"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 had already cut a bunch of mahogany plywood triangles to adorn the big ‘moon window’ in the room and had a bunch of  triangles left over. I attached them to 3″ squares of similar plywood to make movable tiles for block printing. I made a frame which held 108 of the tiles in two parallel grids each of which was 18 tiles long by 3 tiles wide. I arranged the tiles in the grids, inked them quickly with sumi, and printed them on a thin Japanese paper (Okawara Scroll). Then I rearranged the tiles, re-inked them, and reprinted the same papers. I repeated this process a number of times until I was satisfied with the depth and range of tones, and the results are pictured below.

The printing frame was so beautiful in the end! I permanently attached the tiles with short brads, framed the thing, and placed it in the room opposite the prints, which I had pasted onto linen and hung like Japanese scrolls.

the triangle blocks arranged in pattern, framed and mounted in room at UMB (collection UMB)

the triangle blocks hanging in room at UMB

two woodcut mono prints mounted as scrolls in room at UMB (collection UMB)

two woodcut monoprints mounted as scrolls in room at UMB

Untitled, 1999, 54 x 9 inches, woodcut monoprint from triangle tile set (collection of artist)

"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.