Harmonics

Visual Harmonics I,  copr William Cook, 2013

Recently realized that the kind of sounds in this clip are what I hear in my head when I'm making art.  I first began to hear these sounds in 1977, and from then til now is what I've been trying to reflect--a visual expression of a series of sounds.

This piece is created on a heavily textured piece of paper that I made.  The severe wrinkling is a result of the drying process that I don't get how to prevent yet.  Maybe I'll catch on, but maybe not.  I like the fact that it's not a perfect sheet.

Those lines are ink.  I'm very happy to report that it's the sizing of the pulp that makes this possible--a fact that eluded me for 25 years as I searched for the perfect paper to draw on.

Warning:  the visual part of the clip is so inane that you might end up barking, or picking someones pockets--so don't watch, it's like they are controlling the horizontal [and the vertical] like in the "Outer Limits".

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Something Different--The Basics

A Santa Monica Hill,  5X7",  Ink, Prismacolor

Long Shadows, 5X7",  Prismacolor 

Roadside, 5X7", Prismacolor

Something a little different.  Maybe a bit rusty, but I do love drawing with indigo pencils.  My first love is drawing.  Everything else derives from it.  OK maybe not cement.  These remind me a little of Maggie [Latham] who disappeared from blogging last week to sort out the next phase of  her career.  Maggie you are missed.   All the best to you.

These are sketches from the computer screen-- a few of the snapshots I took while in California last month.  I love drawing outside from life, but this is the next best thing, and one can rip through a lot of trial compositions in short order.  I'm looking for natural compositions--the kind you can't make up--not necessarily trying to display any great drawing skill, just interesting composition--sort of an exercise of the eye and a training of the hand.

What happens to these I don't know.  Perhaps they will suggest an abstract approach,  maybe they will become nice sloppy luscious oil paintings--or mudpies, or nothing further.  For now they're just fun to play with in a sort of rapid-fire no mind way.

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A Conglomeration Of Natural Rhythms

NCR Trail, 9X12", Pencil on bristol

That's my girl.  Valerie.  Taking a break while the old man snaps another one of his crazy pictures.  But that's all the fun of a bikehike, especially on the old North Central Railway bed, converted not long ago.  Everywhere you look is another incredible composition.  This one caught my eye because of all the wild patterning of light and dark, directional shifts, spatial relationships, patterns within patterns--a wild mod podge of stuff all going on--to say nothing of the colors.  I like a good visual feast.  OK I guess you had to be there.

Val's such a good sport.



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Relax, Pull Up A Rock, Fall Apart

Underpainting For Along The Gunpowder, 26X36

Along The Gunpowder, 26X36, Oil on Canvas, G print.

The other day I was looking through some old shots and I found this shot of the underpainting of the Gunpowder scene (reposted from my very first blog post).  Now that I've gotten around a bit in the blogosphere, I thought this glimpse into the process might be interesting. 

This is the first serious oil painting that I did since 1983.  I began it in 2005 and finished it in 2009.  I actually picked up where I left off in 1983 with this underpainting technique that I developed for its rapid mono-chromatic result. 

The canvas is coated with a couple layers of white acrylic latex, and then coated with brown tinted gum arabic, and a simple drawing (one of my dots and dashes drawings like in my blog header) was done for placement.  The neat thing about gum arabic is that water instantly dissolves it but oil won't touch it.  So.  If one was to make any kind of mark with just water (a thin elegant line from a sable pointer, splatter from a tooth brush, spit), and then quickly wipe a rag over it, a beautiful gleaming white mark would result.  All kinds of wonderful craziness happens as one works over the whole composition in reverse.

Later a similar procedure was executed with UM blue sparingly.  This completes the full spectrum in the underpainting given the composite color and value possibilities in the BU and UM layers.  The canvas is then 'closed' to water media with a layer of medium.  The paint is applied in daubs of very thin glazes, so that there appears to be practically no texture to the painting. 

I liked the underpainting so much that I had no desire to mess it up, and just observed it (planning) in the studio for a few years, until I got up the courage to set up a pallet.  I had been dreaming about this painting for twenty years, about approaching large works with these techniques, the daubed color "notes" leaving much of the underpainting showing, and ending up with practically nothing on the canvas, a characteristic I have come to admire in the venerable old pieces in the museums. 

In any event--just another approach, thought it would be of interest. 

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A Springtime Stroll En Plein Concrete

Waning Wendy Super-Burger On Concrete, Snapshot

Expansion Joint With Stain, Snapshot

Brushed Concrete With Utility Marks, Snapshot

"Yeah, I can add sand, sawdust, vermiculite, drag brooms through it, stain it,  anything goes."

"How about actually collaging a real butt right into the piece?"

"Cool!", I said, "And how about a perfectly reconstructed broken bottle embedded into the final glaze? Mondo cool!" I added, and then, "Oooo and how about a syringe.  Ever see a syringe out on a walk?"

 "Yeah, but that's kinda creepy, dad.  Besides then you've descended into mere social commentary."

"Ew.  Good point, forget the glass and the butts too.  I don't even care if they look like concrete, I just like the textures and compositions.  That and the fresh air."

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180 Degree Reversals

YHWH VI, 12 X 16, Ink With Pastel, print

YHWH VIII, 12 X 16, Ink With Pastel, print

YHWH V, 12 X 16, Ink With Pastel, print

If star charts are produced in reverse, and my old series here reminded me of star charts, I wondered what my work would look like in reverse.  Would they remind me of actual stars? What do you think?  Of course I wasn't thinking stars at the time, I was either smacking the drawing around or praying,  Possibly both.  Let's just call it a creative trance.

YHWH V, reversed

In terms of physics, Calabi–Yau manifolds are important in superstring theory. In the most conventional superstring models, ten conjectural dimensions in string theory are supposed to come as four of which we are aware, carrying some kind of fibration with fiber dimension six. Compactification on Calabi–Yau n-folds are important because they leave some of the original supersymmetry unbroken. More precisely, in the absence of fluxes, compactification on a Calabi–Yau 3-fold (real dimension 6) leaves one quarter of the original supersymmetry unbroken if the holonomy is the full SU(3).


Thank you Doc, for introducing me to the Calabi-Yau manifold.  What a precious description (Wikkipedia).  I wonder if I was channeling professor Yau back in 1979.  You're right--my goofy little drawings are stoundingly similar to the visual version of the Calabi-Yau manifold.   I have not a clue what any of the Poindexter stuff in the above description even means, but I am a superstring kind of guy.   Ultra cool comment, Sonya (Sonya Johnson).  

I've just found out that Brian Greene's book on superstring theory inspired a Nova special a few years back.  Here it is.  Sonya, this is just getting better and better.

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Art Secrets At The Air Show

Far Inland There Were Seagulls, 36 X 48, Oil on Collage, buy a print.

I was asked to participate in a theme show.  The idea was to translate a poem into a work of art.  What a neat challenge!  How could I refuse, right?   So I was assigned a poem called "Far Inland There Were Seagulls" (its around here somewhere). 

So there I was sitting in the car at the mall parking lot wondering what in the world this poem was even about to begin with, let alone where on earth was this future "work of art" going to come from.  Besides there ain't no seagulls far inland.  Come on.  I was getting all worked up.  What was I thinking?  Screw it.

Then poof.  There were seagulls all over the place.  Walking around on the parking lot, thinking, I suppose, how incredibly similar this was to the water.  They were doing all manner of loops and spirals and aerobatic tricks right in front of me.  Quite a mystical, magical moment.  Of course they were there all along, but my brain wasn't allowing them in.  Sat there for an hour enjoying the show (and planning my "work of art"). 

My attempts at collage had degenerated into me sticking torn  random shapes onto canvas--once I got the whole thing covered, I was going to start adding crazy random pictorial elements and just see what emerges--kind of like the old scribble approach.  After the parking lot episode all the sudden seagulls showed up and gilded contrails.  Out comes the paint.  Now I'm doing the same thing the seagulls were doing.  Playing, doing loopty loops, paintin, livin and lovin.  I began to realize just how far inland they had come after all. 

The show came and went.  Picked up my piece. 

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Stupid Ideas: Old Man Having A Round Thought



Old Man Having A Round Thought, 12 X 16, Oil on paper, buy a print.

In case you haven't guessed by now, one of the things that has kept me jumping all these years has been the exploration of approach to artmaking.  I try everything, and I love it all.  This is such a crazy example, that I couldn't resist hanging it out there in the public square. 

I'd been diligently collecting the camera screw-ups--you know the butt ends of the film--the out of focus, the ones where the flash didn't work, the strange stuff you can't even recognize--the stuff a normal person would chuck.  In terms of abstraction many of these were quite inspirational little jewels.  The composition and the colors were intriguing on this particular slide.

The above is the painting I painted --you can tell by where I signed it in the traditional lower right.  See the old man in the hat?  Perhaps having a big round thought?  White collar sticking up like a Dickens character?  That's what I kept seeing.  So that 's what came out.  Never quite liked the painting--too silly--threw it in the drawer.   Stupid idea.   Humph.

Several years later as I cleaned out the drawer, and leaned it against the wall on its side.  One day I glanced at it and saw part of  my friend Ken Miller.  Hey--that's Ken's chin--and there's his shoulder.  That's definitely him watching me load the camera--there in his old blue shirt with the collar, half grin, beard and stash.  Damn good likeness too. 

Found the original slide.  Yup that's him all right.  Laughed my ass off. 




 

Ken's Chin, 12 X 16, Oil on paper, buy another print.

Ken

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There He Goes Again

The Rebetsky Horizontal, 1987, 16 X 21, mixed media. 



Rebetsky detail A



Rebetsky detail B

Rebetsky detail C

This mixed media extravaganza started with a stylus impressing textures into the paper (thick bristol is the only paper I had found to withstand the abuse of one of these), followed by a tripple tone pen and ink stage  (.03 Rapidograph, black, blue and brown ), a series of rubbed pastel dust and tempura powder layers,  prismacolor toning, graphite lining and toning, and splatter layers in several colors.  These details seem fairly close to original size, but you can still click on them for even more of a blow-up. 

I think of this as pure art--playful, meditative, vigorous, silly, serious, intense, escapist--where the purpose of the paper is only to contain all that.   I have no idea what purpose it all serves, or how it fits in to anything in the art world, and I don't really care.   OK maybe I care a little.  I just like to do them again and again. 

Enough said.

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PS   I've added a detail to the previous post, the Arc Ascendant--way better.

Barn Blues And The Arc Ascendant



Arc Ascendant



Arc detail

"The difference between realism and abstraction in painting has nothing to do with the finished appearance of  the final product (whether the subject is, identified artefactual realism, or non-differentiated perception of the process, 'to do').  If the difference lies between artefactual and naturally realistic painting, (which it does not), then the difference can be deduced by just observing actual paintings.  The difference can only be deduced by examination of motive.  When we intend to create a finished piece, statement, work-of-art, any noun will do--we are creating abstraction.  When our motive is to approach, experience, do the doing of, any verb will do, we are intending to under-go the process of natural realism."   

Sounds completely backwards doesn't it--a poorly worded puff of utter nonsense?  But not when you really think about it, the world being backwards and all. 

It was from Unthesis, A Key To The Secrets Behind The Brush, 10/28/77.  It was the "thesis" I wrote [possibly] in reaction to getting the bum's rush from all the grad schools I applied to (I've mercifully never shown any of it to anyone).  I now whip it out with apologies. 

I was actually struggling with just what's the point of filling a couple of country barns with art?  What am I an assembly line here, cranking out stuff to sell in the marketplace?  Is there not a more healthy--a more lofty reason to make art? 

I still make art, but I've sure mellowed out over the years, though.     

Wm

Arc Ascendant, 17 X 22, inquire here for print.

Hi Rebecca



Vector 2, 14 X 17, 1979, inquire here for print.



Ywh 3, 14 X 17, 1980, inquire here for print.



Horizontal 3, 18 X 24, 1977, inquire here for print.



Horizontal 1, 36 X 49, 1977, inquire here for print.

 

Horizontal 2, 29 X 37, 1977, inquire here for print.



Meditation 1, 25 X 18, 2006, inquire here for print.

Vector 5, 17 X 14, 1979, inquire here for print.

Horizontal 26, 17 X 14,  1979, inquire here for print.

The concept of doing art "for the right reasons" came to me as a student in l970 during a discussion on what is real or fake art, kitsch or masterpiece. 

I was the straight-laced kid out of an engineering high school, discussing the more intense issues of the art world with Tom Hyatt, whom I utterly revered.  He was US Army guy fresh back from Viet Nam, and was an odd mixture of cynicism, worldly experience and self-confidence.  We were new art students.  I can still hear his voice forming that phrase.  For the next five [student] years, it became the yardstick by which I measured the phenomenological validity of my art making.  Was it the real thing or just an imitation of someone else’s real thing? 

The resulting search came down to one event.  The right reasons—motivations—were more from the soul—the deep interior—not from my self-serving ego in its never ending search for rewards and other forms of stroking.  So I designed this project that would force me to engage in the process of creating, only knowing that the product itself—my ego-serving product at the end of all the effort—would be then destroyed.  All that would be left was the memory of creation itself.

What a revelation.  It was a canvas. It involved oils, PVA, gum arabic, spackling powder, pigment powder, acrylics, graphite, afro combs, cutouts, drawn and painted imagery, and a miniature anvil that swung in front of the piece.  It was incredible.  I even violated my own rule and snapped a slide of it.  Then I destroyed it, lovingly, non-violently. 

I see this event as pivotal.  After it I was no longer a student. 

The above meditation devices are examples of what became of my work after this event.  I think of them as recordings of what was happening to at least one meditator, seeking home in a soul—a sort of ancient patinad evidence or byproduct of an essential process that is both urgent in a universal sense, and personally intimate. 

I have revisited the pure horizontal and it’s variations directly many times over the years, and will have more to say about them in future essays.  As for motivation, you paint because you have to—everything else is just fake.

The above unveiling was inspired by Rebecca Crowell's website and blog that I found completely by accident.   

Wm