I want to go back to your first post in which, while referring to some things we have in common, you wrote, "The second is our own individual work. Specifically, I’m thinking about our recent shows—your HTML drawings at the 1708 Gallery in Richmond, Virginia, and my paintings in encaustic at the Marcia Wood Gallery in Atlanta—because our work shares a geometric sensibility and, despite our extremely different mediums, a similar kind of luminosity."
The geometric question is a tough one for me to address immediately. I don't know the answers off the top of my head. I like to work out ideas through either writing or conversation, and of those two modes writing gets me closer because of the pace and possibility through revision of greater precision. I recently had to confront this when writing a statement for Geoform.net, which I was recently invited join. Not everything I wrote made it into the final statement, but in reading the first draft Julie Karabenick, one of the editors of Geoform, picked up on what she thought was a hint of perhaps the accidental or ambivalence (not her words) on my part about geometry; something having to do with my use of HTML for making drawings as kind of an acquiescence to the medium; in other words, I didn't choose geometry, but I chose to use it because the medium itself, HTML, is necessarily geometric. I didn't say this outright in the statement, but she picked up on it in a few things I said, which was perceptive, and it made me think about this issue.
The HTML drawings are one aspect of my overall body of work. Some drawings (on paper) I make have ruled lines or brush strokes, so they appear geomtric. But generally, my paintings are not geometric in the sense of Geometric Art. Sure, I may use the occasional straight- usually hand-painted, as I rarely use tape or anything to make a precise edge- but my paintings are more... what? I'm trying to avoid a whole bunch of words like loose, open, organic, biomorphic, naturalistic. All of this language, detached from an image, can prove so misleading. I will just say that my paintings are often about landscape or architectural spaces and the place of the figure in them or, the idea and/or feeling of the viewer as that figure, either through a visual, physical, or memory experience. More importantly, though, is that they're paintings, and they share in the gestalt of what a painting is through history: support, form, line, surface, mark, paint, color, image, object.
(BTW, the HTML drawings are not paintings, because they don't completely share the painting gestalt. They have: support (monitor), form (cells), line (barely, and often tied to form), color (plenty), and image. The surface of the HTML drawing is the monitor, so it's constant and without variation, so it doesn't count for me. The remainder of what's missing are mark, paint, and object.)
I have always had an attraction to minimal, geometric or hard-edged painting. I'm a big fan of John McLaughlin (for those of you who don't know who he is, perhaps you can read this or that or here and look at these or those). There are all kinds of names we throw around: Constructivists and Suprematist, de Stijl, Conrete, Mondrian, Newman, etc. And I've written plenty about minimalist or geometric-family artists, plus all the interviews I've done for Minus Space.
But the thing is, I have never myself been able to make work that I would call geometric. I just don't want to do it. I'm not neat and tidy. I'm not a taper. I don't make work that goes to all the edges, that is even and uniform. I have a very strong case of approach/avoidance regarding craft. I use the grid a lot, and I might start a painting with some kind of system or order to it, but I always break it down. I want to make an image that is, and feels to me, composed and built, rather than found, and if I use the grid too much, or other kinds of constructed forms it feels "found" to me. So I skirt around architectural form a lot in painting.
Maybe the best thing to do is to quote my Geoform.net statement, because I think it says much about how this use of geomtric imagery came to be in the HTML drawings. I will add that much of what I wrote below, and much of what I'm writing here in general, is not something I knew going into the work; instead, it is what I learned about what I am doing over time, looking back, writing about it at various opportunties.
I use HTML to make tables with colored cells that are rendered by a web browser as an image. I make one drawing every day to show on my weblog. The images are not made to be printed, and they are not plans for “real” paintings. They are simply what they are, meant to be seen on a monitor, framed by the browser, within the window of an operating system, in the serial, chronological, hyperlinked context of a weblog. Each drawing is typically one in a series, and is also meant as an individual, stand-alone image.
HTML is a simple medium with many limitations. It is inherently and inescapably geometric. It consists of right angles, straight edges, smooth and even surfaces. The range of color is confined to the possibilities of the monitor, which ensures a uniform intensity. However, I find a great deal of freedom working within this medium, and despite these limitations, since the HTML drawings exist on the Web, they are extremely portable and easy to disseminate, brilliantly backlit by the monitor, and instantly viewable and linkable. Since 2000 my weblog has been a studio wall, a gallery, and an archive.
Each series of HTML drawings has a subject (topical, historical, personal), explores one or more formal problems (color, shape, line, format, visual effect), and provides a technical challenge (making an HTML table do things it wasn’t intended to do). A series may last ten, fifteen, or twenty-five days, but recently each series has lasted exactly one calendar month.
The idea of making HTML drawings occurred to me as a way to integrate images into a weblog without needing an additional graphic file. Computer icons comprising a small grid of pixels were an early inspiration, and the earliest drawings resembled enlarged, blockier icons. The HTML table allowed me to follow my natural attraction to the grid and abstraction. Over time, as I have pushed the medium, the images have become more dynamic, complex, and expressive. In recent HTML drawings I have used animated GIFS and JPEG backgrounds.
Even when using geometric form there is still the impulse to make an image that is surprising, dynamic, and expressive. In a medium where it's easy to make perfectly measured grids the challenge is to go beyond the expectation of given order and structure. My goal is to make an image that the viewer relates to as something beyond a bunch of rectangles. I want to make images that encourage associations to nature, the body, place, thought, sound, language, social relations, and history.
So, I am often working against and trying to break down the resistant rigidity of the HTML table, and there are little things I do to distract the viewer away from the geometry: gradation, shadow, overlap and looping line, shifts in alignment, associations to forms that makes one think of something other (a door! a building! a space! a figure!) than geometry (a vertical rectangle! a taller rectangle! a square! a spiral!). Sometimes I think it works.
I titled this "Gee-oh-my-tree!" when I originally started this post several days ago and didn't get too far. This was probably just some stalling disguised as phonetic wordplay on my part, buying time to think how to write about this. But I actually think the title means something to me. One obvious thing is that my need to break down the word is part of my need to breakdown assumptions about an art that appears to be something that one might label geometric. But also, I think the feeling I get from breaking down the word "geometry" into the sentence, "Gee, oh my tree," tells something about how I look for and take from geometric structure in nature. This is where a lot of the images- on canvas, paper, and in HTML- come from.
I agree that we have luminosity in common, but also each are quite different: mine are more luminescent from a distant, and yours up close. I'd have to comfirm this by looking at one of your paintings again, but I think the kind of depth and luminousness in your paintings becomes much richer up close; not that they don't have it from a distance, but even more so up close when one see the layers and is closer to the light reflected from the depths of those layers. For me, one of the best ways to get the full effect of the HTML drawings is from a distance, say five or six feet; the light off the monitor needs to travel a bit. When one's eyes are too close to the monitor, within a couple of feet, which is the routine distance, I think we just don't see the light in the same way. In my paintings I'm usually after a more naturalistic light, and a more pictorial kind of light rather than an intentionally physical, experiential kind of light.
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