 turns on the airbrush and SO,3,0 turns it off. M2 means Move in 2 dimensions (x,y) – J2 means FAST Jog in 2 dimensions (x,y)

This is actually only the working part of a MUCH longer program – the long program gets input from a screen, checks to make sure it all makes sense, and then calls the appropriate operation, in this case the subroutine above… Here’s what the screen looks like when the program is running (just finished generating the ShopBot code for the color ‘cyan’ for a Jim Winter drawing:

COOL, eh? I added the new code onto my existing program so I wouldn’t have to rewrite all the file and form handling – can’t believe it actually works!!!

I’ve defined some subroutines named after each of the 17 possible values (00 through 16 is white through black) which call the gestures I’ve designed to produce the values — – the first routine listed below is for ‘black’ or value 16 – it calls .313” square, .438 square, .234” plus, and .338” diagonals in turn to produce the ‘shading’ in that area.:

Then I defined the movement for each ‘gesture’ – these are shown below as ShopBot subroutines – you can ‘call’ the subroutine (GOSUB D375 calls the .375 square inch diamond, for example) – the starting corner position is assumed to be in the variable “&xstart” and “&ystart” and the scale factor in &scale. Then the row and column indexes are in &rrr and &ccc variables – in a 100 row x 50 column image, for each rrr (1 through 100) I position to each column ccc (1 through 50) and draw the gestures for that position.

Finally, here’s just the very beginning of the completed code to produce 0.4” squares (&scale = .4) for a very STUPIDLY large drawing 200 squares high by 110 squares wide… Next time I’ll start a bit smaller

It goes on and on like this – two or three of these commands for each of the 22,000 squares in the drawing – then the next color paints over them, then the next color, and on and on for WEEKS!!!

But it works!!!

– Mike

Computer controlled paintbrush gizmo up and running as of 30 minutes ago!!!

Parts for airbrush assembly – the airbrush itself is just above the angle iron with the solenoid already installed. Solenoid plunger above it, little bent aluminum airbrush retaining clips above airbrush – the angle iron gets bolted into the aluminum pipe and holds the airbrush vertically in the center of the pipe – the plastic pipe shims the assembly out to proper dimension for my holder… Ink/paint bottle at left and “Z” clip to keep the plunger from falling out is next to plunger – it’s a damned simple solution given how long it’s taken me to figure out!

Parts for airbrush assembly – the airbrush itself is just above the angle iron with the solenoid already installed. Solenoid plunger above it, little bent aluminum airbrush retaining clips above airbrush – the angle iron gets bolted into the aluminum pipe and holds the airbrush vertically in the center of the pipe – the plastic pipe shims the assembly out to proper dimension for my holder… Ink/paint bottle at left and “Z” clip to keep the plunger from falling out is next to plunger – it’s a damned simple solution given how long it’s taken me to figure out!

The new paintbrush assembly almost ready for installation!

The completed assembly (minus ink bottle) is mounted in machine – the interface board came from ShopBot – it’s very simple board with five relays driven from program controlled outputs in the ShopBot controller (the ribbon cable you see accordion-folded runs from top of the board over the cable umbilical of the machine and into the main ShopBot control box… I use only one of the relays (and 24v power from the controller) to energize and deenergize my little solenoid which pushes the button on the airbrush…

I mounted the relay board onto the Z-axis of the ShopBot in a little plexi box I built this afternoon – the box should keep the board clean when I’m routing instead of painting… The cover is open at the bottom and just slides down over the plexi back in some nicely fitted grooves in the sides of the cover. You can see the brush assembly mounted into the machine at the bottom of this photo.

Here’s a view of the business-end of the assembly neatly mounted in the machine

The air hose has a quick-release at each end so it’ll be a snap to change over from painting to drawing to routing – but I’m going to need to build a 2nd generation drawing control to fit the relay board the same way and using a 24v continuous duty solenoid which I now have on hand instead of the intermittent duty 110v solenoid I used for the previous two drawings (and melted one of the coils in the process, unfortunately – that won’t happen again once I’ve converted over to the 24v device – and I won’t have to worry about 110v finding its way into the delicate electronics (or my delicate body, either)…

You can see the 24v solenoid wires (white wires) about 1/3 up from bottom left, and solenoid plunger on button of airbrush and black air hose coming in from right… Since it works in reverse of pen-lifter, I have to program a new converter before I can use it (the pen solenoid got powered when it was to STOP drawing – the brush gets powered when it is to PAINT, so my old program is reversed and I need to make a simple change in order to generate the proper code for the new airbrush… Should be testing with actual paint tomorrow!!! YIPPEE!!! But… The thing does actually WORK right now, the computer turning the airbrush off and on with command, so I’m ready to go!!!

January 24, 2007:

Yesterday and today I’ve been experimenting with the new computer controlled painting device and the results are encouraging — a few interesting problems (maybe these will turn out to be ‘characteristics’) which I hope to resolve, but — well, see for yourself (about 1 minute movie):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttc3Fd8akhA

dilute India ink spiral test with my finger for scale

concentric circles with splashes

concentric circle tests overlapped

So how many individual colors can be printed (not considering gradations or variations in color on any single block)? Let’s see:

• 1 blank paper
• 3 yellows
• 5 reds
• 15 red-yellows
• 4 blues
• 12 blue-yellows
• 20 blue-reds
• 60 blue-reds-yellows
• ===
• 120 different colors at most from the 12-reduction printings of 3 blocks
• (4096 different colors at most from 12 different blocks not reduced)

self-portrait, January 15, 2004, 15 x 10 inches, woodblock print - 3 block 12-state reduction, Prussian Blue, Primary Red, Transparent Yellow on Yamaguchi hosho , 44 sheets printed

self-portrait, July, 2000, 11 x 8.5 inches, watercolors on paper

state 3 (pale red, yellow, blue), and state 2 (pale red and yellow)