I inadvertently discarded this post from last August. So here it is back again unchanged except for order in time.

Trees and leaves are among my favorite image subjects. Trees loom large in my legend as well as on their own accord.  I just uploaded thirty tree art pictures to Flickr and I have more to add. (tree art set) I have tons of tree photos as well. Often on our trips (my husband Dana Fisher and me) we seek out famous trees to photograph. I have photos of some that are no longer with us, like the Liberty Tree in Annapolis. We are long time tree huggers and planters. Some of the trees we have planted have reached great heights. The tree photo set will take some time organizing.

The Beech tree in this watercolor is on the grounds at Hampton Mansion. We first spied it while scouting sites to take my summer landscape class years ago. I was delighted when my favorite all time colleague at CCBC, Ray Quigley, no longer with us, bought it. I like to think of it giving him pleasure.

Beech Tree, 3,2,1 other ©D Drees 1987

This Beech tree and Yew are in back of the Hilton Mansion at CCBC Catonsville. I started a few offspring from blowbys of that yew but they are very slow growing. But what a great Yew it is.

Beech Tree and Yew © D Drees 1989

Adobe Illustrator CS4 Wow! Book Cover

The Adobe Illustrator CS4 Wow! Book by Sharon Steuer is available at bookstores. I have not even seen it yet but I have seen my pages with how to details in these PDFs. WarpingBlends and Blends-1-1.2. No customer reviews yet at Amazon.com. I can’t wait to see the rest of the book.

The Dory ©D Drees 2008

ays are getting shorter again. My mother was ninety years old on the fourth of July. She has always taken pleasure in having the fourth of July as her birthday. She said she was red, white and blue; red hair, white skin, blue eyes.

She has the longest ribbon of DAR ancestor bars I have ever seen, over thirty, and she wore them proudly. By amazing synchronicity, I spoke on the phone last night to my youngest sister who was visiting Utica for Mom’s birthday and she told me that the ancestor bars had been missing but that they had recently found them . The DAR friends of Mom who had come to the July 3rd birthday party had put the pressure on Sis to be in the July fourth parade so she acquiesced (a first) and wore the ancestor bars. Grandfather always used to march in the parade. He had an antique military costume, I think Civil War, and was in a small group of guys called “the ancients”, (Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Boston) This is more interesting to me now than back in the day. Always patriotic, Mom delighted in going to DAR conventions in DC in her mature years; too busy and poor when we were kids. She liked to be an organizer of receptions for Uticans who just received their citizenship, one of the various tasks her DAR group upholds.

I remember quite a few of her birthdays. Once I gathered some of my grandmother’s July fourth blooming roses to make a circlet on her cake. Cakes were a big deal to me and she taught me to make them from scratch. I was famous in first and second grade for drawing birthday cakes in perspective for classmate’s birthdays. I would draw the outline and they would decorate them from there. They looked a lot like these by Wayne Thiebaud.

Wayne Thiebaud Cakes

Mom was an excellent tailor and taught me a lot of that too. We would design clothes and Mom would figure out how to put them together. I copied this Betsey McCall blue and white striped dress when I was in fifth or sixth grade. I really loved that dress.

betsey mccall paper dolls

Mom studied home economics at UVM and design at the Traphagen School in NYC. She worked a short time as a ship’s draftsman but she met my Dad and brought him back to her hometown. He was happy to escape hell’s kitchen and was convalescing from TB and they found civilian jobs at Griffiths Air Force Base in Rome during the war, he teaching radio stuff.

After children started to come she was all about home and hearth. I am nothing like that. I have not figured out why trajectories are what they became.

Up till my twenties and thirties I used to make clothes, go to G Street Remnant in DC when it was still on G Street and fall in love with certain pieces of cloth.

The dress in this school picture from the eighties was one of the last dresses I made. (I am the straw hat and dress) It was a superb French cotton, couturier quality from G Street. Work became too demanding and due to worldwide underpaid labor, store bought clothes became incredibly cheap. The really good fabrics are not there but…. Mom always took pride in dressing us well and turned her nose up at ordinary stuff.  She also did great knitting and taught me that too, but unlike some who find knitting relaxing I would find it nerve wracking and anxiety would build as I tried to get it finished, stitch after relentless,tedious stitch, like driving at night in a snow storm.

first Art Department at CCBC in the eighties

Here we are in the forties dressed to match with clothes made by Mom. I think this a real family tartan, good stuff, Scottish made. The velvet jackets and hats were hunter green.

sister mom and dd

These are corduroy jumpers. They were a nice medium blue green. See how my dad dotes on my mom. After being poor in the depression and almost succumbing to TB he felt he was in paradise already. I think that was true!

Christmas 46 blue-green jumpers

The items in this drawing feature handworks from the women in my family, Grandmother’s china painting, Sisters engraving and jewelry and Mother’s ceramics.

Framed ©d drees 1982 , pen and ink

© Charles Burchfield -The Sphinx and the Milky Way-1946

In Framed there are also pictures pinned to the wall from my museum, Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute (MWPI), which looms large in my legend. They have a wonderful Charles Burchfield collection that is a great influence on me. In my ink drawing, Burchfield’s The Sphinx and the Milky Way is the largest pinned up picture at the top. The Thomas Cole Voyage of Life series at MWPI is one of two sets, the other being at the National Gallery in DC. Naturally I like the Utica set best. There is a detail from the first picture in the set, Childhood, pinned on the wall in the ink drawing at the upper left. The pinned up picture to the left of the tulip poplar leaf is the entrance to my grandfather’s backyard. I had cleaned out his backroom after he died to use as a summer studio in my last years of college. Below the leaf is a mysterious postcard of sheep from Hokaido that grandpa had sent his mother in the teens and that I have used as a picture reference in art work more than once.

Cole_Thomas_The_Voyage_of_Life_Childhood_1842-MWPI

Toy-by-Baziotes-MWPI

Established in 1919, MWPI provided me with a very sophisticated view of the arts for a kid from Utica. In the forties and fifties I believe, but am not sure, they had artist visitors like Phillip Guston, Theodoros Stamos, Baziotes, Rothko and that ilk from whom they would acquire choice pieces. Somebody had terrific taste, but I was  too young to know how that worked. But I got to grow up seeing excellent stuff with the paint barely dry.

When I was in high school I saw Alvin Ailey, Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor  and Jose Greco perform at MWPI. My sister and I regularly borrowed recordings and art books from the MWPI library. We listened to ethnic music, folk music, Elizabethan songs and various obscure recordings that were not commonly found. In 1966 or so I put a frame on an ink drawing of a tree I had done at Skidmore and had it accepted in the Artist’s of Central New York Regional at MWPI, my first exhibit in an adult show.

©1966 d drees , Tree , brush and ink

Dad took us to art shows at MWPI when we were little, way before the Phillip Johnson building was built. We took classes there from kindergarten to high school. Mom’s ceramics and Sister’s early jewelry were made there. We watched the Phillip Johnson building going down several stories subterranean and then up in the fifties. It was and is an elegant international style building. I remember the row of Victorian Procter family houses that were raised to make space. My mom remembers the childless Mrs. Proctor , who started the MWPI foundation, driving in her electric car in the twenties.

Phillip Johnson Building-MWPI

We lived just a block down the street. MWPI eventually acquired the greater part of our family land for their new school, except for my mom’s ante bellum (Civil War) house. She has lived on that street for all ninety of her years. We felt it was a good thing to have the school built up around mom in her old age for safety reasons though MWPI would rather have acquired the whole property. She takes pleasure in what she can, being frail now. She seems to have some lingering disappointment for not having traveled much and surprise at the shortness of ninety years. One set of ninety years is nowhere near enough to encompass it all. But who says it is supposed too.

for life’s not a paragraph

and death i think is no parenthesis

e. e. cummings, since feeling is first

lso during spring break, I went to the Walters Art Museum to see an exhibit called The Saint John’s Bible: a Modern Vision through Medieval Methods

I first read about The Saint John’s Bible in an article in the Smithsonian Magazine titled Inscribing the Word. Smithsonian Magazine. (December 2000). Named for Saint John’s Abbey and University in Minnesota, the Bible manuscript is an unprecedented project in modern times to make a superb new version of the Bible on parchment with entirely original artwork to reflect contemporary times.I made note and saved some clippings but I did not anticipate being able to see the real thing in the future.

This from the Walter’s brochure;

Since the earliest days of Christianity, scribes and artists have been creating beautiful copies of Holy Scripture. The Saint John’s Bible carries this tradition forward into the 21st century. This magnificent hand-illuminated seven-volume bible, commissioned by Saint John’s Abbey and University in Collegeville, Minnesota, is the result of more than 10 years of collaborative work between artists, scribes and theologians. This exhibition features leaves from the Books of Wisdom and Prophets, interspersed with examples of Christian and Jewish texts from medieval Europe, Islamic manuscripts from the Middle East and India and Buddhist scriptures from Thailand.

Designing this new handmade book was aided by computer in preliminary layouts. It makes it so much more of a wonder that handmade book production in the middle ages was so fine. The St. John’s Bible designers were able to do their copy-fitting on computer before  starting on the parchment sheets.The style is painterly and reflects various expressionist tendencies of contemporary times. I get the sense that early Kandinsky is an influence or sensibility. The typographic designs remind me a little of Paul Klee.  The illuminations are authored by more than one artist but the project is much specified by common goals. I really liked most of the images and by the time they were painted on the final parchments, they were beautifully crafted and I could see them first hand. There is a lot to be said for the textures of the real thing, the way raking light passes over areas of greater and lesser slickness and such. Screen pictures homogenize images and much is lost.

I bought the wonderful companion book Illuminating the Word; the making of The Saint John’s Bible by Christopher Calderhead ,which describes the project including tools, techniques and editorial decisions.The book has wonderful discussions of the grid system and typographic hierarchy that I shall be happy to use in Design and layout class when discussing the same. There are also facsimiles and prints of all these available, albeit expensive, to share the book with the world and to cover some of the vast expense of making it. Manuscripts were enormously expensive in the old days as well and the Gutenberg revolution was a massive shift as is the ability to publish blogs.

Official website for the Bible is so good as a resource it could be used to augment a college course in manuscript illumination.It has  videos of designers and calligraphers, materials,a great glossary of terms, bibliography, Internet resources, and page by page images of the book.

The largest images available on the site, but with watermarks across them, are in the custom print section of the site’s store.

The site is a little difficult to navigate  and there are areas hidden within a curriculum resources page which are worth pursuing. For example my search for illuminated D initials at the Hill Museum and Manuscript library yielded 1924 results. So much for my little folder of initials that I have been collecting from here and there for over ten years.

The Walters Museum where I saw the exhibit  has excellent manuscript and rare book collections, 18th and 19th Century art, Asian art, Egyptian, Nubian and Ethiopian art, to mention a few.

The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland is internationally renowned for its collection of art, which was amassed substantially by two men, William and Henry Walters, and eventually bequeathed to the City of Baltimore. The collection presents an overview of world art from pre-dynastic Egypt to 20th-century Europe, and counts among its many treasures Greek sculpture and Roman sarcophagi; medieval ivories and Old Master paintings; Art Deco jewelry and 19th-century European and American masterpieces.

The Saint John’s Bible show at the Walter’s also has a nice page, but I am not sure how long it will be there.The show was curated by Ben Tilghman, Zanvyl Krieger Curatorial Fellow, and Kathryn Gerry, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow, Department of Manuscripts and Rare Books. It included more than The St. Johns Bible as the Walter’s writes below.

Featuring nearly 40 volumes from the Walters’ world-renowned collection of manuscripts and rare books, this exhibition will examine the historical traditions of illuminated scripture in the context of a 21st-century manuscript, The Saint John’s Bible. Although it is still yet to be finished, The Saint John’s Bible has already been recognized as a masterpiece of contemporary calligraphy and book arts, and this exhibition marks the first time the manuscript has been examined in its historical context.

The idea of making a manuscript Bible may seem strange at the dawn of the 21st century, particularly considering the time and resources that go into making such a large book: when finished, the seven-volume bible will contain 1,150 pages and measure approximately three feet wide by two feet tall when open. But a quick glance at the illuminations throughout the book reveals that this is a project very much of its time. The artists use bold, abstract designs and collage techniques to create stirring compositions that often incorporate visual imagery from the modern world, such as computer voice-prints and images from the Hubble Space Telescope. The community at Saint John’s University and Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, which commissioned the manuscript, has a long tradition of scholarly inquiry and social engagement, and many of the illuminations reflect these concerns through references to the biblical past and current events. As a whole, the project represents an ambitious effort to envision a modern biblical art that is nevertheless deeply rooted in the long-standing tradition of manuscript production

That tradition, both in Christianity and in religions throughout the world, can be traced through the Walters superb collection of manuscripts and rare books. Featured in this exhibition will be manuscripts from many different religious traditions, including Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Particularly striking and beautiful is a Thai manuscript, in an accordion-folding format, that illustrates the many ways in which elephants were believed to bring good luck to the Thai royal court. The exhibition will also look at the history of calligraphy, both in the past and as it is practiced today. Fine examples of Medieval, Renaissance, and Islamic scripts will accompany works by highly-regarded contemporary calligraphers Sheila Waters, Julian Waters, and Mohamed Zakariya, vividly showing how contemporary lettering artists continue to build on the tradition they have inherited.

As a whole, the history of manuscripts, particularly as represented in this show, encourages us to reflect on how our understanding of what we read depends on the form in which we read it. In an age of disposable media—magazines, newspapers, and, above all, digital texts viewed on computers—it is easy to read things quickly and without much thought. When each book is a unique object, as all manuscripts are, both the maker and the reader are inspired to consider words and pictures much more carefully and deeply.

We can look forward to future shows relating to the Walter’s fine manuscript and book collection. So I am again enriched by having looked at the actual illustrations for books first hand.

his post was planned for April during spring break but, alas, other demands for my time emerged so the content is becoming more historic than current for Baltimore. After I graduated from Penn State in 1970 and failed to find a teaching job in higher education after sending perhaps two hundred letters of application, I landed in Baltimore working as Gallery Director for Ferdinand Roten Galleries on Mulberry Street. Roten’s was near the main Hutzler’s, and other still flourishing but soon to disappear downtown department stores. The job was wonderful in that I got to see terrific prints and meet some of the artists, but I wanted a teaching job. I immediately started on a second round campaign to get a higher education job. As it happens, I was around the corner from the main branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library so I immediately started combing their shelves of college catalogues for art department chairperson names and such. There was no easy way to look colleges up without the WWW . There was a directory of college personnel, whose title I forget, but you couldn’t get information about the department and what their faculty artwork looked like and such in the same place. Pratt had an excellent collection of catalogues. I could go to the Pratt on lunch hour. What a boon.

http://www.flickr.com/groups/prattlibrary/pool/

cathedral from prattwindow©bronxbob

pratt gallery

Pratt window©Bronx bob

prattacrosscourt

pratt cofferedcieling

Anyway, from the second round of application letters, I got an interview at Catonsville Community College, now CCBC, and had an instructor spot by February 1971. Though I felt that my being in Baltimore was by lame chance, perhaps as Fred Astaire once said “luck is a fool’s name for fate”.  Baltimore has proved to be a rich place to be. I had and have a strong interest in illustrated books. Coming out of PSU I had done some study in illuminated manuscripts with the incomparable Tony Cutler, Evan Pugh Professor of Art History. I like to mention these connections because of the six degrees of separation phenomenon.I had already modestly started collecting illustrated children’s books , notably buying a first edition of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are when it came out in 1963.

Soon enough I discovered that Baltimore was a great repository of illustrated books of all types. The Pratt was wonderful but there was the Evergreen Museum and Library of JHU, which had natural history books. There was JHU Sheridan Libraries, which had a rare book collection. I got my gloved hands on manuscripts at JHU while taking illuminated manuscript art history classes under Dr. Sandra Hindman now of Les Enluminures . I also put up an exhibition of called The Art of Marbling in the Sheridan in 1991.And there was the Walters Art Museum with its superb collection of manuscripts and books where I have seen numerous wonderful exhibits over the years. I wish I hadn’t been so influenced by the academic rhetoric of my younger years that called illustration a a “minor” art form, because it certainly has been a joy to me.

golden legacy ©Child at Art

This spring break we went to the Enoch Pratt Free library to see the exhibit,Golden Legacy: Original Art from 65 Years of golden Books sponsored by the National Center for Children’s Illustrated Literature in Abilene Texas and touring till January 2012. This show closed at the Pratt on May 18. Next stop Omaha Nebraska.

This exhibition will present the most extensive public showing ever of original illustration art from American publishing’s best loved and most consequential picture-book series, Little Golden Books—the history-making experiment that celebrates its 65th anniversary in 2007. Launched in 1942—the first full year of America’s involvement in the Second World War—Little Golden Books made high quality illustrated books available at affordable prices for the first time to millions of young children and their parents. Among the artists who contributed to the ambitious series were greats of the European émigré community (including Garth Williams, Feodor Rojankovsky, and Tibor Gergely) who had gathered in New York as the European situation worsened; alumni of the Walt Disney Studios (including Gustaf Tenggren, Martin Provensen, J.P. Miller, and Mary Blair), who came East for the artistic freedom and control associated with picture-book making; and such American originals as Eloise Wilkin, Elizabeth Orton Jones, Richard Scarry, and Hilary Knight.

golden legacy ©Picture Books

kids at show©Picture books

There is a book on the exhibit available at NCCIL as well as children’s books signed by the authors in their store. NCCIL has other touring shows available and a schedule on their site. The site also has information about contemporary artists. We took some pictures of the artwork but it was difficult to shoot. Two of my Baltimore /Flickr contacts have picture sets about this show as well, Child at Art and Picture Books. My sisters and I owned quite a few of these books and they may still be in my mother’s attic. I include a few favorites here but check the Flickr sites and NCCIL for much more. The Pratt continues to have great book related exhibits and is a beautiful place to visit itself. I really enjoyed seeing the original artwork with its fine craftsmanship up close.

color kittens provensen

Feodor Rojankovsky

firetruck tibor gergely

gergely

maryblair atpratt

i can fly mary Blair

richard scarry

rooster struts scarr

scarry i am abunny©Child at art

scarrybunny

tibor gergely

garthwilliams

eturning to my discussion of Optical Art, I would like to share some of the ideas of US design education in the third part of the twentieth century. At Catonsville Community College, the two of us who were the main two-dimensional design teachers for years, though very different in personality, shared in the indoctrination of our alma maters, Bob Dale from MICA and UMD and me from Pratt, PSU and indirectly, Yale through Skidmore, and so we saw eye to eye on our educational objectives. I handled the Color Design class, which was more Albers than Albers. I do not think we were too much different than most of the country in our points of view.

The CCC art faculty used to differentiate between types of op art effects in a manner that would help the students gain control of the art elements both one element at a time and elements combining with other elements. Other objectives were to develop abstract thought capacity and hand eye coordination. In those days we believed artists should have an ability to objectively assess what they put out for communication and to realize that there might be a difference between what they were recording to the material world and what portion remained in their imagination. The students were supposed to realize what was the perceiver’s share. This is not a new idea in education, think Henry Adams “One sees what one brings”, but with many ripples about what is really real. Since I somewhat believed in objectivity, this was important to me.

Let us not forget that Plato worried about the unreality of images many years ago and the discussion goes on and on from there. Oh yes, there was also the graven image item in the Ten Commandments and what that would expand to. In the sixties and seventies, the op artists were making their manifestos  and I remember Victor Vasarely declaring that after him there would be nothing more for anyone to do in the art world. I think he missed something basic about creativity. He must have missed Arabesque designs which influenced Maurits Escher and also quilt designs to mention a couple of precedents.

Maurits Escher- Butterfly

NYPL arabesque designs 4

NYPL arabesque designs 3

NYPL arabesque designs 2

NYPL Arabesque designs

I have used quilt design motifs in a number of my works like these two below.

magnolia quilt-©1989 DDrees

magnolia quilt-©1989 DDrees

We are really all remix artists. Some pieced quilts

c1tcht2 pieced quilt

japanese-quilt-show-at-the-la-connor-quilt-museum-wa1

le159v1 pieced quilt

oleo-1973

Some call Vasarely the father of op art, but with so many design precedents I cannot see how anyone could lay claim to that. At an AIGA speech at the Baltimore Museum I recall hearing April Greiman laying claim to the circle. I think she was at least fifty, so old enough to know better. She startled me.

The basic starts in our 2d design class were line transitions as previously discussed. Previous

Line transitions were made out of even width lines that might or might not wave or change direction. The line had to be repeated many times at intervals or negative spaces that were close in width to the lines, to create ambiguity at the edge of vision’s tolerance for seeing things as discreet lines and spaces, and optically mixing them as visual gray. The result of the ambiguity would be difficulty in keeping the image static. You could delight in how something as simple as a line system would produce flashes, depth and motion arising through perception. Many traditional artists and engravers already knew all this because they had to control the elements to tease them into illusionism.

Diderot's Encyclopedia Sandal detail showing line transition

Diderot's Encyclopedia sandals engraving

When I was a student in Bittleman’s class he would have us take small pieces of Albrect Durer’s mature woodcuts and copy them with brush and ink very magnified in order to study the relationship of the line pattern to image formation.These traditional artists were not so interested in focusing on these tricks as on some other content of their preference.

If you start to use shapes rather than lines, new experiments can be generated. Adding color shifts, hue, value or intensity adds the next development. So from line transitions we took the students to shape transitions. From simple figure ground ambiguity we moved to reversing figure ground designs in which the shapes had additional content, like being letter forms or creatures, (think Escher). I hope that the students were following this train of thought. I assumed they were because it was so laborious for them to craft these items in pen and ink that they had plenty of time for their brains to ponder on it. Their results were often very good. As more elements join in the game, possible creative results expand exponentially. Using a vector program makes this all the easier. My computer graphics students can proliferate designs so fast it would make Victor Vasarely roll over in his grave. I do not think they care to imagine what it was like to make these by hand. The end of art is nowhere in sight.

Student’s digital line and square op art examples:

121cg1_cmc_opsquares2.jpg

121CG1_JW_checkers

cgvc121_lmp_checkers

cgvcd121_eab_oplineart2

cgvcd121_eab_opsquares4ai

jhorstmanCHECKS

trudylrwbheart

How tos;

Making a Line transition with bend and twist in Adobe Illustrator- see figure

• Make line stacks with a 6 point stroke
• Transform /move /vertical -12 point . Copy the repeat transform 50 times or so
• Option drag to get 8 or so stacks, Align and distribute the stacks
• With direct select tool select points between stacks and move the set. Repeat till it looks like this
• Then  apply the twist filter

op line-bent-and-twisted-part-11

op line-bent-and-twisted-part-2

mylinetranbendtwisted ©2000 DD

Making a Shape transition in Adobe Illustrator

• Shape blend between two triangles- one with apex to left one to right
• Height of triangle must have multiple values that equals number of steps times vertical distance between top and bottom
• Run the blend. Here there are 14 steps between two shapes
• Make another set horizontal as a start guide to reset apexes for additional columns
• Option drag column and edit apex- repeat to width desired

shape-blend-starts for op shape transition

shape-transition-1 ©2000 dd

Line transition with figure ground reversal

figure-ground-reversal-lines

figure ground reversal dressed up ©2000 dd

figure-ground-reversal-turned-decoration ©dd 2000

I plan to add an entry about more complex figure ground reversals in the future.

Art and life

In view of the playful, game-like nature of op art, despite the arguments that it points out ambiguities and conditional nature of meaning, I often worry that art is a minor pursuit. But I feel that I can be surer of my conditional statements in art than if I were to make huge blunders in the material world like our government has been making. In art, the players are line, shape and color, reference, etc. In politics and control of wealth I do not even know who the real players are. I do see some ugly results in the real world, so I hope the future will track down the truth.

This from Harold Pinter d.2008: excerpted from Nobel Prize acceptance essay 2005

In 1958 I wrote the following:



’There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.’



I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?…..

So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool, which might give way under you, the author, at any time. 



But as I have said, the search for the truth can never stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right there, on the spot.…

I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all.

My PSU printmaking mentor , Bruce Shobaken, used to say about being an artist, “At least I am not hurting anybody”

Fish and Fowl Show

I managed to get my prints for the show framed and ready. Jane Morais installs the show Tuesday, September 30 in Berkeley Springs, West VA, Ice House Special Exhibit Gallery. Of the exhibitors, Olin Yoder and Jane have been my colleagues at CCBC, both now retired; Harvey Kirstel was in the Art Department at UMBC for years, now retired and Mark Adams I met many years ago when he was painting mostly nudes. He is now participating in a painting a day project on the web, which means his work is accessible to many more viewers and buyers. Below is an oyster picture in the Dutch tradition I nabbed from his site.

Dana and I plan to go to the opening in Berkeley Springs and stay over a night, as the reports are that it is a one of the”Top 100 U.S. Art Towns”. Years ago when we were planning our Interdisciplinary Humanities Courses at CCC, my colleagues and I stayed at a B&B there and the Art Department and later the Computer Graphics Department did two day curriculum revision retreats at Coolfont. Student Government used to go to Coolfont regularly with the student club leaders for Leadership Training. I am not sure that still happens. Times change and the money gets spent by different priorities.

At the top is the show announcement card and below the new pieces I made for the show. These in this blog entry are all digital. I had made real watercolor and marbling fish items earlier in the summer. The digital prints have some of my scanned marbled papers as source files. Some include the blend/extrusion forms I have been working on in Adobe Illustrator and I hope will show up in the next Illustrator Wow! Book by Sharon Steuer. They have been worked on both in Illustrator and Photoshop.

IllustratorCS3 Wow! Book

My new digital Fish pictures;

Promenade © Dedree Drees 2008

I Feel Pretty © Dedree Drees 2008

Three Way Conversation © Dedree Drees 2008

Treacherous Going © Dedree Drees 2008

The Dory © Dedree Drees 2008

Two Fish © Dedree Drees 2008

Red Orange Fish © Dedree Drees 2008

Blue Fish © Dedree Drees 2008

Spotty © Dedree Drees 2008

“The naturalist, J. B. S. Haldane, was asked by a cleric about what he might infer about the Creator, based on his wide-ranging study of life. 
: Haldane supposedly replied the creator had “an inordinate fondness for beetles” based on the then current count of beetle species at around 400,000.”

Inordinate Fondness for Beetles tan/blu ©2002 d drees

An inordinate fondness -blue © d drees

I like insects (and spiders) because they are so beautiful, symmetric and jewel like. I also like them because of their fascinating life cycles, long and short, their transformations, communications and industries. They come in any color you can think of and all kinds of spots and stripes. I remember, but not well enough to give the exact citation, that Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan had decided to spend his next life as a bug because the bug he had chosen had such a great community life and was very happy.

Art deco and Art nouveau artists often used insects in their designs. E A Seguy at  NYPL, Seguy at NCSU, Seguy at Bibliodyssey (the real skinny,see below) Louis Comfort Tiffany , Rene Lalique, Emile Galle are examples. My Flickr set of my work relating to insects is here.

e a seguy plate

Dragonfly, L C Tiffany

Rene Lalique Brooch

Emile Galle

There are quite a few great beetle, butterfly and insect books old and new. Lots of people like them despite the maligning of some of these creatures by shortsighted sci fi and other stories. Many groups on Flickr devoted to insect pictures attest to this interest.

Bugs do at times seem alien but are anything but. My source pictures for the beetles are from hand colored engravings in Entomology: Beetles, edited by Sir William Jardine, 1843.

Jardine Beetles Frontispiece

Jardine Beetles Plate 26, hand colored engraving

A later edition of this whole book can be downloaded as a PDF albeit a poor quality one, from Google.

I bought a copy of the Jardine book and a butterfly book, Berge’s Schmetterlingsbuch, 1842 and a few disbounded plates from Cramer’s butterfly book, which is really high priced intact.

Berge

I love Antiquariat Junk’s site and bought a great but soiled butterfly book from them at a reasonable price. They have a beautifully organized site and you can see plates in the books. You can sometimes get these wonderful antiquarian books at lower prices when they are dirty or poorly bound because high roller collectors want them as close to perfect as they can get. I am in it for the pictures and can expertly clean them up in Photoshop. So I want the real books for the line detail and I start out with 1200 ppi scans and play around with them from there. Most anything that you can get on the Internet is too low in resolution but some libraries are doing excellent scanning jobs if your bandwidth can handle the large downloads. Here are some links but be careful you do not get stuck in them. University of Strasbourg, University of Wisconsin,

A picture blog coming out of Australia, Bibliodyssey, often finds and posts links to these good picture sources. It is on my check every week list.

I also have collected a few specimens but not with scientific rigor. I have found more than one Luna moth and noticed how different the individuals are. I suspect this is often so. But that is another large subject for another life. I do not want to kill any of them to catch them anymore. There are enough other ways to get models.

Luna Moth, watercolor and marbling ©d drees

Some of my artworks here are from specimens, some are from my photos and some are from engravings. I avoid contemporary photos because of copyright issues.

black and gold striped creature designer, digital ©d drees

Inordinate fondness/red ©d drees

Inordinate fondness/dark blue ©d drees

Inordinate fondness/sand ©d drees

noiseless, patient spider, watercolor and marbling ©d. drees

night vision, watercolor ©d drees

Anne's Butterfly , watercolor and marbling © d drees

Bug Pals, digital © d.drees

Butterfly and Pinecone Mandala ©1994 d.drees digital

Butterfly mandala-blue © d drees

Butterfly vortex ©d.drees digital

blue and white © d drees

Grasshopper pattern © d drees

Waterskeeter pattern © d drees

Illuminator's Butterfly assembly © d drees

Is rapture the treasure © d drees digital

Palimpsest © dedree drees, digital

caterpillar © dedree drees , digital

This caterpillar from Diderot, then worked in Photoshop channel ops. My students do not tend to like the abstraction level of channel ops. I really do like channels and they fit into my procedural art area.

Caterpillar 8 © d drees

Caterpillar 9 © d drees

And do not forget this one.

scarab

Winky Dink and You screen

remember when Winky Dink started being broadcast on TV in1953. My sister Jane and I got a screen kit and joined the fan club right away. The screen was a piece of transparent but greenish flexible, erasable plastic about a sixteenth of an inch thick that would be placed over the TV screen so you could draw on it with crayons. Winky Dink would then have you follow dot-to-dot instructions to complete drawings or decipher secret messages. We loved it. They sold millions of fifty cent kits by mail, but then there were thee cent stamps. My Dad became characteristically angered because he feared we would get radiation from being so near the TV. Perhaps he was right. He was always very cautious on our behalf. I started checking to see if I was glowing in the dark.

Winky dink golden book

You can buy a Winky Dink video now after it disappeared for years. Except for my sister, no one I know has any recollection of it. It was the first interactive screen show and I think we kind of knew it was rich but when it ended nothing like it followed for decades. Anyway, none-other than Stan Vanderbeek was working on the Winky Dink show. “Vanderbeek began his career in the 1950s making independent art film while learning animation techniques and working painting scenery and set designs for the American TV show, Winky Dink and You” Who knew he would later be a colleague in our academic enterprise?

Winky Dink crayon set

For many creatives of a certain age, the notion of interactivity was very attractive but needed to be supported by an entire industry. You could not do it alone. Whereas, you could paint and draw alone. I guess you still need the backdrop of the computer and software industry to do anything like that alone, but at least, if you have the time and money, you can learn Flash or whatever and make interactive stuff. You can be a one person band. It is a huge change.

In those days, my hometown had one good TV station and static on others, even though Daddy climbed the roof to put up an antenna. Most all the kids watched the same thing because they had the same good channel. You could count on your coevals to have the same TV experiences you did. We took it for granted that the same pieces of info would be referenced. It was pretty much controlled input with music too. Radio stations played a small repertoire of tunes and we now know that payola was being practiced. The incredible variety of music available now puts an entirely different perspective on creativity in the culture.

I think we got the TV when I was six. Before that I would go to watch TV at Dickey Roberts house and I would have met him in kindergarten at Egbert Bagg School. (I always wanted to know who Egbert Bagg was, and here through Google my wish is granted.)  Dickie, who looked like Winky Dink, and I were best buddies but he moved by the end of first grade. I started getting a complex about losing people around then. Dickie’s TV had a tiny round screen. Our first set was a twelve incher. Like me, my family was too frugal to be early adopters. I am still waiting for the cell phone, hand held gadget thing to sort itself out before I get in that habit. I have gotten along without one for sixty-two years and it somewhat bothers me that young people have instantaneously been so stuck on them. I get the impression that they are afraid to do anything alone.

When I was in Freshman English at Skidmore in 1963 we were asked to analyze e e cummings “anyone lived in a pretty how town”. Everyone, even the worst reprobate Union College boys, thought e e cummings was the coolest. In my class, girls who had gone to the High School of Music and Art seemed to be able to talk in secret language to the teacher, Donald Tritschler, who I think was in his first year of teaching. I did not know what he was talking about or asking us to talk about. I was in a cold sweat in that class. I felt that we had not been prepared at Utica Free Academy to trust our own ideas or instincts when reading, so things were sucked in and held in abeyance till someone with authority would steer us towards what to think. I really loved the stuff we read and thought a great deal about it but I was expecting that coming from the provinces to this golden place would allow me to be filled with the external wisdom that they had and I did not. So I was tongue-tied. It took me till junior year to work this out when Arnold Bittleman, my late great drawing teacher, said in a lecture that when he went to college he expected to be able to be filled with external wisdom but then found out that it came from inside. I do not know the source of this Bittleman Self Portrait. I grabbed it off the internet years ago.

Self Portrait © Arnold Bittleman

But  I got through Freshman year through the kindness of my teacher’s hearts and it took me the next three years to get my grades up to an average that would let me in graduate school.

Unbeknownst to Donald Tritschler, the poem has resonated in my imagery. It may be a little abstruse crossing from verbal to visual but it works for me. The art teachers at Skidmore never managed to indoctrinate me into thinking that having literary elements in one’s art was anathema. That was part of that era that I am glad is forgotten. Who is Clement Greenberg? No link for him in my blog. See Tom Wolfe instead.

Here is the poem.

by e e cummings

anyone lived in a pretty how town

(with up so floating many bells down)

spring summer autumn winter

he sang his didn’t he danced his did

women and men(both little and small)

cared for anyone not at all

they sowed their isn’t they reaped their same

sun moon stars rain

children guessed(but only a few

and down they forgot as up they grew

autumn winter spring summer)

that noone loved him more by more

when by now and tree by leaf

she laughed his joy she cried his grief

bird by snow and stir by still

anyone’s any was all to her

someones married their everyones

laughed their cryings and did their dance

(sleep wake hope and then)they

said their nevers they slept their dream

stars rain sun moon

(and only the snow can begin to explain

how children are apt to forget to remember

with up so floating many bells down)

one day anyone died i guess

(and noone stooped to kiss his face)

busy folk buried them side by side

little by little and was by was

all by all and deep by deep

and more by more they dream their sleep

noone and anyone earth by april

wish by spirit and if by yes.

women and men(both dong and ding)

summer autumn winter spring

reaped their sowing and went their came

sun moon stars rain

From Complete Poems: 1904-1962 by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage. Used with the permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation. Copyright © 1923, 1931, 1935, 1940, 1951, 1959, 1963, 1968, 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1976, 1978, 1979 by George James Firmage.

Lines from this poem wash across my brain often. Below are some of my artworks that I see as having a kinship to it.

Mimicking the Sun ©Dedree Drees 1978 watercolor

Sun Flare © Dedree Drees 1996 digital

Pink Landscape ©1995 Dedree Drees digital

Why wait any longer for the world to begin © Dedree Drees 1969, etching

Above named from a Bob Dylan song lyric

Dreamer ©1980 dedree drees watercolor

Waves of Flowers tiles BWI airport garage

Newton to Blake Landscape ©1979 Dedree Drees watercolor

The multiple sky idea is just an appreciation of all the light shows we get to watch, no two alike and in every color you can imagine. I believe there are plenty of Flickr groups on the subject.  You know ‘”the world is so full of a number of things, that I think we should all be as happy as Kings”.

Mirabile Visu © dedree drees 1980 watercolor

Skies ©1980 dedree drees watercolor

Skies ©1980 dedree drees pastel

There is a nice old German song about the good moon Guter Mond du gehst so stille with awareness of people from all times and places connecting by seeing the same old moon.

Ryder Moon ©1981 dedree drees watercolor

Ryder Moon ©1981 dedree drees watercolor

OCD helps your art in many ways. It took me a while to pick out the exact watercolor pigments to bleed as I wanted them to for Ryder Moons. Here is Albert Pinkham Ryder.

Albert Pinkham Ryder Moonlight

Dover Beach ©1987 dedree drees watercolor and marbling

This named for Mathew Arnold Poem -Dover Beach. Being literary again

Sometimes I can not get wordpress to show the captions- do not know why. The image above is from 1996 and is a digital version of Dover Beach.

God Bless Baltimore ©1982 watercolor

Sheep May Safely Graze © Dedree Drees handcolored etching

Above named for Bach Cantata- “Schafe können sicher weiden”. You can play that at my funeral

Klein blue sky ©1996 dedree drees digital

International Klein Blue is a color Yves Klein painted on many things. I saw his show in the Jewish museum in 1967 or 1968. He had died young in 1962. Unbelievably I find a Wikipedia link here to IKB. The world is so full of a number of things…

Klein Blue sky ©1996 Dedree Drees digital

Yellow stars ©1996 dedree drees digital

Fooling around with colorways on the computer – sure is fun. I mean it!

Cumberland Fall ©1989 dedree drees watercolor and marbling

The above was from a photo taken on a rainy day as we drove to Pittsburgh for my father-in-laws funeral. So it is rainy,sad,cyclic, eternal.

This is 1995 Lightening scape, digital, from the same photo as Cumberland Fall.

The Rain Beats the Rain ©1979 Dedree Drees watercolor

The title is from an haiku but I do not remember where I first saw it. This is the best link I found though it is not the same translation.

Leaves falling
Lie on one another
The rain beats the rain