[July 16, 2008]
I brought in my digital prints and compared them to the orginals. They all look good, but in digitizing, the colors have changed slightly: all the prints are slightly more saturated and have a higher contrast than their sources. I supposed these are “better:” I think of those histogram curves on my digital camera, and also in Photoshop, geared towards an idea of correct color balance and contrast. I trimmed the prints and stamped them.
I then cut down my half-sized print of Ruscha’s book and pieced them together. In doing so, I caught a few more mistakes in my composite images–some sections are cut off, and so the folds don’t like up properly. I also forgot to print the title page. I used my bone folder to score the folds and folded together the book. I was somewhat imprecise, which is all right now, as this is a draft, but I’ll have to be better when I get to the final copies. I like the half-size, I think I’ll make a “small” edition of them (sorry for the pun).
Last week, Andrew and I were looking at our houses on Google Maps street view. This gave me the idea to re-create Ruscha’s book using this. I checked and Google does have Sunset Boulevard in Street View. The street had changed, but there are a lot of similarities between the images: the presence of cars but not of people. As soon as I get a little caught up on my orders, I’m going to compile these images.
A few more visitors: Paul, who lives in Cortland came in. We were discussing some ways of copying things, and he suggested screen printing. He had gone to the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, and does oil paintings. I am struck by how many people I have met in the gallery who have gone to art school. But it makes sense that these would be the people who would visit the gallery. Still, it has made the number of people who have art training more apparent to me. Later, Jen, who teaches fibers at Cortland came by. She had just finished advising during orientation, which has been going on for several weeks now, it seems. We talked a bit about the bureaucracy in school.
It was time for me to get back to Geroge Dugan. Unlike the Mazur, which seemd to just flow, this one had already been difficult. It’s funny, because the Mazur is much more polished, whereas the Dugan is more gestural and process-oriented. It is hard to replicate another’s gestures. His painting has a loose grid on it. I first thought of Giacometti’s portraits, which are also full of grids and crosses and a emergence of an image. As I worked on this painting, I realized that the lines are sight lines; they correspond to an edge of a shape. There is some underpainting–dark browns with lighter colors worked over it, a constant reworking and re-looking, and so I was trying to follow these marks first. After about an hour, I felt like I was just getting too far off from the composition. I wiped out an area and tried to re-work it but again felt frustrated. I decided it was time to just start over. I mixed up more brown-ochre-gray, and painted over my start.
I felt like I had just wasted the day…I have to be more patient.
