An Artist Statment

I have always wanted to be an artist. Ever since I was a little kid I was always making things and drawing.  When I would draw, I would create entirely new worlds that I would then be able to inhabit and explore. Drawing was a path to freedom. Like most kids, every time I would pick up a pencil it was like a new universe was being created. The rules were invented as the pencil moved across the page. I was the creator, participant and observer of these universes all at the same time.  These new universes may have only existed in these drawings, but taken collectively, they began to have an effect on the way that I would view the world outside the drawing.  They began to provide new ways of looking at and understanding the possibilities of the world.

As I have gotten older, I suppose I am still looking for ways to make or discover new worlds, even if those places are far too fragile to exist beyond the bounds of a piece of paper. While I haven’t drawn any space battles for a very long time, I do find that while I am a creator of the worlds, I am also an observer as these worlds begin to develop a logic and a life of their own.  The subject matter has also changed over time.  Rather than drawing far away planets, my work tends to be about the world around me.  These might be the things that I see when I am walking in the neighborhood or in the Columbia River Gorge or they might be things that I read about in the paper or on the internet.  When I was younger, I would use drawing as way to escape the world around me. Today I use drawing to get closer.
There are many ways that artists have been exploring getting closer to the world around us, but for me, my work has always been about getting closer to nature.  Nature always seems to do it better.  Every time I go for a hike or look at Mount Hood, everything is perfect.  Every color, texture, stone, tree and river always seems fully resolved in a way that art rarely is.  For me the question then became, do I copy nature or do I begin to find ways to use the way that nature works?

I never wanted to copy nature.  I already knew that nature was beautiful, so copying it in paintings or drawings never felt necessary to me.  Those paintings never made feel closer to nature.  I wanted my work to have the sense of unexpected and discovered beauty that I would often encounter on my hikes.  If my work wouldn’t imitate nature, could it begin to create a parallel experience that would remind me of my experiences in nature?

I realized that remaking or imitating the things that I loved in nature, like mountains, trees and rivers, was out of the question.  I had to look at the things that I had around me that I could use.   For me, geometry is profoundly natural and as good a starting place as any.  Like everyone else, I could draw the simple shapes of geometry, such as circles, squares and triangles.  On the one hand, these simple shapes seem completely abstract, but when you look closer you see that they occur everywhere in nature.  We see circles in our eyes and in the shape of the sun and the moon and the planets.  We see squares in rocks and materials, and triangles in the way that the branches connect on a tree.

I loved the idea of basing my work on using simple shapes like arcs, circles, squares, rectangles or hexagons. These are shapes that we are all familiar with.  They are easy to understand and they belong to everyone.  These shapes are ancient and have been passed down or rediscovered by countless generations over the centuries.  While I use these shapes in a unique way, there is no technology requirement that would have prevented my work from being done in the times of the ancient Egyptians or the Greeks.  I learned that my work is about the exploration of the maximum amount of complexity with the simplest set of parts.  

I thought long and hard about how my work could begin to have some the unexpected beauty and complexity that I see in nature.  The breakthrough came when I realized that I could begin to make drawings from the digits of Pi. Pi is the mathematical term for the relationship between the circumference and diameter of a circle.  If a circle was natural, then so must be its internal proportions.  Even more interesting is that Pi is transcendental number, which means it goes on forever.  Computers have calculated the decimal points of Pi out to hundreds of billions of digits, but it never ends.  I found it fascinating that something we use everyday like the circle could also be, at some level, fundamentally unknowable because Pi is transcendental number.

For my recent work, I have been using the digits of Pi as an engine to generate structures.  Rather than imitating nature, I have been using nature to make the work. Every time I make a new drawing or painting, I never know what the work will look like until it is finished. The way that the shapes relate to one another and the complexity of the overall structure reminds me of the complexity that I find in nature on my hikes.

For me, nature is about the demonstration of movement of energy from one state to another.  This can happen in a lot of ways.  Sometimes energy is moved so that a tree can grow to take advantage of more sunlight or recourses in the soil.  There is a movement of energy as a mountain erodes or in the currents of a river.  The more I thought about it, the more I realized that if nature is the continuous movement of energy, then there is no one moment in which everything is frozen or complete.  Nature exists in time, caught between the poles of creation and destruction.  Within nature, no single state or moment is definitive.  It exists in time.  Everything is continuously changing.  This is the opposite of how we view art, which is often talked about as being permanent, one of a kind and can stand alone by itself.  I am for an art that is dynamic, plural and reveals aspects of a larger whole that can be experienced by many people simultaneously without a degradation of experience.

Like a lot of people, when I go to the beach I like to watch the waves break on the shore.  It is amazing to think that each wave is different.  Surfers talk about the perfect wave, but I am not sure that really exists because inevitably there is always the next wave.  Every wave is unique, but yet each is still identifiable as being a part of the larger ocean. Even more important, each wave is inseparable from the larger ocean.  I think that this is a fascinating idea.  Something can be unique but still be identifiable as part of a larger whole.  The difference between the individual state and the larger whole is the amount of energy.  Like a wave, my work can exist in multiple states, in multiple times, without any one state becoming definitive.

Maybe I have not traveled very far from where I started, since I am still exploring new worlds in my work.  Today, the worlds are more about the things that I learn about the world around me.  When I am on a hike, I try to learn as much as I can about why nature looks the way it does and to see if there are lessons or insights that can be distilled into my work.  I learned that my work does not have to exist in opposition to nature.  It is part of nature, even if it is a small part.  It has led me to insights that are very different than the art that I learned about in school.  I hope that my work leads to an open-ended experience that makes the viewers more aware not only of themselves, but also of their surroundings and the world at large.  

I think that art is ultimately about intention and communication.  It allows us to see and experience not only new worlds, but also new ways of being.  That is why art is such a worthwhile pursuit.  Art is the ultimate optimistic act.  Artists bring something into the world that did not exist here before.  We choose to make the world a little better, one work at a time.

Here is very cool video of how an Apple engineer rebuilt the inner workings of the Antikythera Mechanism in Legos.

There is something about doing calculations with gears that I find mind boggling.  Here is a difference engine made out of made of Meccano parts:

Richard Paul Lohse:
Lines of Development 1943-1984 (selection)

To obtain a new operative basis it was necessary to systematize the media so that they could form logical sequences and would permit a multiplicity of operations. The result: variability and extensibility.

The colour series provides the law for formal expression, colour and form cancel each other out as opposites.

Anonymity of the media, non-limitation of the structural laws, relativity of the dimensions, extensibility and flexibility determine the expression.

The machine and the expression are developed at the same time, the method represents itself, it is the picture.

The picture field is a structural field.

The prerequisites for the development of flexible ordering systems are the identity of the pictorial media, of surface and surface boundaries, the anonymization and objectivication of the structure, the congruence of the beginning and the end of the action.

The anonymous element is part and substance of a system of coordinates in which each element has an equal share of passivity and activity.

The individual expression lies in the choice of methods, in the control of preliminary conditions.

Simplicity is not produced by spontaneity but by the multiple superimposition, interpenetration and modification of the processes of development.

There is no definition of aesthetics without the definition of its social basis.

The task consists in developing systems that make transparent and combinable, flexible orders possible.

Technological reality is a fact that cannot be ignored. Identical with it is a vocabulary of media that is characteristic of this epoch, an instrumentarium of methods, systems, modes of behaviour, an arsenal of forms of expression that have already shaped the life of the epoch and will continue to shape it.

A social basis corresponds to every cultural expression, a cosmology to every aesthetic. In no other form of art do the media and methods of a global technological strategy find a legitimate expression as they do in constructive, logical, systematic or serial art, which is a sublimated and critical echo of the structures of civilization.

The forms of expression of a non-hierarchical society correspond to this society in the sphere of visual art: they are flexible, transparent, verifiable in method and in result.

It is as an instrument of cognition that art has a social value.

Every technology has an appropriate sign alphabet that differs from its forerunner in structure, dimensions and motion. Forms of expression in art correspond to this global structure.

Flexibility is the counter-principle to monumentality.

No other epoch has experienced this onset of straight lines, direct connections, accumulations of identical elements resulting from the addition and division of the identical.

The possibility of repeating elements and facts mechanically is one of the identifying marks of this epoch.

Geometric art forms have a range extending from the esoteric to democratic orders. There is no such thing as the language of geometry.

The serial principle is a radical democratic principle.

The attitudes implicit in Lohse's work, including strong and still radical ideas about society, are very interesting, both as to what is older and what newer. The squares and rectangles comprise schemes that repeat or vary with colors that correspondingly repeat or vary. This way of working which now is common to lots of us, didn't exist before Lohse and some others. It's not the way that Mondrian, Malevich, or Van Doesburg worked. In Lohse's work there is the end of the European compositional tradition, a good end, and also there is the beginning of much that is still beginning to develop. (Donald Judd, 1988).

Twenty Questions for Henri Matisse

1.  How would you explain your paintings to a child?

Either this pleases you or it does not please.

2. What is your feeling about abstract painting?
   
It is a problem which is relative to each person

3. What is the single greatest influence on your art- Giotto? Fra Angelico? Byzantine Mosaics?

All of these, and above all, Cezanne.

4.  Do you get more creative please working on secular or religious subjects?

I bring all subjects back to human sentiments.

5. Which painter has exerted the most influence on you?

Cezanne.

6. What clues can you give for better appreciating your work?

No answer.

7. What influence has do you consider your sculpture has had on your paintings?

A familiarity with solid forms, to supplement the study of nature through drawing.

8. Which do you consider more important in your own work and in art generally- line or color?

Both.

9. What do you think is your most creative contribution in the use of color?

I have brought a feeling of space through color.

10. Which of your paintings do your consider is completely realized in this respect?

No answer.

11. Why have you given up you absorption with color, mass and form and seemingly gone in the direction of line?

An error. I am always taken by color.

12. Which do you consider more important- your paper cut outs or your paintngs?

Both.

13. Why did you give your paintings to the museum in Le Cateau?

Because it is my native village.

14. Do any of the younger living artists arouse your enthusiasm?

No Answer.

15. What advice would you give to young painters?

To draw a great deal and not to reflect too much

16. Should an art student begin to work with line first, or with color, or with both at once?

That depends on his temperament; in principle, both of them, and harmonizing them will be his great difficulty

17. Do you consider the allied arts such as music, literature, etc. important to the development of a painter?

Very important.

18. What do you consider the most creative period in your life?

Each period has had its own importance, but I should be tempted to say this one.

19. What direction do you think that Modern Art will take?

Light.

20. Do you consider in your collages that you have found the final solution to your art?

No. I have not yet finished.

Originally published in Look Magazine, August 25, 1953

Here is my recent post about the Picasso show at the Seattle Art Museum.  The exhibition is from the Musee Picasso in Paris and if you are not planning on going to Europe anytime soon, it might be a once in a lifetime experience.  I

In the post, I am trying to make the point that Picasso was more inspired by the purpose of Tribal Art than by its forms.  

Here is the link to the PORT homepage:

http://www.portlandart.net/

Here is the direct link to the article:

http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2010/10/picasso.html

  Nature does it better.

I would probably go even farther and say that nature does everything better.  Its designs are subtler, more surprising, more complex and often times completely unexpected. The night sky, the ocean, rivers, rocks, trees, plants, animals and practically an infinite number of things are things in nature that I find endlessly inspiring.

In the West, as artists we are often trained to measure our skill by our ability to copy or even imitate nature.   Nature is the model and our job is to translate what we could see into another medium whether it was drawing or sculpture or photography or any number of other arts. Of course with our background, often times the translation into another medium severed any connection to what made nature natural in the first place.  Take for example a seascape, it is portraying a natural system based on the flow of energy in a fluid medium that is interacting and responding to a geological topography that is both scene and un-scene. There are changing lighting conditions based on the time of day, the weather and the season. The natural system that creates the experience of the ocean often stretches not to the limits of the system but to the boundary of the horizon so that it is limited by the curvature of the earth.  This fantastically complex and evolving natural system yet when it is translated into art is often depicting in stationary earth pigments on woven canvas frozen in a moment in time from a single point of view.

The translation has nothing in common with the system that it is depicting and yet we are content to call the depiction “real.”
I think that the very act of translation of natural models reveals a system of thought that automatically separates, and often diametrically opposes art and nature.  Only the worst of us would think that we are helping nature or in some making nature better.  There are other perhaps more productive models that different cultures have developed in working with nature.

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to sit down and have breakfast with Shiro Nakane.  Mr. Nakane comes from a family who for generations have built, restored and added to some of the most famous Zen gardens in Kyoto.  As a garden designer, he has come to possess a tremendous body of knowledge and specialized skill not only of the rocks, trees and plants of nature but more importantly how they often arrange themselves in nature.  He would be the first person to tell that despite all of his skill he would never be able imitate let alone match nature.  The most he hopes for are to produces arrangements and situations that are less unnatural.  I was surprised when he said that if he has done his job correctly, the arrangement might aspire to looking as though it had always been there and had not been created.  In other words, if he does his job correctly, all of his skill and work, in a profoundly Japanese way, is invisible.

Mr. Nakane is not opposing nature.  He is not translating nature.  He is using it; and ideally he is using it to create a place where his own skill and labor would become invisible.  He is trying to use nature to merge his work into nature.
Even the ink painters of China, Japan and Korea, found, discovered or evolved over the last 1,000 years ways to able to paint nature while still being a part of it.  Their work is never frozen in time and more importantly, a lot of the interaction and representation of nature is left to the imagination of the viewer. More recently, the Aboriginal painters of Australia have also found compelling ways to integrate their experience of nature into their work.

Western artists have found new and interesting to work with, rather against nature, in their work.  Jackson Pollock separates his brush from the surface of the canvas on the floor and in so doing allows all kinds of natural systems dependent on gravity, the viscosity and the movement of his body to enter into the paintings. Mostly in the 1960’s and 1970’s, artists in the United States and elsewhere created work in the dry lakebeds and high deserts of California, Nevada, Utah and New Mexico that were inseparable from the environment that the work was located in.  The best of these works created a profound integration between the art and the natural systems of the site. In the case of Damien Hirst, nature is usually made to be non-functioning, i.e. dead, before being integrated into his work but once it is on display it is often shown as is with a minimum of translation or embellishment.

My goal with Cloud was to find a way to make work that would work with rather than against nature. If nature does it better, my goal was to find a way to work with it, to use it to make and define the work. For me, this meant trying to discover ways of being able to take advantage of systems that define a simple set of rules that over time produce a work of extreme complexity.  These could have been done a lot of different ways but in this case I chose a few mathematical equations.

In a way that is difficult to explain to other people, Cloud is profoundly natural, at least for me.  It is a natural system in the sense that it is based on a set of rules that even as its author, I would not be able to predict the sequence of the results of the system.  Cloud generates in real time its own evolution and is not dependent on any external translation. It is not a representation or diagram of another system.  It is self-contained set of rules whose results generate conditions that might be interpreted as visual information similar to drawing.  Like a natural system, it is never fixed or stable, it is always changing in the way the way that when we look at the ocean or a river they are also always changing.

Both Cloud and the two large-scale wall works are driven by mathematics. Maybe it is more accurate to say that the mathematics is used as a tool to create an interface with natural systems such as the natural distribution of random numbers or the seemingly endless digits of Pi.  Because of the difficulties of calculating Pi on the fly forever, Cloud is based on continuously generated stream of random numbers.  The two wall works are based on a stream of numbers from the calculation of Pi. It is important to understand that while the work uses mathematics it is not meant to be seen as illustrating those systems.  The experience of the Cloud has to remain as art first which for me means recognizing the visual and spatial conditions and interactions of the work.

In Cloud, I chose to work with circles because it is an extremely simple and easily recognizable shape.  In general, because circles are common shapes, when we look at circles a remarkable sequence of events takes place. First, when we see a circle we are able almost instantly recognize them as circles and then almost immediately again stop looking at them because they are so common they are no longer interesting.  Circles are boring which is precisely why they are important to our interaction with Cloud. It is shape that we are all familiar with and by using a common shape I hope that I can focus the viewer’s attention on how they are being used. In this sense, to paraphrase one of my artist statements, a circle is a circle is a circle.

The circles are neutral.  I would even say that circles are natural shapes in every sense of the word. Because we stop looking at an individual circle rather quickly, it allows us to become aware of the entire field of the work.  It is an awareness of all the circles and the entire system all at once. Because the circles are simple shapes, we can easily process changes or updates to the system several times a second. We become aware of the changes to the field as a whole rather than the individual evolution of one part of the system or at least our attention is constantly shifting between the detail and the entire field.

So far in my work, all of the circles are all of the same size. I am able to use them as a standard unit or as a module for the system. Again I think it makes easier for the viewer to concentrate on the entire field as well as allowing the visual connections that the circles make between themselves to become more legible. It is the awareness of the entire system that also reminds me of my experience in nature.  It is the recognition of everything all at once. Our attention might be focused on a small part of the system for a given period of time but sooner or later our awareness comes back to the system as a whole.

In order to further speed up the visual processing and comprehension of the work, I chose to work with a monochromatic color scheme of just black and white. Although work in the future will undoubtedly become more colorful in time, by concentrating on black and white the circles seem to be more interchangeable and relative which is the whole intention of the work.  There is also the nice symmetry of black and white seeming to have a binary relationship like the on/off switches in the microchips of the computer.  I would like to say that just because the work is in black and white does not mean that I do not think that the work is colorful.  For me, black and white are used as colors.

  I was a little surprised when someone looking at Cloud said that the work reminded them of an Op Art piece.  It was surprising because I have never been interested in Op Art. Op Art is about the creation of some kind of optical effect and once the effect is achieved the long-term engagement of the work often seems secondary. Although the vocabulary of the two types of painting might be similar, I think that my work is the opposite of many types of art including Op Art.

In a subtle way, Cloud is about the denial of any single optical effect simply because it is about all of them.  All configurations and permutations are treated equally. They exist in a continuum that is so large it is impossible for one person to experience all of them. Cloud begins to ask difficult questions:  Are all the solutions of the entire system implicit in any one configuration?  Cloud creates multiple access points along a linear path of continuous updates creating essentially a non-linear experience.

In the same way, except for Bruce Nauman’s Mapping the Studio (Fat Chance for John Cage), which was and continues to be an ongoing revelation, I have never been interested in either computer or video art.  Most computer art seems to be imitating drawing or painting while most video art is so linear that one often wonders whether the experience of is worth the investment of time.  I did not set out to work in these areas.  It was just the natural extension of the language of my work.  Cloud as a projection piece could only exist on the computer.  It is constantly updating itself so it is fundamentally time based in a way that is easy to understand.  Cloud as a painting or drawing is also time based in a way that is a bit more subtle because I see it as taking an infinite amount of time before it ever evolved.

  The display of each circle visually connects to the rest of the entire field.  It is not a pattern.  While the work may exist infinitely in time, they do exist finitely in space. The large-scale wall works are not patterns.  They are constructions of a given number of shapes in a configuration determined by the digits of Pi that fit in a certain to a given area. Each shape has size and creates a given area. Although the first generation of Cloud projection is driven by random numbers, when I am looking at the evolution of the entire field and I am watching the numbers through the circles relate to one another the structures do seem to be random at all.  The system is random but not unstructured.  I would say that the work is seeking out the deep structures that we often experience in natural systems.  I am striving for the maximum of complexity with the simplest means. The result is that it became clear to me that the exhibition was not a collection of things but a place.  It is a space that everyone is welcome to participate in.

We posted the Mark Grotjahn interview today.  I think it turned out really well.

From the PORT homepage:

http://www.portlandart.net/

The direct link to the interview is:

http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2010/10/interview_with_11.html