Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 20,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 7 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

took a course in semiology in 2002 at U of Baltimore for my Doctor of Communication Design work.

Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of cultural sign processes (semiosis), analogy, metaphor, signification and communication, signs and symbols.

Richard Stanley, principal of Swisstrix who studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule Basel with Wolfgang Weingart, taught the course. Richard was quite fond of Hoffman and Hoffman’s graphic design ideas and has remained his friend throughout the years. Through this contact, I am but two degrees of separation from the Swiss Style. I like being aware of these connections, reflections in the net of gems. Many of my Skidmore professors from way back when, Robert Reed, Arnold Bittleman, Arthur Anderson, Victor Ligouri and others were directly connected to Josef Albers. I remember the day that Bob Reed and Arnold Bittleman had Alber’s newly published folio of Homage to the Square silk-screens in hand and were showing them to our class. Later I met many other Alber’s students, like Norman Carlberg at MICA. So there I was two degrees of separation from the Bauhaus version of color theory, which I have enthusiastically passed along to a multitude of CCBC art students. I discover that Weingart was also attached to Yale so the net of gems image continues to work.

One of our projects at UB was to develop sincere identity images. The two you see here are my results. Perhaps due to my many years on the planet yielding many interests or my older brain finding it difficult to hone things down to a single essence, my icons of self remained fairly divergent. They also reveal a lot to me if not to anyone else. They are somewhat of a psychoanalytic exercise.

D Drees ID 1 ©2002

D Drees ID 2 ©2002

Because I make images with an array of traditional media, plus digital media I do not think of myself as a painter or printmaker but as an Iconographer. Unfortunately that word does not mean to most people what it means to me. My take on it has more to do with art history and semiotics and less to do with graphic user interface icons that many think of, or paintings of holy figures in byzantine style. My icons include representations, likenesses, symbols, and signs.

So my sincere identity images incorporate some visual ideas that I have developed over many years including;

• Spectrums embedded in an array of natural creatures like the ring of butterflies;
• Aspects of fractals, like marbling passages;
• The physicality of pictures as opposed to the abstraction of words;
• Delight at the variety of creation as expressed in Pied Beauty by Hopkins;
• The hand of higher power from which all ideas and talents flow;
• Layers or dimensions of reality that we float through constantly;
• Relationship of words to pictures, (allowing the troubling word iconographer to be present.)
• Pens, brushes hands palettes keyboards, all very trite images standing for artists, I allow because they are what affords the transition from mental/internal to physical/external, hackneyed or not. (In our class we also discussed where to draw the line between hackneyed, obscure and simply understandable; what we do to make sure something is being sent out and received.)
• My image of myself as the fairy godmother or good witch improves on a very early image of my aged self as the crone 1968-1969. The crone can be transformed into the good fairy.

©d drees 1969-3 The Information, oil

©D Drees 1969-4 Revelation, oil

©D Drees 1969-12 24x18 pen&ink

Our primary readings in Richard’s class were from Arthur Berger’s Seeing is Believing.

Later I would incorporate these and other readings into my CGVC246 course, Graphic Design for Communication. My other reading suggestions for that course:

• Hot-Wiring Your Creative Process; Curt Cloninger;
• Semiotics for Beginners; Daniel Chandler;  http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/semiotic.html; free semiotics tutorial
• Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art,
• Hillman Curtis, MTIV; Process, Inspiration and Practice for the New Media Designer,
• Jim Kraus, Idea Index,
• Rick Poyner, No More rules; Graphic Design and Postmodernism,

If an artist ever wants to clarify his/her messages, these sorts of studies are essential.

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Fresher than ever.

Crunchy numbers

The average container ship can carry about 4,500 containers. This blog was viewed about 21,000 times in 2010. If each view were a shipping container, your blog would have filled about 5 fully loaded ships.

In 2010, there was 1 new post, growing the total archive of this blog to 19 posts. There were 10 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 3mb. That’s about a picture per month.

The busiest day of the year was September 27th with 146 views. The most popular post that day was Op Art using line sets in Adobe Illustrator.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, flickr.com, search.aol.com, dreesspring09.wordpress.com, and dreesspring10.wordpress.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for bridget riley, op art, charles burchfield, bridget riley op art, and albert pinkham ryder.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Op Art using line sets in Adobe Illustrator August 2008
7 comments

Procedural art, my computer graphics history and op art in Adobe Illustrator August 2008

sun moon stars rain August 2008
2 comments

Adobe Illustrator CS4 Wow! Book is out July 2009

Ninety Years Old July 2009
2 comments

Here is my influence statement, just submitted.

Lots of artists will tell you their best ideas came from beyond, were given. But I need the precious commodities of time and quiet spaces to bring the inspirations to fruition. I do a lot of slow synthesizing. Among my most important influences in the language of image making are Charles Burchfield, William Blake, Rembrandt Van Rijn and Arnold Bittleman. These fellows provide a tradition of notation that can be built upon to maintain meaning.

We are stuck in our bodies but we make trips to transcendent places all the time. We need to reaffirm this and put it in perspective as four-fold vision in works of art, as Blake said, “An eternity in a grain of sand”.  The transcendent is embedded in the actual in works of art.

William Blake’s classical archetypal figures all signify our identity. He embodies multilevel meaning from the particular of the streets of London to the eternal. My Dad quoted “The Tyger “ to me when I was a little child, which made me sit up and take notice. Blake connected verbal and visual as well as anyone ever has.

William Blake from Songs of Innocence and Experience

I saw and was influenced by Charles Burchfield at an early age. His evocative art was a personal inward response to creatures, sounds, weather and temperature of everyday life. His perceptions in the moment with total awareness allowed the connections to the vibrations of the universe to happen.

Charles Burchfield

My college drawing teacher Arnold Bittleman took reality and observation and rendered it with a meaningful line system and a respect for the mark as the creative instant. He synthesized the aesthetics of the West and the East.

Arnold Bittleman Untitled

Rembrandt’s inner feelings and introspection were backed up by compositional choices, as in “David and Saul”. He used light to direct the viewer’s gaze and color and texture to set an introspective mood. Yet he worked “naar het leven” so the transcendent and real are connected.

Rembrandt, Saul and David, 1655-60, Mauritshuis, The Hague

My short artist’s statement is here. I need to update it sometime soon.

I want to make art that is beautiful, that addresses the viewer’s spiritual needs. Perhaps that is my role—to try to get people to look at the sublime and the beautiful again. I want to create works that show, as Blake said, ‘an infinity in a grain of sand.’ I like the idea of an art that is multi-cultural and multidirectional, connecting then and now, here and there, them, and us into images that show the transitional forms that bind. The more the artist can put into the work as potential meaning, the more the viewer will be able to connect with, no matter where or when.

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.

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”