HTML as drawing

 

When I Met You (Pacific), 20060720, HTML, 300 x 400 pixels

Joanne, in your last post you talk about how you see my sensibility as a painter come out in the HTML drawings, and I'm glad to hear that. A few people have commented on that, and I suppose that's why people naturally call them paintings. In fact, it's very gratifying that you recognize that, because it is something I really work on, and I draw from my experience as a painter when making the images.

To be honest, when I see a lot of digital work by others I can see the lack of experience and the eye in the work, and this lack goes in one of two directions, both rooted in the inability to handle old-fashioned color, form, and composition.

The first direction is work that looks too digital, too blocky, to formless, without a good sense of color. The second direction is work that overcompensates by relying too much on the neat digital tools at one's exposure. I find the simplicity of HTML tables really freeing, and it gives me limits to push against. One of the ways to push against it is by using painterly knowledge about color, form, light. There's a way that HTML might force all of the daily work to look alike, but I think I've been able to get a kind of variety out of something that most people would've given up on long ago.

I think someone else who is really good at working against the seduction of digital work by working within some very narrow parameters is Tom Moody, and in particular his work on paper.

I call them drawings because it just seems to me historically drawing is a more flexible term, especially in post-Minimal times. For me a painting needs paint- painting is a specific medium. The meaning of drawing has for me more possiblities- it comes from disegno, design, and seems closer to idea and process and planning. There are issues of degrees of finish between drawing and painting. Drawing means all kinds of things: pencil on paper, collage or watercolor, a typewritten page, a stick moved over wet sand at a beach, a shadow on a wall, a finger on a frosted window pane. Picasso moved a flashlight in front of a camera during a time-exposure. Tom Marioni made drawings by rubbing paper with drummer's brushes. Hansel and Gretel's breadcrumb trail is a drawing. Brice Marden made drawings with wax and postcards. On and on.

And the feel of making these using Dreamweaver is closer to drawing for me than painting. I select areas, apply color in rows or columns, copy and paste sections- it feels in some way more that collage, but drawing is what it really is.

Does it matter if they're called painting or drawing? Not really- people will continue to call them paintings and I'll continue to call them drawings. Just don't call them late for supper.

More in another post.