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.

I'm Thinking of You, Leonardo - again, update

The large mezzotint.  It's almost finished.  It's a bit later that I expected, but I still want to lighten and smooth the notebook.  Everything else is just about where it should be.  It's very difficult to get a photo that looks like the image.  The slightest imbalance in the surrounding light distorts it.  The lighter greys are darker in this photo than in the actual print.  The mid greys are actually smoother than it looks in a photo, the darker areas are darker and edges and forms meld into each other more (when you expand it; this is darker over all).  But this gives an idea.  Surely I will be finished in a couple weeks.  At that point I will replace this and make sure the new one has the right range and balance of tones. I'm removing the much earlier and rougher image from the earlier post below but leaving the comments (June 22).

Galileo's fingers

Among the displays of telescopes and microscopes, clocks, globes and glass polyhedra, astrolabs and contraptions designed to test or display scientific principles, and many other curious objects to be found at the Galileo Museum in Florence, these are uniquely gruesome (unless you find the sculpted lifesize and very naturalistic body fragment of a pregnant woman dissected also gruesome, but you are thankfully aware that it is a sculpture).  These are fingers cut off of Galileo's hands encased in glass reliquaries, like many remains of saints to be found in medieval cathedrals.  But here no one is sobbing in front of them, pleading with the spirit of Galileo to assist them or leaving post-it notes to the saint as I have seen in places of pilgrimage.  Maybe I should have tried that: "Grant me some genius, O saint Galileo."  The dried flesh has pulled back and revealed bones.  I was a bit daunted and put off looking closely until after I had gone through most of the museum twice and come back to this room.  I think I would rather see the work of his fingers, notes and sketches that would record the movement of his pen and thoughts.  These are just bones.
     I have finally gotten around to reading David Freedberg's The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, his friends, and the beginnings of modern natural history.  It is a thorough history and analysis of the work of the principle members of the Academy of the Lynx, the troubles they had with their detractors, and the scientific arguments and problems of the time, mostly the place of images in the attempt to order knowledge.  The relationship of the emblem of the Barbarini bees and the scientific investigation of bees under the microscope is fascinating.  Distinctions between art, politics, fables and other narratives, and scientific inquiry dissolve.  The total natural and cultural worlds are treated as continuous, apparently the ambition of more than one of the group.  They, the Linceans, had the same problem as many of us--very little of their work was finished, partly because of the scale of their ambitions and partly because of the unsolved problems of method.  Most died relatively young (relative to expectations today).  Where I found a new idea to contemplate was in the relation of naturalistic illustration, geometric diagrams, and words.  The first two, being non-verbal like drawings I would have said to be more similar and words the odd man out.  But Freedberg's thought is that diagrams are more like words.  Both abstract nature and therefore allow for categorization.  Taxonomy is made difficult if not impossible by naturalistic images; even when you dissect and reach down inside things they continue to show more and more of the unique and odd features of a thing and not what makes them the same.  What the work of the Linceans revealed is that the world of nature is not a set of clearly distinguished species that each member of which can be set in a box and, as Aristotle claimed, be altogether the same within the group and that which is outside altogether other.  Instead, the world of nature is a continuum with fuzzy edges between things.  Even animal, vegetable, and mineral are liable to be mixed or ambiguous.  So categories and order come not from reality but from human reason alone, therefore only abstracted languages are suitable to clarify the order.  Naturalistic illustrations reveal the blurs between things.  The question of whether fossils are, in the case of petrified wood for example, vegetable or mineral can't be answered with a picture.
     This put me in mind of the question of color.  When we identify colors using basic color terms, as Berlin and Kaye showed in their surveys of people around the world, we are liable to put color chips on the fringes of a color group in one category one day and another on another day.  In other words, a reddish-orangey color will be put in the red box sometimes and other times in the yellow.  Individuals actually varied more from day to day within a language group population than between different cultures.  This suggests that categorizing color is a subjective thing.  But, contrary to expectations, people everywhere select what we call the 'pure' color as the center of the color group.  In other words primary red is always red and this even holds in places where there is no basic color term for a color (red's a bad choice though, there's only one language known to lack a name for it).  In the end it appears there is something about the categorization of colors that is subjective, something inter-subjective (cultural), and something beyond that transcends culture, language, and individual choice.  In other words, there is something about the categorization of colors that is 'natural' and not reliant on reason or learning alone.  Might this also not be true of species, even though, further complicating the matter, they also change over time?  Are illustrations indispensable to this understanding?

Arrivederci Florence

It's over.  Been over for a few days, but I've been horribly ill.  No more searching for the dome in order to find my way 'home'.  No more rooms full of people intensely interested in Leonardo da Vinci.  The weeks leading up to the Leonardo institute were just as intense as I spent as much as 18 hours a day reading and preparing.  The weeks there in Florence were packed with unusual experiences.  (So was Florence packed, with tourists, so I didn't get many good pictures.)  We met and heard from a dozen of the finest scholars and saw Leonardo paintings and drawings up close and uncovered.  Now it is back to the usual grind, but I am going to try to make some permanent changes in what I do from now on.  Having read over and over reports of Leonardo's death and his supposed last words (Was anything done?), and having heard a remark by Martin Kemp on the bus back from Villa I Tatti that it is what one does with one's talent that matters, I realize with some horror that I share with Leonardo his worst trait -- I never quite finish things.  Beginning things is so interesting that it takes one away and anyway there is so much to do I stagger from one obligation or meeting to another, but that is making excuses.  I also heard once that one should never repeat anything so all my papers at conferences have been new and different from each other.  Even my prints and paintings are mostly unfinished.  So now I have over 20 years of incomplete projects.  I am going to line them up in an order taking into account some have due dates and some are further along than others, and then finish things one after the other and get them out into the world.  It may still be slow going as I tend to choose labor intensive projects. Someone (Seneca?) once said that when you die no one gives a damn what books you have read.  I take this to mean that you must do something with what you learn and give it to others.  Something more than just the day to day teaching, which is like washing dishes.  So I vow to finish things and send them out.  Let those who read this blog be witness as to whether I do this in the years to come.

Sta Maria della Grazie in Milan

Yesterday we spent the entire day in Milan.  First we visited the Ambrosiana Museum where Pietro Marani gave us a tour and we ended by seeing the display of original pages of the Codex Atlantico in the library.  I couldn't take pictures inside, but it is another beautiful space with floor to ceiling, wall to wall books.  Then we went to the Castle of the Sforzas where we were treated to a very thorough history of the attempts to restore the Salla delle Asse, and finally to Santa Maria della Grazie to view the Last Supper.  The panoramic picture above is of the piazza in front of it; the little yellow building to the left of the church is where one enters.  Again, no pictures allowed.  This was a perfect day.  Long, exhausting, perfect.  Today I visited the Ghirlandaios in Santa Trinita, Brunelleschi's Santo Spirito, and the Capella Brancacci in Santa Maria delle Carmine.  Had the place virtually to myself for an hour.
Earlier in the week, Tuesday, we spent hours at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure viewing the restoration of the Adoration of the Magi (and also one of the Madonnas of the Yarnwinder that happened to be there at the same time), then Wednesday we spent the afternoon looking at original drawings by Leonardo and others of the 15th century up close and uncovered by any glass or other impediments at the Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe in the Uffizzi.  Thursday I trudged about in the Uffizzi for 6 1/2 hours.

18 Views of Verrocchio's Putto

This is a page from my newest notebook. (If you click on these images you get a larger view).  I moved around the wee putto fountain in the courtyard of the Palazzo Vecchio here in Florence, stepping in a circle to capture the figure from all around.  These are quick gesture drawings, no more than five minutes each.  The idea was to get to know the general conformation of the figure in order to carve a similar figure on the peghead of a dulcimer.  Instead of the fishy thing this one holds, my peghead putto will hold a small lute-like instrument.  The sound holes will be the traditional hearts; the sides, back, peghead, and fingerboard are all walnut.

You may wonder why I would draw this instead of take a picture.  Perceptual drawing has many uses beyond capturing an image.  It can be a meditative activity.  It can be used for more expressive imagery.  But most of all it changes how you see.  To draw or to paint is to alter the structure of your mind.  A friend in graduate school experienced a good example of this.  She used to be very bored driving up across the midwest between the university and her home, especially in winter, so she would read novels while driving.  Do not do this!  Anyway, one year she was forced to take three terms of a studio or performance art.  She had never done anything like that.  She chose painting.  Soon she no longer needed the novels for entertainment but she reported seeing colors in the landscape she had never seen before.  The more she painted the more riotous the erstwhile dull grey view became.  Then the three terms were over and she stopped painting to make time for more pressing obligations.  She reported that the colors began to fade, and after a few months she was back to seeing only dullness, but now with the sad memory of having seen something marvelous that she was no longer able to see.

I must be addicted to those colors, and the effects of light and shadow, and the character of lines and textures.  I can't stop drawing and painting and if I'm prevented from doing so I get anxious.  When I can't be wielding pencil or brush, I draw and paint with my eyes and the whole world is a dazzling display of beauty.  I can stare at a glass of water or a shadow on an old wall and be content.  Let me now apologize to anyone I may have stared at a bit much -- I am merely drawing you in my mind.