Paintings that Move

chess paintings

all of them, one [result] [byproduct] of the creation of a collaborative new media installation. hope you enjoy.

http://www.eriksanner.com/2008_for_blog/080221_chess_paintings.pdf

saturday night good friend and new neighbor kevin had a housewarming party. after taking down chess from breeze, i set it up in his place. then, late at night, started projecting across the street. not sure whose idea that was, but there were a few of us who agreed it would be "cool" to try. here's what that looked like from the sidewalk (chess is visible at top-left).

think the projector can get a little brighter, but sometimes i get nervous and forget such a simple thing. anyway, several people had suggested approaching alvin ailey, but i don't know anyone there and wondered who to call. also frankly i was getting quite discouraged after all my cold-calls and packets and emails weren't yielding venues. also had been suggested that might be more fruitful abandoning the approaching-random-people-with-attractive-spaces in favor of approaching-people-i-already-have-some-sort-of-relationship-with and see if i can figure out how to make the space work, or how to fit the space. (more fun, too, approaching people who are already supportive of my art, and actually want to see it, or help if they can, whole different feeling.) now it turns out that rachel (who i know through kevin) has a friend who ?heads the extension division? there. anyway, it's something worth pursuing, one of the spaces i hope to show chess at after february 29th, when it comes down from cafe forant.

speaking of cafe forant, there's now a little dvd player and a digital picture frame, both showing more images/footage from the park sessions, so you get a bit of a better feeling for how the project progressed, from collaborative paintings into a new media piece of computer-controlled video-of-painting.

chess is up again

only visible when it's dark out. hope to have opening reception next tuesday, february 26th, 6pm-8pm, still tentative.

you can see it now but it will look better when the weather clears up - will draw black and white squares with chalk and charcoal on the sidewalk. so next tuesday, assuming this all gets solidified, will be the time to check it out.

cafe forant
north side of 51st street between 9th and 10th ave

also planning to have dvd of all the paintings playing, and digital picture frame of the event, another of all the games. hope will be beautiful.

one customer already said was.

selected pictures

from first half of february. most of what i've been doing is trying to solidify a venue to share chess, which is a lot of emailing and calling people and meeting up for coffee or whatever, not the most imageful activities. but there are other chunks of life too.

got a phone call from good friend catherine who said her good friend fanny was looking for used paint brushes, tubes of paint, etc. so i sold a bunch of nearly-empty tubes, bent pigment-encrusted brushes, my palette, etc. it all got put on a movie set, one of the characters is an artist. the cash will cover a new palette and some other supplies i needed. i don't know what the movie is called, but my tools (not my work) will be in a movie at some point. just an odd thing that happened. frankly i'm excited to go to pearl and get some new brushes.

here's what i sold.

drawing class, we went to st patrick's cathedral. i really need practice. it has been a long time since i've done any drawing from life.

at guenter's opening, the photographer and his model.

lots and lots of battles with the pinwheel. so much chess rendering (not for the piece itself, which is done, but i decided i also want to show just the footage of the painting on another screen, and also pictures of the painting and location on another screen), always afraid to do screen captures during rendering, don't want to upset my machine. however even just wrapping up documentation, there were skirmishes.

set up chess in my studio again, to try to get a cleaner work sample, to show people on dvd, what it looks like, anybody who doesn't get to see the actual piece. maybe i'll do some sort of project, ok not sure about this but maybe at some point, involving just the documentation, the new piece would be a sort of conglomerate of a bunch of other projects. maybe not, every time i think about going back to old work or combining existing things, i realize there are more projects which are newer i'd rather initiate, instead of exploring the past. onward. but sometimes i really like looking at those sample images, a different kind of satisfaction then you get in the presence of the work itself.

drawing class in grand central station.

and chess is no longer at breeze, i took it down yesterday. but i thought it looked good from the inside.

you can see some of the chess documentation i've been pulling together, it's huge though, might take a while to download.

http://www.eriksanner.com/2008_for_blog/080214_chess_paintings.pdf

anyway here you get the gist. that's the only chess painting (of 64) which doesn't use any paint, it's a collage of polaroids steph and i made in the park, wrapping up day three, waiting for the paintings to dry. we each had a polaroid camera. first she took a picture of the board, then put it on the board. as it developed i took a picture of the picture of the board on the board. we each had a pair of scissors and bunch of stuff - i don't know what it's called - some kind of super-strong archival adhesive, photography people are familiar with it. anyway, so we kept taking pictures of this collage as it was growing, and incorporating them into the collage, this is the result. memorable experience. (months ago, not february, just finally got all the pieces in order, and photographed them, to share.)

chess is up!

breeze (thai-french fusion restaurant)
661 9th avenue (between 45th and 46th streets)

the owner says if no customers complain by mid-week then she'll keep it up for a while, and then i'll plan an opening/closing party etc. worst case, i'll keep looking for another venue.

but if you want to see this piece right now, you can totally do that.

hope you enjoy it.

order

putting the chess paintings in order, making sure i have all the video included in the piece, a still photo of each one, the right names and numbers. has been occupying most of my art-time lately, everything else on hold while i get chess wrapped up (work complete) and share it.

some details if you're curious.
http://www.eriksanner.com/2008_blog_for/080130_game_tracker.xls

by the way, really enjoying listening to some of the conversations (which won't be included in the piece). was telling sarah schmerler about ray kurzweil and transhumanism and how i believe we're all going to become the borg, she stopped painting at some point, got to see a physical reaction other than facial expressions.

final painting, six children together, i sound like beavis and butthead's teacher, "ok kids, do whatever you want, ok?"

unforseeable effect

starting another class tomorrow, drawing interior public spaces in new york city, that might not be the exact title, but you get it, a drawing class. not so long ago was talking to katharine about why. big part of my answer was "i don't know but i want to." anyway, that perspective drawing class last year, today it changed what i'm doing and how i do it. i've done a lot of projects involving rectangles or grids of some sort, usually painting, going all the way back, almost, as long as i've been painting - certainly in the nineties in tokyo there were a lot of grids in my work. i didn't see them that way, to me they were rectangles. anyway, never once did i use a ruler or a straightedge or a pencil or block anything out. as a painter i've always just stuck to paint, not drawing underneath, not lining out or outlining or going around edges much if at all, painting should come from the center so i'll start everything from the center, that has pretty much been my attitude.

so, that color study piece i'm about to embark on, was thinking about how precise i wanted it to match up, how it might be more interesting but definitely more work later on to just haphazardly paint a square, another square, another square, and see if they come out uniform, or try to see how uniform i can get them - anyway that's what i'd usually do. but i want to see that piece. and i don't want to spend days jiggering little movie clips in flash or whatever software it ends up being and matching them up. it might look more "organic" or you might see my "hand" a bit more, but basically i want this to be a functional color study and i'd rather realize it than futz around either painting over and over to get the grid right or coaxing video clips into specifically picky locations. so, i got out my square with the straight edge, and the tape measure, and i drew a grid.

which never would have happened if i hadn't taken that other class. this piece is going to be "flat" and perspective is not going to be a consideration, but drawing a grid or using a square or a straight edge or measuring, none of those things would ever had occurred to me if i hadn't taken that class. didn't have the equipment anyway, was resisted getting it until i realized i wasn't getting any feedback from the teacher without it. so it's already had an effect on how i work, how i think, on my practice.

i didn't really know why i was taking that class either. there were a few vague ideas, i don't want to get into them because i want to go to sleep, but - never would have thought i'd end up painting inside lines. so even if i'm not using what i learned (perspective) i'm using what i learned (tools, precision, efficiency).

smoother

think thai/french fusion restaurant breeze on 9th avenue is going to let me show chess for a couple weeks in february, should know for certain this week, that's a great development on the sharing-chess-with-the-community front

regarding the call-of-the-paint, put some more grey on the base of color study first half last night, no real reason to do that, except i could hear it

underpainting

this is what the first half of "color study" (now a piece, not just a color study, although it will be functional) looks like now.

my tripod broke a few months ago, plan to buy a new one sunday (hope it's in stock); then hope to begin work on the piece this week. getting chess shown and anything that entails still priority right now. also got matthew's images (from the nakasendo) and haven't been thinking too much about that lately - anyway, color study, a couple issues resolved. first, both halves (diptych i guess is the correct word?) are going to contain "real-world" color and pigment paint-world color. on one square, the one you see up there, i'll paint 81 squares of fundamental colors (grey, white, black, yellow, green, blue, purple, red, orange). i'll videotape that painting - up close, i think. so i'll have 81 little video clips of a base color being painted. then, out into the world, looking for things which have those colors, and taking 81 video clips of whatever i find. green is easy - leaves, grass, public garbage cans. but i'd like to have movement, that's where it gets tricky, maybe - don't know, haven't been out exploring yet. maybe someone is wearing an orange hat and i can zoom in on it? but i'd like to have, not sure if this is the best way to say this, contained movement - so, a toilet flushing works fine for white, for one-of-nine white moving images anyway, because the camera can be still (on the tripod, not tracking an orange hat through a crowd of people on a subway platform - never mind that it's illegal to film in the subway these days anyway) and the white (toilet basin) will also be still, but the clear water swirling will create some movement. suds popping, that's another, fixed camera angle but the popping is happening, that's two white movements, and maybe clouds if i'm lucky, so six more whites to go. so, i don't know, blue or orange - anyway hopefully either sunday or this week or next week i'll be wandering around accumulating these shots. yeah i could go through what's on my hard drive but i'm interested in really trying to find those fundamental colors. a really red red, moving, now, here.

the foundation of the second half then will also be a color grid, but they'll be stills from the video, and that will be printed and plexi-mounted. then the pieces get joined - i'll project the painting of the colors (rotated ninety degrees so you get one yellow square on the yellow real-world image, but then yellow painting over a green image, yellow painting over a blue image, and so on, until you get all 81 color combinations, as shown below in the post from the other day). and vice-versa - projecting all the real-world clips, in a grid, onto the painted half.

i guess this could end up taking a little while - weeks? months? anyway it's started, and it's clear what i want to do, and i don't think there are any major obstacles (flash might not like showing 162 video clips at once, i suppose, i could always cheat and use aftereffects, but i really want it to be nonlinear and always changing). anyway, i'm excited about it. i want to share chess, but this is something for me to just work on. getting it shown might be an obstacle, but that doesn't really enter into my head when i'm concentrating on a project. i figured out a way to let me paint, and painting is so all-absorbing, everything else just fades away, i could be anywhere, really. even just painting that grey, very moving, somehow - it's that painting-state you enter. painting-mind. could call it meditative, i suppose, but it's so active. even just grey, it's action, mental and physical, whole-being something-making.

and yes, i think it's funny that i can't start a painting without a tripod for my video camera. brushes i got, thinner i got, palette, easel, tubes of oil and powdered dry pigment if i decide to use egg tempera, that's all here, but i can't start painting without the tripod for the video camera, that's because i'm a new-media artist rather than a painter, right? a painter would just paint. me, i need to capture that video, or there's no point in doing it.