Buddha of 10,000 Colors

I have played around with the look of the blog, and it occurred to me that you might like to know the source of the header image.  This is a painting I did a few years ago called Buddha of Ten Thousand Colors.  It is approximately 4' x 4' and divided into a grid of just about 10,000 patches.  Some patches are layered colors - wet on wet, glazed, scraffitoed, or scumbled; it has a lot of texture up close. So it really has more than 10,000 colors. Unfortunately the color isn't quite right in a photo and I can't seem to improve it much with photoshop, but these tiny photos are just an approximation anyway. It began when I was zooming in on a picture I took in the Botanical Gardens of Honolulu.  The Buddha sculpture was carved out of grey rock but there wasn't a single pixel of grey in the photo!  There was something about that that tickled my fancy so I attempted to reproduce as close as I could each pixel's color, comparing it as I went to its neighbors for hue, saturation, and brightness.  Each square was painted separately and its colors mixed separately.  I don't want to think of how many hours that took.  Why do I always set myself such labor intensive problems?  But at least this one had a definite end.  In the gallery, most people couldn't see the face when they were within normal viewing distance.  It just looks like a riot of color patches.  You must back away many feet to see the face.  Shrunk down as on this website is like being very far away.  Some people never see the face.  I can't not see it no matter how close I get.  From a great distance it becomes grey once again like the stone sculpture.  I like to play with people's perceptions like that.  This is the opposite of how the trompe l'oeils I used to paint would operate.  They held their illusions at every distance no matter how painterly they were done, and they fooled some people so well that a woman once chewed a gallery director out for leaving the boxes of junk on the floor (the paintings were very deep sided and sat on the floor, painted to look like worn out dented marked up old cardboard boxes full of stuff.)  One time I had to pick a painting up and show some skeptical viewers the inside so they could see that it was stretched canvas.  One screamed.  Sometimes people don't like to be fooled so much.  Those paintings used to get kicked as well, and they aren't that easy to display or store.  The cats used them as hammocks when I left them around the house which stretched the tops out of shape, so I stopped doing such paintings.

Still Life with Open Book

This is a painting that I made several years ago.  Yes, it's terribly old fashioned.  It looks like it could have been painted in the 19th century except for the fact that the objects are from recent times.  The central object is a book called The Look of Reading, opened to a page that includes a painted illusion of a photograph of an open book with painted images on its pages.  I call this layering of self-references a "reality sandwich".  The words on the page are about books with paintings of images of books with paintings in them . . . .  They also discuss the readability of the type and how Jan van Eyck is the greatest master of the readable painted book or page.  The drawing covering the other page has doodles and a sketch that appears to be the thumbnail design of this painting.  Yes, that is a painted illusion of a fly on the upper corner of the editor's desk.

I did this painting because I love books.  They have been my companions since I was less than 3 years old.  I taught myself to read and could get through an entire book (e.g. 4th grade reader from the 20's) at 3.  It's an obsession I guess, and a rather unfortunate one.  I now realize that too much reading and drawing at an early age exacerbated my myopia.  When I get a new book, or even borrow one, I examine it with most of my senses -- I smell the pages and lightly run my fingers over the paper, the cover too if it has embossing or an interesting texture, enjoy the quiet sound of the binding as it opens, or flex a paperback and listen.  A nice scrunchy sound can be heard in many thicker paperbacks especially if there is a little kaolin in the paper.  I undress hardcovers to check out under the dust jacket, admiring the color of the cloth and the lettering of the title and author's name, the logo of the press.  I read the information in tiny print that tells me when it was printed and all the other editions.  I pause to admire the title page and the choice of type, the arrangement on the page, . . . .  Sometimes I get really close and look at the texture of the fibres in the paper and the slight ragged edges of the inked letters (which is invisible when you are at proper reading distance.)  I check out the back pages: index, bibliography, appendices.  Often I look through at any pictures before settling in to read, beginning with any prefaces, introduction, acknowledgements.  The only thing I don't do is lick it to see how it tastes.  That would be silly.

Digital books can't compete with the printed object for a sensual experience.