December 2006 Archives

In school, I had a 3D design class. I was horrible at it - I only made one thing I really liked - a piece of sheet metal that I twisted to form a shape that could stand on its own, much like a spring. The form itself was nothing but a plane - hardly three dimensional. I was caught sleeping at *least* once in class, I was caught working on a painting at least twice. I remember my teacher thinking my idea of a kinetic sculpture of taking balls of paper and throwing them into a trash bucket was a joke (I thought it was great). My block of wood that was supposed to be changed to resemble a rock, didn't.

I just didn't really get anything out of the class - I don't really blame anyone except myself - perhaps I should say, I didn't *take* anything *from* the class.

I think my strength was more in translating what I saw in three dimensions into two, a much different process than creating something to live in the third.

A few things I did take from the class, now looking back:

+ Seeing my professor in the wood shop. He had a piece of styrofoam and was cutting it on a band saw and sanding it on the belt sander - a little here, a little there. I asked him what he was making. He said,

"I... dunno"

And smiled at me and went about doing... whatever. I wasn't his favorite person, but it was nice, to see him so at ease, seeing the gears sort of turning. It was a completely different experience than when he was in class.

+ His first slide presentation (with *slides*). He showed some of his work - lots of these post minimalism pieces using nothing but pennies in interesting locations. He'd sort the pennies based on what color they were - new pennies where shinier and light, older pennies were duller and darker. These compositions of his were gigantic, using thousands of pennies. Cheap to make, terribly laborious. Anyways, there was this idea of economy of materials. There's usually a way to get cheap materials and the problem solving of using these materials plays into the actual piece.

He used another example from a different artist - Constantin Brancusi -

The Kiss

I really fell in love with this piece. It may be that I like to kiss, but the simplicity of the sculpture really hit me. It's *also* very two-dimensional, more of an extruded drawing than anything else.

So,

A few years later, I'm in my last semester of school - insanity - I honesty took a trip to whacky land afterwards. I had too many credits to complete and a semester that was something like 10 *weeks*, then to graduation and then, the Real World&trad;

I did some pretty silly things during this time.

For example:

About two weeks before graduation and without anything to show at the grad show (And I've hated recycling stuff, even though I had a large amount of work - *good* work), I decided to go on a road trip to Seattle and back and plunk down sculptures every where I went. I mean, hey, why not? I am horrible at sculpture! Let's make *that* illustrate the apex of my higher learning!

The sculptures themselves weren't really the point of the project - none of them would be shown. I was photographing them all, and *just* showing the photography - I had a little idea I was working on. In that sense - I could take a rather mundane subject that repeated and work on basically composition - something I knew how to do.

It was a fun project. Here's one example:

If you live in Seattle, this was in China Town,

I also visited the space needle. Another one of my favorite things to do, is to be in pictures of landmarks, in front of a cardboard background, depicting the landmark I was in. This is the one from the Space Needle.

TELL ME why the statue of liberty is hanging out in the shot with me. It's so very awesome. One more, just for comparison:

Looking back, I think my prof's penny compositions had some inspiration for this - who knows.

I got back from the trip (Or maybe I did this before - I forget) and I started going to the thrift stores, and buying up as many puzzles as possible - they go for anywhere from .25 to a dollar, each puzzle contains hundreds to thousands of pieces.

I thought - well, these are almost like parts of a painting already - all I have to do is intelligently put them all back together. Sort of like, make a mosaic out of the bits and pieces of, well basically photographs. Like a digital picture but instead of pictures - you use puzzle pieces - yeah you get the idea...

It sounded like an awesome idea, so there I was, in my studio, with plastic bins on one side and a stack of puzzles on the other - sorting these damn pieces by color and luminosity. I thought of this as a painter would - get your paint tubes in order, or your palette, before you start painting.

And I sorted thousands upon thousands of puzzle pieces, graduation becoming eminent and nothing really to show for much of the semester.

And then before I knew it, the semester was over. I had done nothing with the puzzle pieces.

I brought them home. All of them, still sorted. I moved a month later. I brought the puzzle pieces, throwing away quite a bit of my possessions.

A month later, I moved, *again*. Brought the puzzle pieces. Still, didn't do anything with them.

Over two years past.

A blizzard hits Denver. I have a cracked rib. I am gimpish.

I asked Mike to set up the ladder in my room, so I can reach a *very* high shelf. There's a project I started a year ago in London I want to work on and it was up there and -

Oh,

there are the puzzle pieces.

I take a few down and start to play with them. Why...

"I... dunno"

And my 3D design class from yarns ago resurfaces. (Damn you, professor!)

Here's some sketches I made, like the pin photos, a lot of these pieces is composition and less about the piece itself. I'm still not the best at sculpture and much better at placing things, what can I say.

First sketch, the line. I took a bunch of puzzle pieces and just basically glued them all together. I used acrylic medium - just something that was on hand.

Sort of circumvented the idea of what the puzzle piece was supposed to do - first off, connect with another puzzle piece in a very exact way and also, being available to show itself, to fulfill being a, "piece of the puzzle", literally. Naw, fuck that:

I also made it stand up (without support):

*usually* puzzles are flat.

And have at least a noticeable area:

Second sketch - The shape.

Again, I just glued puzzle pieces together with acrylic medium. The pieces are still pieces of something, yet the concave/convex parts are useless. Half the pieces aren't even showing the, "right" side.

I could stand this one up as well:

I like looking through circular things like this. The background seen through the puzzle pieces seems to somehow become removed from where it was and sort of come forward.

From above!

Third sketch - back to surface (tear!)

With a little bit of effort and patience, you can make any old puzzle piece fit into any other puzzle piece of a similar size. There's something sort of humorous about doing so - since the entire *point* of a puzzle is finding a piece's, well, buddies. If you just mash them in, it's like conforming by destroying conformity. Perhaps I just like jokes like this - who knows.

Obviously, a little color theory as well. The pieces aren't necessarily from the same puzzle - I just have bins of puzzle pieces - you know?

The best I could do in getting this sort of 3d is by leaning it against a wall:

That did make me look at the negative space a bit, so what do you do when you want to see something in more detail? Hold it up towards a light!

I don't know about you, but I think that's beautiful.

I can't help but see the light pour in and make sort of, reverse silhouettes of faces laughing and winking, or a frog jumping, blue birds flying, a duck in the water, a crescent moon, a weirdly deformed foot, someone in a hockey mask, or a mustache.

That was my little epiphany for the day, I think.

A two-sided painting. Both sides, a mandala.

One side, lucidia.

The other side, alex

Ephemeral Composition - another mandala. Pieces do not fit together, rather the shape of each piece hinder the creation of the composition.

Another angle. A drawing - an abstraction from the initial image (a photograph). Cut up, re-composed in a random, coincidential way.

A breath.

A cough.

A sneeze.

Woooooooosh!

It's gone.

Goodbye! Goodbye!

We shall see you again, (?), together with your neighboring pieces. If the puzzle ever gets solved.

When she opens the package - the package just two pieces of neglected cardboard taped together, this is what she'll see.

This is what she'll listen to on the CD:

Songs from New York, where I met you at 470 Broome St, SoHo, Manhattan NY - January, 2006. Over a year I thought and wished to give you these songs. Songs that make me remember you and our very short time in New York:

I know you'll read this before this all arrives in the post. Are you anxious? Are you nervous?

3.

2.

1.

Katie told me about a fundraising project she was putting on, to benefit Working With Artists. She took 5 bucks from me and gave me this:

A 4" square card with a few marks. The idea is that a whole bunch of people take one of these (after forfeiting $5) and create something on them - everyone's design has to somewhat correspond to the marks on the card. Then, we'll all put them together, and when we do, we'll make an exquisite corpse.

"More like a tiling", I told Katie, as with an exquisite corpse, you either see a little bit of the other person's drawing or the last few words of a sentence. In a tiling, you just want all the tiles to match up, somehow - and that's what the marks were - match points.

Now tiles and tiling are

"fold, bend, crease, close, collapse - crash.", May Installation, Andenken Gallery, 2' x 10' x 10'

"Step Out", July 2004 Installation at The Assembly

"And Dodd, Jul. ", January 2005 Installation at Pod/Capsule.

something I know quite a bit about. And I really didn't want to make a patterned tiling. The few examples Katie showed me of other people's work were patterns. I really didn't like the marks, as they had four points of reflective symmetry and four points of rotational symmetry - this can make a design somewhat dull and having perhaps, a hundred such designs - seemed like a snore. I wanted to break that up a bit on my own. And I like being a smart ass.

So, I asked myself: what's something that has many similar points, but all points are unique?

Well,

A city built on a grid pattern, like say, Denver:

has many physical points and each location is different. The points are laid out on an actual grid, so that you can almost fold a map of the city and all the streets will still align up - downtown Denver

has relective and rotational symmetry.

A good start.

Then I asked myself,

What could contrast a human made system, based on the logical grid? How about something natural? How about, the human face? Its form isn't based on the layout of a grid, but rather how muscle, skin and fat are attached to a framework of bone.

How about this face?

But, let's draw it - a drawing is an abstraction and also a unique and personal view of the original:

Could it be fun to see if we could find similarities between this drawing, and a map of the city that the person whom I drew lives?

Could these two different things share any visual similarities?

Well, no that really doesn't do it. More playing...

How about like this?

Even though most of the city is on a grid, some major arteries and highways, aren't. There's many reasons why this is, convenience of the placement, but also physical features of the terrain - rivers, hills - just off the map is a huge mountain range where it wouldn't be possible to build a gridded city.

The ability to see the similarities between these highway routes and some of the lines in the drawing is a human talent - if you look at the design long enough, most likely, you'll see the similarities. I think humans like figuring out how to disparate things fit together. We like making sense of what we see.

Just to finish this all off,

I can play with the colors of the map,

and switch the map around,

since we're not really using the map as a map, but instead as more of design element. Playing with the colors and flipping the map around introduces a type of abstraction - it becomes less apparent that what you're looking at is actually made from a map.

Color the woman blue and Viola! We're done!

The idea that the woman drawn is from Denver is a personal thing - if I didn't tell you, you wouldn't have known, but you may have inferred.

The drawing of the woman is colored blue and the maps has been colored red - with a fairly similar degree of lightness. This gives the design a tendency to look as if it's fluttering - this is a basic lesson in color theory.

The whole idea of joining two opposing things in one design reflects and complements the idea that this one design will soon be joined on four sides with four different designs. This is the basic concept and allows the idea to have sort of a fractal dimension to itself.

I guess this little piece is going for auction - it'll soon be shown publicaly. Hopefully, it'll raise a little more money for the non profit org.

--alex - with much design inspiration from Alan Fletcher and his book, "Beware Wet Paint"

I started drawing this picture:

I wanted to add, color, so I got out my watercolors.

The black ink started to run, since it was water-soluble. Damn it.

So, I painted it on a piece of cardboard, with house paint.

I thought it came out pretty well.

I cut it up,

into postcard-sized pieces and sent it out to someone I never met.

The only thing I asked of them was,

Please, we you receive them all and put it together, snap a picture and send the picture back to me. I want to see what it looks like all put together again

And they didn't.

(or)

See Also:
2006/6/29-beau.html

I cut this painting up, too:

And sent each piece as a postcard.

The only thing I asked of them was,

Please, we you receive them all and put it together, snap a picture and send the picture back to me. I want to see what it looks like all put together again

And they didn't.

Chalk on Colfax. Cameraphone