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.

The opening Friday, September 1 of “Mike Lyon: Large Scale Drawings and Woodblock Prints” was a pretty humongous party! I suppose more than 600 people passed through the gallery that evening between 7 when the doors were unlocked and about 9:40 when Sherry Leedy shooed the last of us out the door. I saw MANY old friends which was just wonderful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbhP6GzapK0

my VERY old friend (when I lived in New York, I occasionally walked him to pre-school), the now best selling author Seth Mnookin and his friend (they later married) Sara visited the next day while they were in town for a wedding and it was great to touch base again (photo: Jennifer Bowerman)

My 1974-1975 painting instructor, retired chair of the Kansas City Art Institute’s painting department, Wilbur Niewald, was there — he just returned from a Guggenheim Fellowship spent painting in the Southwest US. He had the most wonderful time and we’ve got a dinner planned to find out all about it. Wilbur’s close friend, another retired painting professor at the Art Institute, Michael Walling was there and bought my “Fixing Hair” print. That was very nice.

Another KCAI retired faculty member, Victor Babu (of ceramics fame) visited and really seemed to love EVERYthing! He’s an enthusuiastic guy and characterized my big “Sara” reclining nude woodcut this way: “Omenish, very very omenish — the deep-deep-darks and the figure turned away — as if she’s sad or angry and maybe she’s talking about it — but what’s she saying? She’s rolled away up there but there’s that comfortable knitted thing up front — it’s soft, but she’s turned away from the comfort thing and us and all those deep blues — oh-menish… very VERY oh-menish!” — I asked him to please write my artist’s statement! (ha, ha)!

The director of the Kemper Museum, Rachel Blackburn, was there and bought the big “Sarah” drawing for their permanent collection. That felt great, I can tell you! Doug Freed, Director of the Daum Museum was there earlier with Dr. Daum and bought bought the big “Jon” drawing for their permanent collection! Wow and double-WOW! Very validating to me that these two excellent regional contemporary art museums stepped up and collected my most recent work on opening day!

The place was a veritable BUZZ of activity all night long — people pressing their noses right up against the prints and drawings, pointing and talking and it all seemed very energetic and positive! Now I’ve settled down a bit and am waiting for post-partum depression to overwhelm me!

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

detail

Framed drawing in studio (plastic wrapped)

The squiggly lines in my new drawing are concentric tracings of each tone layer — in that drawing there are 22 tones, I believe — I was experimenting (pretty successfully) with creating tone by that weird cross-hatching — each tone layer was treated exactly the same way — by ‘coloring’ them in with little parallel concentric squiggles on about .o8″ centers — quite a programming challenge! First I traced the darkest area, next the two darkest areas as if they were one area (changes the shape of the area so a random sort of ‘cross hatching’ may occur), then traced the three darkest areas as if they were single shapes, etc. etc. until finally I traced the entire non-white area… Worked well! The paper held up and in the darks, there’s a beautiful low-relief ‘combing’ from the repeated passing of the extra-fine point Precise V5 Rolling Writer pen (eight or nine of them, actually — they only hold enough ink for 10 or 12 hours of drawing)… I’m finding it quite difficult to briefly describe my process, but it’s pretty simple, really…

In a way, this drawing took exactly one month to produce, if you include the previous failed efforts and the one-week workshop I taught at Center for Contemporary Printmaking in Norwalk, CT last month.  Here’s a short movie from my first attempt (which was torn to shreds by the pen — the paper stretched, wrinkled, then tore under the repeated drawing) — shot March 6, 2006:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xL3Hyd2MIi8