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!

I’ve successfully moved my ShopBot CNC machine from the 3rd to the 1st floor… After cutting a large vacuum plenum to hold 4×8 foot by quarter-inch plywood sheets flat and solidly in place on the machine, I experimented yesterday by carving the dozen blocks for my prints for Baren Forum Mythical Beasts Exchange (#27).

My kids gave me a nifty and TINY little all-digital video camera for XMAS, and I used it to shoot a 2 1/2 minute video of the computer-guided tool in action:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8z2NEUO1lSc

You may want to turn down your volume as the router is very loud and obnoxious… What you’ll see are some brief cuts of V-bit carving to outline the printing shapes, then clearing outside the V-carved areas with a 1/4″ down-spiral — I’ve also shown a couple of views of the control screen — the first shows each line of program code as it’s executed — I think we’re at about line 14,000 in the shot — later there’s a view showing the cutting head position in X (length) Y (width) and Z (height) coordinates.

The blocks turned out quite nicely! I’ll be printing in pinks and greens for this one…

'Hannya' January 22, 2006, chuban (about 10x8) woodcut from twelve blocks for barenforum.org exchange 27 (mythical beasts)

"Traffic II", 1995, 9 x 9 inches, plexi-block print, Rives BFK paper

"Traffic", 1995, 9 x 9 inches, plexi-block print, Rives BFK paper

The cubes could be set in four ways (I didn’t print with the band-sawed sides) to print 100%, 75%, 50%, or 25% (and I used 3/8″ slices to leave a square blank). Then I arranged the cubes into grids using a printing frame I made for the purpose and printed.

In 1995 I was experimenting with ‘strings’ of repeating numbers, spiralling the sequence of numbers around a center point, and later mapping colors onto the numbers to better understand the patterns produced. For this print, I counted from 0 up to 7 and from 7 back to 0 beginning in the middle and moving down first, then counter-clockwise (on the print), changing direction as each corner was reached. A ’0′ printed 100% (black), then 1 & 2 printed 75%, then 3 & 4 printed 50%, then 5 & 6 printed 25%, and finally ’7′ printed 0% (white).

The color version was part of the 1995 Hand Print Press portfolio., the blocks were arranged, printed in black, and then I rotated each block 90 degrees and printed the arrangement again in order to produce the black hatches, or squares which appear in the print. In the color version, each color was printed using the un-machined (100%) face, and then the black was printed twice as already described.

I find the pattern produced extremely interesting — it’s easy to see there’s some sort of regularity, but difficult to understand exactly what it is, and I like that. I love that the final spiral (outer row) is symmetrical in several ways.