Color Tests For Prints..

Yesterday, I began color testing for the prints. I decided to operate in reverse of the standard manner: Instead of working with a printing shop to adjust their techniques to my finished files, I am creating files that accomodate their hardware and machines, to achieve the desired result.

In the picture above, I've printed a color test which is from the printer I'll be using. This way, I can create the work in the colors that I choose, and they'll come out as I desire, from the printer.

Votes Are Coming In...

I'm casually checking the voting for the "Primary, Black and White" project. Votes are coming in, and I'm pleased. I actually haven't voted myself, so I wonder it the majority choices will concur with mine.

Keeping in touch with contacts in Facebook v.s E-mail is challenging. It's not clear as to "who got what" in terms of messages being received or not. Modern communication offers headaches as well as inconveniences.

Ready For The World...

Finally, after a number of technical difficulties, the first phase of the "Primary, Black and White" Web site is ready to go. And none too soon, as the exhibit is only a little more than a month away.

I'm glad to have this small burden lifted, as I can now focus on other preparations. I have also successfully gathered my mailing list, and will be inviting my friends, contacts and colleagues to participate in the project. Onwards and upwards!

Text From Theroux's The Primary Colors....

Some of my colleagues have expressed interest in seeing the source texts that I used in my Englyph images for the "Primary, Black and White" series. The text for each color follows:


Text for Blue Theme, Blue Background:
" Blue is a mysterious color, hue of illness and nobility , the rarest color in nature. It is the color of ambiguous depth, of the heavens and of the abyss at once; blue is the color of the shadow side, the tint of the marvelous and the inexplicable, of desire, of knowledge, of the blue movie, of blue talk, of raw meat and rare steak, of melancholy and the unexpected (once in a blue moon, out of the blue). It is the color of anode plates, royalty at Rome, smoke, distant hills, post marks, Georgian silver, thin milk, and hardened steel; of veins seen through skin and notices of dismissal in the American railroad business. Brimstone burns blue, and a blue candle flame is said to indicate the presence of ghosts. The blue-black sky of Vincent Van Gogh's 1890 Crows Flying Over A Corn Field seems to express the painter's doom."

Text for Blue Theme, Black Background:

"Paradoxically, it is the only one of all the colors which can be legitimately seen as a close neighbor to, as well as essentially symbolic of, dark and light both, oddly black in the night and almost white at the horizon by day. ('...deep blue air that shows,` observes Philip Larkin, `nothing and nowhere, and is endless...`) it can darken, it can obscure, it may float to and fro like a mist, evoking serenity and power. Mirroring each other, the sea takes its color from the sky. As Helen Hunt Jackson observes in `My Lighthouses,`

I look across the harbor's misty blue,

And find and lose that magic shifting line

Where sky one shade less blue meets sea...

It might be said to be not so much a color as a state of the light. It is also the void; primordial simplicity and infinite space which, being empty, can contain everything or nothing."

Text for Blue Theme, White Background:

"I saw Venice turn blue because she forgot to care,` sings love lorn Charles Aznavour.

No color isolates itself like blue. 

If the lamp's blue shadow equals the yellow 

Shadow of the sky, in what way is one 

Different from the other?

Asks painter Fairfield Porter in one of his poems, `A painter Obsessed by Blue.`

The word sings. You pout pronouncing it, form a kiss, moue slightly, blowing gracefully from the lips as if before candles on a birthday cake. ( Is that why Rimbaud insists the color of the vowel o is blue?) In the unambiguously grammatical, culturally neutral, core-vocabulary-informed, artificially constructed lojban, the word blanu, 'blue,` incorporates all of English blue, Chinese ian, the la of Hindi nila , the azu of Spanish azul , the olu of Russian goluboi, and of course outside the official six lojban base languages, the word also incorporates all of German blau, along with the obvious resonations of French bleu."

Text for Red Theme, Black Background:

"Red is the boldest of all colors. It stands for charity and martyrdom, Hell, love, youth, fervor, boasting, sin and atonement. It is the most popular color, particularly with women. It is the first color of the newly born and the last seen on the death bed. It is the color for sulfur in alchemy, strength in the kabalah, and the Hebrew color of God. Mohammed swore oaths by the 'redness of the sky at sunset.` It symbolizes day to the American Indian, East to the Chippewa, the direction West in Tibet, and mark ruling Aries and Scorpio in the early Zodiac. It is the color of Christmas, blood, Irish setters, meat, exit signs, Saint John, tabasco sauce, rubies, old theater seats and carpets, road flares, zeal, London buses, hot anvils (red in metals is represented by iron, the metal of war), strawberry blondes, fezes, the Apocalyptic Dragon..."

Text for Red Theme, Red Background:

"It is, nevertheless, for all its vividness, a color of great ambivalence. Eugene Field wrote of the effects of red,

There's that in red that warmeth the blood

And quickeneth a man within,

And bringeth to speedy and perfect bud

The germs of original sin

Love is red. So is Death, its counterpart. It is the color of fire and flame. A bride's gown in China is red. So is the button on a Mandarin's cap.  Red means happiness in China, where people under roofs tiled that color prosper. At new births in old China, red-colored eggs were often sent by messenger from neighbors to the new parents in the ritual of pao-hsi, 'reporting happiness,` and in marriage rites the Chinese bride formerly wore red and processed to the wedding in a red sedan chair, where, walking on a red carpet to the ceremony, she found the groom, who, greeting her, lifted up her red silk veil."

Text for Red Theme, White Background:

"In celebrating we `paint the town red,` and no other color. Upon merely seeing the color red, the metabolic rate of a human being supposedly increases by 13.4 percent. When subjects in a test viewed a red light -- hand-grip strength was being measured -- their strength increased by almost 20 percent. Giorgio's exotic perfume, Red, has such a powerful scent that it had been reported in places to kill people's appetite for food, and there are certain restaurants in the Los Angeles area which actually prohibit entrance to women wearing it. Its passion as a color is arguably matchless. One of my favorite Jazz records, which I own on an old RCA 78 r.p.m. (no. 26141-8) , by Larry Clinton and his Orchestra, is called `A Study In Red.` Wasn't it Kandinsky himself who said that red called up the sound of trumpets?

It is generally agreed that of all the colors, red has the strongest chroma and the greatest power of attraction...."

Text for Yellow Theme, Yellow Background:

"Yellow is a color, for all its dramatic unalterability, with a thousand meanings. It is, surprisingly, at least to me, a child's first color preference. Wallace Stevens called yellow the 'first color,` with an attendant suggestion of decay and dissolution ('the grass is yellow and thin'), but more often uses it affirmatively, linked with the sun: `The sun is clownish yellow.` It is the color of cowardice, third prize, the caution flag on auto speedways, adipose tissue, scones and honey, the nimbus of saints, school buses, urine, New Mexico license plates, illness, the cheeks of penguins, the sitch dog's livery in grey hound racing. Highway signs, Pennzoil, and the oddly lit hair before adulthood of all Australian Aborigines. Easter is yellow. So is spring, and much of the beauty in autumn. It is redolent of old horn, dead coins, Southern wood, and the generous sun."

Text for Yellow Theme, Black Background:

"It has many tints and hues. Banan is the proper term for the yellow color of a ripe banana. (Yellow taxi cabs or beach wagons painted yellow that were once used by resorts to meet guests at train stations were called 'banana wagons.`) a `high yaller` referred, mostly in the last or early part of this century, to a very light-skinned or xanthomelanic black or octoroon, an attractive color in women to Southern men ( and in the popular novels of Frank Yerby), and octoroon balls were extremely popular down South, especially New Orleans, in the 1880s. Nat `King` Cole in `Honey Hush` sings, `I'm steppin' out with them high yellows / snubbin' all the other fellows.` The race of nomadic negroid pygmies on the western border of Uganda called Mbuti are reddish yellow. Jazz singer and semi-nude dancer Josephine Baker's lovely skin in 1924 was dubbed 'banana-colored.' Or was it for her girdle of bananas, which flew hither and yon, when she did the Charleston or Black Bottom in the Revue Negre, wearing nothing else?"

Text for Yellow Theme, White Background:

"It is the color of butter, arsenic, sponges, candlelight, starving, lawns, translucent amber, and cathode transmission-emitters in electrical chassis wiring. It represents wisdom, illumination, intuition, power and glory, the hue of confessors, divinity, magnanimity, ripening grain, eternity, and the gates of Heaven. In Egypt it is the color of happiness and prosperity.

There is tangerine yellow, a sort of honeysuckle. Golden ironweed . Celandine, a greenish yellow. Yellow, which is often associated with green (O.E. geolo) is etymologically connected to that color by way of chloros (Gr.) and to gall, the yellowish fluid secreted by the liver. Gamboge is reddish yellow in hue. Carthamus is also yellowish red in hue, some what like chili oil or the color of a stained dinner plate after a meal of Indian curry or many a dish in the American Southwest."

Writing and Pixel Pushing...

After a detour through Los Angeles, this weekend (see previous post), I'm almost done with the polling site for primaryblackandwhite.info.

Things have gotten to the most exacting point, where I figure out how to make sure that all is aligned and configured correctly. Changing numbers and sizes quite minutely, to align and re-align pixels on the site.

Things are looking quite good!

I've also spent a good amount of time writing instructions, an "about" page and the all important "Statement." I had been neglectful in writing statements for some of my projects, but now I see this as an essential part of the practice.

L.A. Detour..

I took a trip to Los Angeles over the weekend to check out museums and galleries. The picture above finds me immersed in the blue neon glow of Carlos Cruz-Diez's Cromosatruación, from 1965.

This piece and others were part of the exhibit, "Suprasensorial: Experiments in Light, Color and Space" at the Geffen Contemporary wing of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. I saw the amazing Murakami show at this space in 2007, as well.

The most striking message I took from this show was Lucio Fontana's quote from his Spatial Manifesto of 1946:

"We carry forward the evolution of Art through the medium."

I am a firm believer in this notion. Too bad that much of the Art world seems a little behind due to their their timid support and promotion of artists working in digital media, etc.

I also saw, for the second time, Blum and Poe's magnificent space on La Cienega Blvd in Culver City. I was surprised to see that Peres Projects had closed shop in the space that was nearby. Things come and go....

Poll Position....

The polling application was added to the site. It will now be possible for visitors to primaryblackandwhite.info to vote for their preference from four competing images.

I'm pleased that this part of the work is over and am looking forward to the writing for the site.

Why I Chose The Primary Colors....

I am a proponent of testing one's perceived limits and learning while doing. Proper planning, practice, and equal measures of chance, risk and caprice are healthful in life and, especially, in artistic practice.

I was asked why I chose the primary colors for this project. The reasons are both artistic and practical.

The primary colors are called so because they have some basis as "originals" and "basics": The primary colors are the colors from which all others flow. These colors are universal and understood by all -- if not in exactly the same way.

Red, yellow and blue also have a long history in art, from the blue gown of the Madonna to the iridescent yellows of Van Gogh and the strident reds prominent in the works of the Constructivists. Mondrian and Van Doesburg reduced their palettes to the primaries, along with other artists in the De Stijl movement.

Practically, I'm interested in starting with "the basics" as it were, and to move to more nuanced and complex color schemes as this Englyph line of my practice develops.

For now, though, it's Primary, Black and White....

Color Tests...

Today, I'll begin doing print tests for the colors of the pieces. I'm not sure what the colors will look like when I print them, so I'm creating a CMYK-based "test sheet" that will contain variations of the Reds, Yellows, and Blues that I would like. I am overlaying White and Black in varying degrees of "opacity" or opaqueness, to see how bold the colors need to be for the printer.

I also recognize that I'll use more than one of each color. Perhaps I'll want the blues on a particular piece to stand out more than the red. In this case, I'll make the blue more saturated, and dull the red just a bit, to get the desired effect. Josef Albers is calling.

Once I get this test sheet printed, I can go back and choose the colors I'd like to use for printing, and change the digital files accordingly. This is one of the advantages of working in a digital format, as opposed to more traditional approaches. I can test, change, and accommodate, both expanding and limiting the possibilities, depending upon the effect desired by the artist.

Moving Along Swimmingly....

Things are moving along swimmingly. Yesterday and this morning, I created the structure for my image voting screen. Each screen will give a choice of four images from which my viewers can choose one as the best to be printed. There will be a total of 36 images from which to choose, as I plan to print nine images with the following characteristics:

3 prints with text in Englyph that addresses the color BLUE, one with a blue background, one with a white background and one with a black background,

3 prints with Englyph text that addresses the color RED, one with a red background, one with a white background and one with a black background,

and 3 prints with Englyph text that addresses the color YELLOW, one with a yellow background, one with a white background and one with a black background.

The viewer will be able to examine the images close up, using a Flash-based zoom feature.

Fun!

Cutting Graphics...

Today, I'm preparing the Web site, primaryblackandwhite.info.

Working in Photoshop to prepare the look of the site, making sure that all is carefully sized to fit  the flash modules I'm developing to allow the magnification of images.

I'm also creating much of the user interface in Englyph, which will translate when the cursor rolls over the word.

Learning How To Ride A Bike

I learned how to ride a bike later than the other children.

Once I did learn, I rode my bicycle very well.