Oakland 112103
Oakland
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The Oakland HTML drawing is the last drawing in the series "Places I Have Slept," which began August 3, 2003. I saved Oakland for last since it's where I live and a town I like. The series includes 133 places (I know there are more places than this, but I can't remember or name them), and a drawing for each place. There are just a few instances where I posted two or three drawings on a single day, usually places that, in my mind, somehow, I associate together.
All drawings start with a small table, say 18 x 16 cells, with each cell 20 x 20 pixels. Except for a few drawings most have a strict grid structure of 20 x 20 pixel units. In a few cases I varied row height or column width, but mostly I set out to do pretty straightforward drawings based on a gird of equal units. There is nothing fancy here: no tables inside tables, no non-standard table attributes, no layers, no style sheets.
The tables are made with Dreamweaver. Each day I picked a place from the list, meditated on the place , even if briefly, by saying the name, or picturing myself there, or trying to get a feeling of being in a place and surrounded by it, and tried to begin with the image that popped into my head, at least as a starting place. Of course, images in my head are not as complete or as quick to make as by hand. What almost always happened is that the image changed a lot through the making as I added or deleted columns and rows and copied and pasted code from one area of the table to another. In some ways this is more like a collage process.
During some periods I'd get in a groove, finding new effects, enjoying the space being created, fretting over too much illusion-like transparency or the hint of perspective. Each time during the process of making a drawing I'd think of a next step, and knowing that this next step might be a laborious thing to do, and thus undo if I didn't like it, I would copy the current state, paste it, and work on this copy. Sometimes I would have a page, then, with maybe a dozen drawings, each a previous state of the next. A drawing might go through a many changes during its making, and it's interesting to looking back through some and see the stages they went though; I have them all saved.
Sometimes I would make a very complex image, going through eight or ten stages, only to feel that I wasn't getting what I wanted, and so set off rapidly in a completey different direction, making the final drawing in just a few mintues very quickly and very simply, as if I had to go through a very elaborate process to arrive at something direct, even minimal, with few shapes or colors.
When I made the list and started this series I had no idea it would last this long. I thought I would do more multiple-drawing days, but obviously it didn't work out that way. I also began with the intention of all drawings being the same size and dimensions, but I quickly abandoned this as each place is quite different in my memory, and the associations of some were more fond or intense than others. Having them all be the same size or dimensions would have instead lead to a logo-like series, and clearly to me, as some places are more important than others, or feel different, then each drawing had to be somewhat unique. Also, some places are intimate, some big and open, or, instead, my associations with these places might be more intimate or maybe large and open. I have a general sense that urban places are intimate, and rural or more wild places are larger or more open.
I have seen many painting shows where a painter has a motif, a figure, or a layout, and each painting in that body of work is just a different set of colors. Imagine any one of my drawings repeated ten or twelve times where the only real problem from work to work is color. This works well for some people, but I seem to have a hard time doing this. I don't naturally repeat myself, but instead have to choose to constantly do so. Typically, I've got to at least do enough of a significant variation from work to work so that I have not only a color problem but also a drawing problem, a spatial problem, and a scale problem to work with.
I"ve enjoyed having a project with over three months with a daily predetermined subject; this has freed me each day to memory, imagining, invention, and discovery.
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Nice David Cohen review of current shows by Howard Hodgkin and Thomas Nozkowski.
The artist has a peculiar dead-pan touch... He is not a minimalist: on the contrary, there is enormous variety in the quality of marks he puts down; but nor is he an expressionist who invests textures or strokes with "personality." His colors are odd and interesting but never terribly pleasant. The ultimate irony of his diffident yet involved touch and his insignificant but insistent signs is that he is not an ironist, either. So what is Thomas Nozkowski?
The answer, I think, is that he is a truly radical abstract artist. There is an incredible sensation in a Nozkowski exhibition that although each painting is unmistakably his from a mile away, no two paintings are really alike. The enigma is always self-contained: The eye is detained and engaged within the picture. Taking to heart Kant's definition of beauty as "purposiveness without purpose," Mr. Nozkowski has found a great means by which to keep himself-and us-busy.
Say...
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