PRINT QUARTERLY, XXVI, 2009, 4, Page 409

NOTES

MIKE LYON. For various reasons, very modest exhibition catalogues are sometimes worth noting in Print Quarterly. This is the case with Figuring it Out: Prints and Drawings by Mike Lyon (Manhattan, KS, Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Kansas State University, 2009, 8 pp., 10 col. ills., free), which includes an essay by Bill North. For this photorealist printmaker has made use of his knowledge of computerized technology to create a series of digitally based colour woodcuts. Mike Lyon studied at the University of Pennsylvania and the Kansas City Art Institute before going to work in [976 in his family’s cattle-hide processing business. There he invented a computerized system to automate the process of grading cattle hides. This led him to set up a successful computer hardware and software design business, which specialized in providing warehouses with a computerized system for automating orders. In 1991 Lyon sold the company and became a full-time artist. A great admirer of Japanese aesthetics and printmaking and an avid collector of ukiyo-e prints, he taught Japanese woodblock techniques at the Center for Contemporary Printmaking in Norwalk, Connecticut. He based the designs for his own woodcuts on photographs. Lyon used Prussian Blue ink similar to that used in aizuri-e woodcuts and followed Japanese methods in printing. Rather than printing from multiple blocks, however, he used a single block, reprinting it to achieve the results that he desired by the reduction woodcut method.

In 2004 Lyon decided to use his knowledge of computers to further his art, acquiring a ShopBot CNC (computer numerically controlled router) designed for woodworking applications. As North describes, he adapted the machine to carve his blocks. The first woodcut that Lyon printed using the ShopBot was carved from fifteen separate cherry plywood blocks, although he maintained his approach to the work conceptually as a reduction woodcut. This print of a full frontal head close to the picture plane bears similarity to some of the works of Chuck Close. More recently Lyon has created a large-scale print of a reclining nude, using paper especially made for him by Iwano Ichibei. To print it, he designed and made his own printing press with a five-by-ten feet bed, and adapted the elements of an electric garage door to act as a drawer, which cantilevers over the bed laying the paper on the block as the drawer retracts. Lyon has also used the machine to create immense photographically based pen and ink drawings.

The exhibition also included eighteen Japanese woodblock prints from the artist’s own collection. Dating from between c. 1767 and 1928, these were chiefly of actors and beautiful women, the two illustrated in the catalogue being expressive close-up facial portraits. Cori Sherman North provides a brief description of ukiyo-e prints to accompany them. MARTIN HOPKINSON

It seemed to take forever to narrow the photos down to a handful — some of them full figure and some just of the head.  Topper and Linda and I consulted and, based on Toppers dislike of my favorite head, I decided to use the standing portrait he liked best.  It turned out to be VERY difficult to get an image I liked and which I thought wnted to become ‘art’.  After MUCH adjustment back and forth, an image eventually developed which I thought worthy.  However, that image was a BEAR to complete.  For some reason, I could NOT keep my pens working and went thorough over 150 of them before I called it ‘done’!!  But the drawing turned out very well, I think!

"Topper" 2009, 79x38 inches, pen and ink on Rives BFK paper

detail

detail

 

I received a very sweet note from Topper after I delivered the framed drawing:

November 2, 2009

Dear Mike,

Your artwork is absolutely captivating.

Seen from afar or near – from a “micro” aspect, or a “macro” aspect – it simply soars. The overall composition is commanding and, at the same time, any square centimeter of that overall composition is utterly fascinating in its intricacy and rhythm

Mike, you are a truly grand visual artist.

And, I must add, a very smart human being. You continuously demonstrate intellectual prowess as well as psychological observations of considerable perspicacity.

And add this to your “human package”: you are just a prince of a guy.

Congratulations my friend, on your marvelous accomplishments, but also simply on the qualiry of the life you have led.

Sincerely,

Topper

The emotion in Mike Lyon’s artwork is inspired by old Japanese prints. The shapes are determined by the contours of the faces of his closest friends, friendly strangers, and the outcome hinges on the mechanics of his latest digital tools.

“Figuring it out: Prints and drawings by Mike Lyon” is on display until July 18 at the Beach Museum of Art.

Bill North, senior curator at the museum, said though Lyon has always had an artist’s touch and studied art in college, he got his start when he went to work in Kansas City, Mo., for his family’s cattle hide processing business in 1976. While working there, Lyon invented a computerized system that made it faster and easier for the workers grading cattle hides. His idea was wildly successful, and Lyon was able to sell his new machine and go to work as an artist full time.

This type of automation and machinery play a large role in Lyon’s work, along with a taste for Japanese print work, North said. Lyon has a collection of nearly 2,000 Japanese prints.

“One thing that really attracted me to his work is that few artists are using digital technology in a responsible and judicious way,” North said. “This marriage of Western and Eastern traditions and ways is so fascinating.”

Mike Lyon and "Crosby" (photo: Chelsy Leuth)

At the entrance to Lyon’s gallery at the Beach Museum, five oversized faces stare out, full of ambiguous emotion, each wrinkle and hair clearly defined in a maze of ink squiggles and geometric shapes.

Lyon said he starts his process by having the model for each piece come in to his Kansas City studio, where he takes hundreds of photos of their face. He then spends several weeks painstakingly selecting the perfect photo to turn into a print piece.

“Most people don’t look like art,” he said. “But the right image — I know it when I see it, it’s just the aesthetics, I can’t explain it.”

He then programs a machine called the ShopBot with data converted from the digital photographic files to trace the image with a simple ink pen. The files tell the machine how far to move the pen along X, Y and Z axes for each bit of the piece. Lyon said this process is long and tedious and requires him to watch the machine to replace the pens when they run out and make sure the thick paper he prints on stays in place.

Lyon said he has been criticized for using technology so prominently in his work, but he feels that it takes just as much artistry to create his own computer programs and machines to make his pieces come to life.

“My ideas and my blocks and my shapes and my designs are not done by a computer,” Lyon said. “That comes from me, from my mind, and then I just make it happen, whether it’s my hand on the pen or my machine — just another tool.”

“Linda,” a featured piece in the gallery, is one Lyon printed of his wife, Linda Lyon. According to research compiled by North, this piece is 77-by-46 inches and took more than 12 million lines of code and 11 days of continuous drawing on the ShopBot.

Linda said she enjoyed posing for Mike because it gave her a chance to see him work.

“I never know how he is going to do something!” Linda said, laughing. “Every piece just turns out to be his own blend of the thoughts in his head.”

Video walk-through of exhibition

Linda, Sandy Kemper, Mary Feigenbaum, Christine Kemper, Frank Wewers, Helen Wewers -- the champagne begins!

The group arrives at the Beach Museum of Art in Manhattan, Kansas

Group photo at the Beach (standing l-r): Bill North, Helen Wewers, Christine Kemper, Sandy Kemper, Frank Wewers, Mary Feigenbaum, Linda Lyon, Hanna Blick (reporter), Mike Lyon lying down on the job (photo: Thomas Park)

Bill North explains something or other to Sandy Kemper

Frank Wewers is blown away by a large pastel drawing

Helen and Frank Wewers with Christine Kemper

Mary Feigenbaum and Linda Lyon

Frank Wewers speeds by 'Jessica Paper Dolls' drawing (or print?)

Thomas Park (right) is happy to see us

Bill North begins a tour of the curatorial, storage, and framing areas under the museum

Christine, Mary, and Frank in one of the works on paper rooms

Sandy and Christine Kemper relax outside the Manhattan Courthouse after our visit to the Beach Museum and a quick tour of the Strecker Nelson Gallery

We arrive at Cafe Beautiful in Lawrence, Kansas

Linda and Mary at Cafe Beautiful

Interesting 'stuff' including this 16mm projector decorate the dining room (across from a hookah parlor) at Cafe Beautiful

The first of eight courses at Cafe Beautiful - egg and shrimp custard baked in a squash shell

Mmmm-mmm good! Sandy LIKES it!

Linda and Mary during first course

Christine and Helen, too!

Sandy and Frank deep in conversation

Hashi on green ceramic platters

Beautiful and delicious fruit are being served by Cafe Beautiful owner, waiter, dish-washer, Chef Ken Sukan

Chef Ken Sukan was our very gracious host

The fruit course was (temporary) sculpture and VERY edible!

the group enjoys a moment of conversation between courses

Chef Ken Sukan puts the finishing touches on a 'salad' of veggies in a cucumber roll bowl -- DELICIOUS!

A snapper shashimi was served

hamachi wrapped california rolls with grilled unagi (OMG)!

Check out that sculpted cherry tomato!

STILL having a LOT of fun halfway through the two hour service! WHAT a day! What a wonderful evening! What a great time with the best of friends!

 

Senior Curator of the Beach, Bill North, met us and guided the group through a tour of the permanent collection.  I THINK everyone got to see the exhibition rooms with my work, but I’m really not sure because a reporter for the K-State newspaper, Hanna Blick was waiting to interview me…  I think I talk WAY too much — she had LOTS of questions and I enjoyed looking at the work with her and describing my various processes and techniques and what interested me about each…  When we finished, Bill gave us a tour of the museum’s extensive storage for works on paper, paintings, his office which was FULL of books and articles and lots of stuff organized in piles on his desk and bookshelves and floor and everywhere — lots to look at in there!  And in one of the file drawers he showed the large 10-drawing proof sheet I’d made over several months with different approaches to “Jessica Paper Doll” — it was a thrill to see that again after some months and I appreciated it much more.  I realized that I’ve been missing it!

I was pretty tired as we boarded the van for a 90 minute drive to Lawrence, Kansas for a special dinner at Chef Ken Sukan’s ’secret’ Cafe Beautiful.  Sandy and Christine had been raving about the Cafe for months.  Reservations must be made at least six weeks in advance.  Even though Cafe Beautiful does no advertising and doesn’t even have a sign out front, it seats only six (seven for us) and is very populer.  Now I understand ‘why’!  WOW!  Chef Sukan was born in Korea and trained there, in Japan, in China, Taiwan, France, and decided to move to Lawrence, Kansas after folding a map of the United States in half both ways and Lawrence, home to the University of Kansas, was exactly at the center.  He spends eight or nine months a year serving two to six guests in two seatings daily and the rest of the time he travels and teaches cooking and his special ‘Midwest’ sushi technique.

Cafe Beautiful shares the second floor of a downtown Lawrence storefront at 728 1/2 Massachusetts Street (785-84307423).  The other tenant is a very smokey bar aptly named Hookah House where (duh) people sit and smoke tobacco from hookah pipes, drink, and chat away.

Dinner was relaxed and elegant in eight beautifully designed courses.  Although I was exhausted when we entered, when the first course arrived I woke right up!  It was all delicious and gorgeously plated!  Really wonderful dining in an unusual setting and the best company. Chef Sukan made it all look easy and this was the perfect finish to a long and wonderful day.  Two minutes after we arrived home, I was sound asleep and felt just great in the morning (which is truly amazing given the mass quantities of champagne, wine, and sake I consumed throughout the day)!!!

THANKS so much Sandy and Christine for organizing this — you were GREAT hosts!

'Joanne' 2009, 35x21 inches, acrylic on tinted paper

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!

from the Goldman Collection: Ludovico Cardi (Rome, 1559-1613) c. 1610, about 17x11 inches, black chalk with brush and pale brown wash heightened with lead-white gouache on blue paper

from the Goldman Collection: Guido Reni (Bologna, 1575-1642) "Andromeda (?)" c. 1640, about 8x6 inches, pen and brown ink heightened with brush and white gouache on blue paper.

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!

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

 

Bill North and I had some interesting discussions about ‘what is a print’ in connection with this edition. Initially I’d intended to print each sheet in colors, then draw on top in register. In the end, I chose to draw in red, blue, and black inks to produce what is to my knowledge the very first fine-art edition of drawn drawings (or prints)… In the broadest sense of the word, I think, the noun ‘print’ is synonymous with the noun ‘multiple.’ But, since this image was created on a single sheet of paper, roughly 5 x 12 feet, even the word ‘multiple’ is subject to question. BEFORE I tore the sheet apart, it was most definitely a pen and ink drawing. Once I’d torn the sheet into 45 pieces, each about 10x15 inches, it became an edition of ‘prints’ I think, even though each is an original drawing.

"Jessica Paper Doll" 2009, 10x15 inches, pen and ink on paper

example of a 19th Century Japanese paper doll woodcut

a contact sheet of the photos I considered for the paper doll drawing(s)

one of the (many) late mock-ups for the drawings

a sheet of 10 proofs with various approaches to the drawing - about a month of work from the first to the last

final drawing with red ink begins

final drawing with blue ink underway (blue on red)

5x12 foot drawing completed and ready to tear out the 45 'prints'

 

from the Beach Museum of Art web site:

Figuring it Out: Prints and Drawings by Mike Lyon

April 14, 2009 -- July 18, 2009

Donna Lindsey Vanier Gallery

Kansas City-based artist Mike Lyon is the 2009 Friends of the Beach Museum of Art gift print artist. This exhibition features a selection of the artist’s recent prints and drawings, as well as examples from his extensive collection of Japanese prints. Lyon earned a BA in architecture and fine art (University of Pennsylvania, 1973) and a BFA in painting (Kansas City Art Institute, 1975). In 1976 he put his career as an artist on hold and joined the family business, a cattle hide processing operation in Kansas City his great-great grandfather started. Lyon invented a computerized system to automate the cattle hide grading process. In 1978 he founded Grading Systems, a computer hardware and software design company. Longing to make art full-time, Lyon sold his business interests and returned to his studio in 1991.

Lyon’s interest in computers and machines informs much of his recent work as a visual artist. His large-scale prints and drawings (as large as 84 × 45 inches) are based on his digital photographs of the human figure and inventively merge traditional art making methods and computer technology. Lyon’s work also demonstrates his keen interest in Japanese aesthetics. For example, his bust-length portrait heads recall the tradition of okubi-e (big-head picture) images. Lyon has an abiding passion for Japanese art and culture and is an avid collector of Japanese ukiyo-e prints.

Lyon’s prints and drawings are created with the aid of a ShopBot CNC (computer numerically controlled) router, a programmable machine designed for woodworking applications. He has modified the ShopBot to create a giant drawing and block cutting machine. With data from the digital photographs, he calculates millions of lines of movement code with which to program the ShopBot. This code instructs the machine how far to move an ink pen or a router bit along the X (length), Y (width), and Z (height) axes for each mark or cut. The final images can require as many as 12 million lines of code and nearly two weeks of non-stop drawing or cutting.

“Figuring it Out” is sponsored by the Friends of the Beach Museum of Art Business Partners.

Cover of catalog from the Beach Museum 2009 exhibition

distorted panorama of exhibition

sign at front door advertising the gallery-talk

Linda with "Annette" and "Linda"

Crosby and Anthony drawings - senior curator Bill North at right

 

Printmaking with Extreme Technology (Erik Brunvand, Chair with Edward Bateman, Stephen Hoskins, and Mike Lyon) 10-11:30am Friday, March 27 at Columbia College, Hokin Lecture Hall, 623 S. Wabash Ave, room 109

Printmaking is an art form that celebrates and embraces new technology in a way that other media do not. This panel gathers an international group of artists that are using extreme technology to make works that can only be called prints, but that are far removed from traditional printmaking techniques. These techniques include printing on silicon chips with image sizes measured in micrometers (millionths of meters), prints that include LEDs and other electrical components, 3D printing where the result is a solid object, the use of 3D computer modeling tools to create virtual worlds that are then printed digitally, and a wide variety of ways to use CNC routing in the printmaking process.

(l-r) Erik Brunvand, Steve Hoskins, Ed Bateman

The auditorium begins to fill 20 minutes prior to our talk - once underway, every seat was filled and people were in the aisles along both walls.

 

There were 120 – 140 in the audience when Erik introduced our panel and we got underway.

Ed Bateman, 'Ambassadors'

Steve Hoskins, four 3D models

Erik Brunvand, woodcut

Our talks seemed to be enthusiastically received and there was time for 30 minutes of questions and answers.  VERY FUN!

'Linda' 77x46 inch pen and ink drawing, July 31, 2008

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)!

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.

Claude Mellan (1598-1688, 1649, engraving, 'Sudarium'

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 were drawn)

detail of eye (complete)

completed drawing on machine bed

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

using CNC it was so very easy to cut an ellipse to perfectly fit the angle of the hose hook-ups!

vacuum plenum complete

3-zone control of vacuum to table via simple knife gate valves

vacuum hose hooked up to fitting on table bottom

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!!!

 

'Crosby' exhibited at Beach Museum of Art April-July, 2009

“Crosby” Dec 2007, 84 x 45 inches, pen and ink drawing on Arches 300 lb. hot press watercolor paper

 

– Mike

"Crosby" pen and ink with watercolor, 90 x 45 inches (permanent collection, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art)

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)…

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.

original plan for color areas with mock-up

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.

preparing to paint using pencil outline guides

pink watercolor applied -- belt still needs to be painted

frisket mask painted around area to become blue

blue painting completed, frisket removed

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!

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

the needlepoint I've been working on (from Linda's happy design)

plan colors for "Linda"

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).

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

“Linda” painting underway

"Linda" painting underway

detail showing blue and crimson dots

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.

'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 of Jim litho

September 7, 2007 -- Mike Sims and I met for the first time at the 'Backstage Pass' exhibition at the Kemper Museum and he suggested we collaborate!

September 30, 2007 - proposed images for collaboration with LLW

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.

October 3, 2007 - test images on different tinted papers

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.

October 15, 2007 - 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

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…

First proof of "Jim" 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 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!

November 5 and 6 proof on BFK Tan paper which I printed moku-hanga style from two blocks (first printing a cherry block in a blue/green, and then an ash block in a neutral-ish red which gave the pronounced wood grain). This example now framed and in the collection of the model, Jim.

Photos from the ‘print signing’ party April 13, 2008:

November 28, 2007 - Jim dropped in to see some of the proofs at LLW

Group gets first look at 'Jim'

April 13, 2008 - signing the edition

signing the edition

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.

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

 

panorama of Backstage Pass at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City

“Sarah” April 5, 2006, 7 x 3.75 feet, pen and ink drawing, Permanent Collection, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art

“Arthur”, Oct 31, 2006, 77 x 42.5 inches, pen and ink on Rives BFK paper, private collection

Mike Sims of Lawrence Lithography Workshop with 'Arthur' -- future collaborater

Exhibition catalog cover

Roger Shimomura, Chuck Close inside catalog

 

By pairing artworks from area private collections with examples by the same artists represented in the Kemper Museum’s permanent collection, this exhibition offers visitors a rare opportunity to see outstanding paintings, photographs, and sculptures by internationally acclaimed artists, including Willem de Kooning, Duane Hanson, Deborah Butterfield, Helen Frankenthaler, Lezley Saar, and Mike Lyon, among others, normally housed in private homes and offices. The diversity and quality of the featured works are not only a testament to Kansas City’s rich history of supporting the visual arts through public and private patronage, but also proof to the thriving support and enthusiasm for the arts in the city today.

Backstage Pass showcases noteworthy paintings by prominent American artists Richard Estes, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, and Frank Stella, highlighting the level of commitment and intensity shared by many area collectors.

Equally important are the collections that include works by artists that reside in the Kansas City area, such as Wilbur Niewad, Roger Shrmomura, and Michael Sincair. Portraits by Andy Warhol and Kansas City-based Mike Lyon illustrate the gratifying relationship that often develops between artist and patron-arguably one of the most enjoyable facets of championing living artists.

Rachael Blackburn Cozad, Director
Christopher Cook, Curator
Backstage Pass exhibition catalog

Wow! What a thrill!

Self Portrait, 43 x 27 inches, July 10, 2007, painting in acrylics on Rives BFK

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’…

the first attempt was on light weight drawing paper -- it proved too weak to survive the abrasive action of the flow pencil

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

 

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.