In January, 2014 my then studio assistant, Carrie Riehl, walked in one morning wearing shorts (in January?) and showing off her new 2nd hand red, white, and blue leather jacket and I said, “let’s go photograph you right now!”
In May I generated sixty drawing layers of red, yellow, blue, black, and white squiggles intended to produce a drawing of one of the images I liked from the January photos. I also was admiring some archival prints Carrie had produced with the assistance of Bruce Bettinger at Dolphin Printing. Her prints really were just gorgeous! I spoke with Bruce and he provided me a link so I could upload very large graphics files to be output on his large format printer.
I modified one of my earlier programs to read the movement code I’d generated for my CNC machine and convert the movements to vectors and output them in a DXF file compatible with Adobe Illustrator. I processed the 60 layers of machine movements into 60 DXF files and loaded them into Illustrator. Then I stacked them up in layers, applied color, transparency, and line thickness to each and output the resulting image to Photoshop where I further adjusted the image to taste and uploaded the resulting flat image to Dolphin for them to print and adhere to aluminum backing. Wow, it looks great to me! The background is especially complex and lively. One of the most attractive things I’ve made, it hangs near the entrance to my studio and I admire it every day!
“Carrie Americana” 2014, 80 x 42 inches, archival print on aluminum
detail of “Carrie Americana”
I also made several half-size versions with more saturated colors, but I much prefer the one illustrated above.
“Carrie Americana” 2014, 40 x 21 inches, archival print on aluminum
“Carrie Americana” 2014, 40 x 18, drawing in five ink colors on paper mounted to aluminum