Alchemy Scrolls: Transformation of Earth, Come and see this, On My Mind, What I'm Making, What I'm thinking about

On Transformation

Part of my practice is to wander my neighborhood and pick things up. I pick things up and look very closely at them. (It is convenient to have a dog to walk with me so that this activity does not call too much attention to itself.) I try to hold on to things that are not “perfect” specimens of their kind: leaves which have been altered by insects; squashed bottle caps; damaged butterfly wings. These objects in themselves call attention to the way my mind tries to organize things into types and then impose an idea of a perfect form for that object, a form without blemishes. I try to challenge the well-worn paths of my expectations so that I can pursue the discipline of really seeing. Then I take my favorite things and put them on the scanner and scan them at a very high resolution—so high of a resolution that the scanner feels compelled to ask me if I really want to make such a large file. When I look at the scan I can see so much more, such fine detail. Every bite mark on the leaf is exquisite.

But I digress. I really want to talk about transformation because that is what some of my recent work is about. So. One way to call attention to the particularity, to the thisness, of an ordinary object is to make it into something unexpected. It is itself but also something contradictory at the same time. This is the project I undertook in the Alchemy Scrolls: Transformation of Earth (showing now at Brookland Pint on the Arts Walk.) I started with resonant objects, some of my favorite things: tools and food. I have been wanting to do something with this clothespin for a long time. And the antique potato smasher. And I fell in love with some crazy Hungarian peppers at the farmers market. Not to mention the supremely strange long purple turnip. Garlic scapes have always delighted me with their giggly squirms. The hammer was left in my previous house by the contractor who later died and I swore I would never hire another contractor because Tom was too damn wonderful to replace. No more renovations for me. But I cherish the hammer. Etc.

This is the point in my thought process where things don’t resolve, they stack up like layers of polyphony, and the resolution happens with the viewer of the work. I hope. I can only point at threads which I pulled together in these works. So here goes:

I thought first of making angels, and then of making dragons. Alchemy is the transformation of materials, of base materials into exalted materials. Tools have an aura, a quidity, an appropriateness, a beauty in good function. Food is a locus of passion and culture. Vegetables mean life, vitality, the transformation of light into energy. Tools and vegetables are of the earth. Tools are the transformation of matter into energy, energy in the sense of making. Tools are used to transform the world into the actualization of an idea (building with tools according to a plan). Food is transformed into our bodies, fuel for our bodies. Vegetables, from the earth, are transformed into food through the agency of fire, air, and water (cooking)—the backgrounds of the scrolls show the elements of fire, air, and water.

So this is as close as I can get to explaining what was going through my head when I was making these works. So come and see them at this restaurant if you can. I ate Saturday brunch at Brookland Pint. It was really good.

Alchemy Scrolls: Transformation of Earth, from Left to Right: Hammer & Turnip; Scissors & Peppers; Masher & Garlic Scapes; Clothespin & Escarole; Wrenches & Onions.

Left to Right: Hammer & Turnip; Scissors & Peppers; Masher & Garlic Scapes; Clothespin & Escarole; Wrenches & Onions
Left to Right: Hammer & Turnip; Scissors & Peppers; Masher & Garlic Scapes; Clothespin & Escarole; Wrenches & Onions
Celestial Bodies, On My Mind, Small is Large is Small..., What I'm Making

About Scale

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(Forgive me for the length of this post.)

The computer, my primary medium, lends me a peculiar relationship to scale. I can zoom very deeply into an image. By now I know at what point my modifications will be undetectable when the art is printed, but that is a feeling one gets for the scale of things that is not intrinsic to the information on the screen. On the screen you could be anywhere.

If you have ever worked with graphics on a computer you must know the importance of resolution. Basically, the amount of information in a particular image has to relate properly to its output size. You can print something smaller (to an extent) and retain information but if you keep blowing it up it will blow up into bits. If there is not enough information then the image gets garbled and the viewer has trouble making out the information, it all becomes a kind of average noise. In this sense resolution can be associated conceptually with focus: when something drops out of focus it also becomes averaged and its information unreadable.

Lately my work has been incorporating objects that I scan directly on a flatbed scanner. Obviously the objects must be relatively small to fit on the scanner. At the beginning of this body of work I wasn’t sure how big to make the scans. I can enlarge things something like 26000 percent. How big should I make each scan? I wasn’t sure yet what I was going to do with these things. Eventually I decided to make everything 24 inches wide (at a resolution of 240 pixels per inch) in the shortest direction—this is the width my printer can make. Through this rule of thumb I have accomplished a kind of leveling of scale of every source scan I work with. A quarter-inch watch gear becomes the same size (24 inches) as an 8 inch hubcap.

The scans combine high amounts of information with a very limited depth of focus. The part of the object that lays directly on the glass is perfectly sharp and the parts that curve away from the glass become blurred when they are more than about an eighth of an inch distant from the glass. This quick fall-off of focus we tend to associate with macro lens photography (the lens photography of very small things blown up large) so the eye can be tricked into thinking that all these objects are very small. But the scans can hold so much information about an object, more than I could see with my eyes or a camera lens and much sharper. So they are not really like macro photographs after all. I can zoom way in to these images–it’s like I’m flying myself in a tiny airplane super close. I get attached to this depth of information and sometimes find regular photographs lacking in sharpness and richness.

The Celestial Bodies series uses mostly scans of objects combined together—there may be ten different objects blended together to make each Celestial Body. I have noticed an interesting thing when people talk about these works. I have always thought of these objects as resembling very large objects–the sizes of stars and nebulae. But many people see these things as being microscopic, as some kind of diatom. This may be because of the focus drop-off tricking the eye.

I also work from photographs, not just scans. I need photographs because I can’t get everything onto the scanner–alas! I need photographs to reduce the very-large down to my 24 inch image.

In my recent piece, Small is Large is Small: Dendritic Rhymes on Multiple Scales, I combine images that share a branching dendritic structure: lightning; neurons; soil drainage patterns; blood vessels; street layouts in Old Delhi. All these are rhymed with the vascular structure inside the blades of some maple seed “helicopters.” There is a structural rhyme between drainage patterns seen in satellite images of West Virginia and the path of blood vessels in a mouse’s ear. Recently I am drawn especially to visual rhymes that work across large gaps in scale. It is like the physicists who are trying to find natural laws that can apply both to the very small quantum level and to the very large scale force of gravitation. The rules of the very small break down when you blow them up—sounds like resolution! This break down I show in the maple seed blade with the satellite image of drainage patterns in West Virginia: the image was scanned from a book and then blown up large and you can see the halftone dots of the original print. The dendritic pattern then can be best grasped if the viewer backs up. Essentially you have to reduce the image using a body zoom (moving your body away from the image) in order to find the “proper” resolution. We have to adjust ourselves in order to see things clearly.

Small is Large is Small: Dendritic Rhymes on Multiple Scales, is also the largest image I have made so far. I wanted to make something small, the maple seeds, into something very large. The piece is about six feet wide so when it is viewed up close the structures are clearly visible. This piece can be seen when the roll-up door is shut at Black Lab, my studio on the Arts Walk at Monroe Street Market. I have plans for another very large piece combining fennel flowers and galaxies. Stand by.

On My Mind, What I'm Making, What I'm thinking about

What was going on in my head when…

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… I was creating Correspondences: Line. Some visitors to my studio have told me they enjoy hearing where some of my ideas come from and how I put them together. So here is a short bit about the image sources I’ve used in this piece. This series came about because I was finding that the photos I was capturing with my camera were not interesting enough to me to print. They are fine photos but they weren’t really doing for me what I wanted my art to do. I was capturing these images because there was a particular thing I liked about what I was seeing but the whole photo was not as interesting to me as this one bit. In this case, with Line, I had a bunch of images I had captured in which there was a line that I really like. So I decided to take a collection of lines and make a new composite image from them. When I harvested the lines I may have stretched or squished them, depending on what I needed for the final composition. Here is the final image:

Line
Line

So some of the lines are obvious: from left to right–the gingko leaf, the maple seed helicopter, the sycamore leaf. But let’s go back to the left again, to the thin black line. See if you can find it in this source photo I shot in Italy:

shadow-edge

Do you see the shadow on the overhanging roof tiles? I traced my line from this photo.

Okay, proceeding to the right you can see a picture of stucco with a shadow on it–look at the left edge of that portion of stucco and now look at this photo I took of the Sandia mountains in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I grew up:

sandias

I used the horizon of the mountains to crop the edge of the stucco.

Going right some more, there is the marvelous line of the shadow of a wire I captured in Italy:

wire-shadow

Next there is the edge of an old piece of corrugated steel that I fell in love with. Look at that line dance:

corrugated-edge

I found that our eyes want to see a landscape when we see lines horizontally, so I rotated my lines to be vertical to pull them toward abstraction.

Lastly there is the yellow calligraphic line which comes from the shadow in a photo I made at Pompeii:

fresco-edge

This series was a breakthrough for me because I started on the path toward taking apart and putting back together photographic images based on different characteristics: material; form; pattern; organization…

I Make Things Out of Words, Mostly