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.

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 1×1 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.

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 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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbuosJE_2fs

(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!

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!

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.

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)

Use a razor knife and straight edge to cut out the colored squares along the black lines. Paste 143 yellow squares over the 143 ‘M’s, 160 magenta squares over 160 ‘I’s, 186 red squares over 186 ‘K’s, 91 cyan squares over 91 ‘E’s, 73 green squares over 73 ‘A’s, and 74 blue squares over 74 ‘R’s in order to complete the portrait of the artist.

Portrait of the Artist, _/25 Mike Lyon 1997

"Do It Your-Self Portrait of the Artist", 1997, seven color Lithograph on BFK Rives paper, about 46cm x 61cm

"6,401 Self Portraits", 1995, four color Lithograph on BFK Rives paper, about 7" square.

Detail, about 2 inches wide from "6,401 Self Portraits"

This is another “tiled” image. I made five little rectangular black and white self portrain images, each one designed to cover the rectangle with more ink than the previous, in 25% increments. Then I wrote some computer programs to make the job of analysis easier. For each of the 1600 cells in the image, for each of the four colors, I calculated the ink coverage and applied the appropriate one of the five little self-portraits. Then I laser printed the yellow, blue, magenta and black images on paper, transferred the toner to litho plates, processed the plates, and printed each color one on after the other.

"Embedded Self Portraits", 1996, deeply embossed four color Lithograph on Rives BFK paper, image about 14" x 19".

I love looking at all the incredible (and sometimes funky) variation among the small portraits…