What I’m up to these days: Making stuff, sufficient quantities of stuff to fill—physically and conceptually— approximately 4000 square feet and a two-story vitrine. The grant-proposal way of putting it would be that I am currently developing an immersive exhibition for the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, scheduled for March 2027, envisioned as a convergence of the material, conceptual, and technical threads of my practice.

But this is my blog so I get to sound like myself. And I find that breaking the project down into the physical stuff that must be made feels slightly less intimidating that obsessing on the more lofty overarching goals of the project. Those goals go something like this: conjuring a visual confection that will feel like stepping into an alternative future, a warm and fuzzy path not taken; a meeting of high and low, human and machine. Capital-t and small-t technologies as human creations, collaborators rather than a ubiquitous mind-scrambling distractions.

To paraphrase what an art professor once told me, the overarching concept stuff, the “why”, is already in you and will come out no matter what. Your job is to make an interesting page. Or in this case, an interesting room.

I’ve been simmering the plans for this show since I got invited to do it about three years ago, and actively experimenting with how to manifest them since the beginning of this year. Here is a little sneak-peek at that process.

Let’s start with pattern. I always do. My first experiment was trying to come up with shapes that, when repeated and layered into patterns, would feed into the theme and anchor the feeling of the show. I was looking for a whiff of early computing, ye olde DIY techno-optimism, where the human touch still shows up in the machine and its output. I auditioned a lot of different shapes, and eventually landed on one shaped vaguely like a lower-case “h”.

I rolled it, I flipped it, I rolled AND flipped it…setting up rules, at first arbitrary, then learning from the results to refine and define the next set of rules. The original sense of “algorithm.” I screenprinted the variants, layering them in different combinations, and eventually began to get a handle on how they moved and what they did. I tested a few other shapes this way, too, to find out whether they were worth repeating and if, surrounding and filling a space, they’d make you feel like you were inside a very friendly machine from a gentler less-creepy version of the future than the one we find ourselves in. This is the only one that made the cut.

It was in the next set of experiments, LIGHTING, where this series of patterns proved its mettle. Last summer, I made an installation that involved programmed colored lighting. A kinetic sequence of lights running up and down the columns of pattern gave it the illusion of movement. I’ve been wanting to try this idea out on other kinds of surfaces and see if I could scale it up for the museum.

The lights I’m using are theatrical fixtures that separates light into its red, green, and blue wavelengths, which you can blend to get different colors. If you turn all three channels up to eleven they combine into white light. It’s the lighting version, but also sort of the opposite, of what I do with CMYK printing inks. (I taught this stuff for decades so it’s a struggle not to digress into a lengthy illustrated explanation of additive and subtractive color but perhaps some other time.)

I thought, what would happen if I took some of the gazillions of red, green, and blue “pixels” that I have left over from two different projects and LIT them? The answer: all kinds of cool stuff! If you match the colors of the light and the paint, red light makes the reds glow almost white and the greens and blues turn brown and gray. And likewise with the other colors. I’m now working on making a kinetic painting out of red, green, and blue blocks.

The blocks are stationary; the “kinetic” part comes out of the changes in the lighting. Here are some early tests of a prototype, the same pattern under different lighting combinations.

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I’ve also been conducting lighting tests on 3-D objects, mostly paper constructions, some of them made out of old prints.

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While a lot of the exhibition will be experienced by moving around inside of it and standing in front of things as one does in a museum, I’m also going to carve out a cozy, inviting place to sit down, with the possibility of interacting with other visitors. It embodies my central notion of imagining a warm and welcoming technology that brings people together instead of separating them. In this living room, or “meet space”, visitors can sit on comfy furniture and also watch a program of my animations on a retro-futuristic TV I’m constructing. Here’s a preliminary wire sketch of the TV.

How all these ideas and patterns and technical sleights of hand get deployed and wrangled into a conceptually coherent whole will be what keeps me off the streets for the next six months. Here’s a foam core model of the museum with some (not nearly enough) stuff in it.

I think that the biggest challenge at this juncture is for my project-manager self—who knows from deadlines—to co-exist peacefully and productively with my mad scientist self, who knows that experimentation is at the heart of the project. The former will somehow make it happen on time while indulging the time-sucking whims of the latter. Stay tuned.

In November 2023, as part of a residency I was doing at the Amazon Spheres, I was invited to give a talk on my work as part of Conflux, an internal conference of designers. They were particularly interested in the dramatic changes my work had undergone in recent years and what drove those changes. Good question, I thought. I would like to know that myself. I set about unpacking the plethora of experiments, dead-ends, crises, writings, and, of course, art, I’d accumulated in the past four years, and attempted to wrestle them into some sort of narrative arc. This post and the following one are adapted from that talk.

I used to paint little slices of narrative, warped mirrors of mid-century America. I painted on repurposed domestic fabrics and integrated the patterns of the fabrics into the images.

Before I was a painter, I had studied film in college, and I sometimes thought of my paintings as stills for films that were never made. I pulled apart the visual elements of print advertisements and put them back together again into stories that were less neatly resolved than the ads.

Over the course of thirty years I had developed a process to wrestle this material out of Madison Avenue and into worlds of my own creation.

I made large drawings of the people, houses, and objects that interested me, moved them around until I had a composition, and cropped it. I’d build panels the size and shape of the final compositions, then cover the panels with fabric.

The flatness of the fabric against the painted illusion of space were integral parts of the story.

I felt my characters were pinned inside the fabric, stuck in their times & places. I also felt, I was certain, that this process and this subject matter would keep me occupied and interested for the rest of my days.

But a few years ago I started to feel a little restless with the way I interacted with the fabric. It required so much planning and exactitude, which limited how I used the paint. I loved pattern, but I wasn’t sure if the patterned fabrics were really doing all they could, or if they were becoming merely obligatory. I suspected that I might be the one who was trapped inside the fabric.

I early 2020 I completed some commissioned paintings in this style and delivered them to their home in California. I came home, and shortly thereafter the world ended.

I was fortunate enough to be able to work alone in my studio during quarantine, so I went in every day to work.

It was hard to concentrate. Doing the same thing in a completely changed world, painting people when there were no people around, made almost no sense, but I persisted, starting new paintings on fabric, not sure where they were going, because that was what I did.

Things got a little weird, so I thought I’d take a detour and come back.

I had always loved printmaking for its ability to get me out of my head. Tackling the technical challenges of simplifying and reverse-engineering an image would reset my brain, and usually bring me back to painting clearer and a better painter.

Print studios were all closed at the time so I had to use what I had around. Which were a couple of screens, a squeegee, some ink, a roll of Tyvek, and an Xacto knife.

I conceptually tore apart this ham into its exploded view. I reduced & resolved it into shapes simple enough that I could cut them with a knife, separated them into the four colors of commercial printing, cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (CMYK), and put it back together again.

After a few of these prints, I would, naturally, go back to my “real” work.

Then the phone rang. A building manager I knew had an empty storefront (a lot of those around at that time) and he had heard something about programs for putting art in empty storefronts, and did I know anything about these programs.

On impulse I said, “Programs schmograms!” (or something to that effect), “I’ll put something in your storefront.”

I had committed myself to making an art installation, which I’d never done before, with absolutely no idea what I was going to do or how.

I went back to this impulse to tear everything apart and put it back together again. This time I was thinking about pattern: I’d been working with it for years, but had never allowed myself enough time to learn what it is and how it works.

Pattern is a shape plus a relationship. I chose squares, and the relationship of changing scale and tone according to some rules I made up.

At the time I was engaging with the world largely through screens, and I was totally sick of it. I wanted to break the screen images down into something I could touch.

I cut plywood into squares, and painted them red, green, & blue, to make physical manifestations of pixels. The squares got smaller and lighter as you got further back in space. It was textbook atmospheric perspective which I had used and taught for years as a painter.

I had to conceptualize and visualize the installation in three dimensions, and figure out how to construct it at scale. My studio looked like an alien had taken it over, but I actually thought of this piece as a painting.

Which OF COURSE I was going to go back to, painting being my “real” work.

But first, as long as we were still in this stupid pandemic, and no one was watching, I wanted to dig a little deeper into this “structure of pattern” business.

A unit + relationship. Its roots are in weaving, one of the earliest technologies.

I made a square unit.

I rotated this unit clockwise or anti-clockwise in rows. Change the starting position for the next row. Repeat.

A square unit, two possible directions, 4 possible starting places. Three variables, infinite combinations.

I soon realized that by drawing them individually, there was no earthly way I could make enough permutations to find out.

So I switched back to screenprinting, a simple technology I had on hand. I cut all 8 possible rows for each unit into a tyvek stencil and printed them a row at a time.

I approached this scientifically: What does it DO? And tried to forget about making capital-A Art.

The physicality of the process was essential, the repetition was soothing and really helped with the uncertainty of the times. I would get up every day knowing what I was going to do.

I was going to keep moving the squeegee and covering the walls with these patterns until I figured out the what and the how and the why of this.

I started layering the patterns, building up translucent layers of CMYK palette, just to see what they would do. At some point I started to have opinions about my experiments. Some worked better than others. That gave me an inkling what I wanted them to do: To start to move, to have a sense of space, and of things vibrating just under surface.

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At some point also it became clear that I wasn’t going back to my “real” work. I was doing my real work. Continued in part two…

In November 2023, as part of a residency I was doing at the Amazon Spheres, I was invited to give a talk on my work as part of Conflux, an internal conference of designers. They were particularly interested in the dramatic changes my work had undergone in recent years and what drove those changes. Good question, I thought. I would like to know that myself. I set about unpacking the plethora of experiments, dead-ends, crises, writings, and, of course, art, I’d accumulated in the past four years, and attempted to wrestle them into some sort of narrative arc. This post and the previous one are adapted from that talk.

(When we last left our hero, she was a printing machine, generating patterns and covering the walls with them.)

I was aware that these prints weren’t the whole story, that I wanted them to actually escape the wall and fill a space.

This print, Andy’s Ambition, felt like it had the potential to leave the wall. I could see these squarish, space-invader-like characters with four mechanical arms, starting to emerge out of it.

So I cut two of them out of foam core, cut slots into them, put them together at right angles, and poof, I had made a 3D object. I was now a 3-D artist. And I’d made my first model.

I made more of these creatures, cutting the components out with this groovy vintage saw, the cutawl K-11, and I painted them with housepaint in two related shades, employing more of my old painters’ tricks for making illusions of space and volume .

I suspended these creatures in front of the pattern that had spawned them.

On the surface my work had changed a lot. But to say “figurative to abstract” or “painting to installation” is superficial, it masks how deep the change was. My whole conception of what it was to make my work had exploded.

The scary, wobbly feeling of not knowing where something was going or what it was going to look like, was in some ways the point. And something I was/am aware that I need to hang onto.

I read in an obituary of a jazz musician that he’d always try to keep himself in “beginner’s mind,” and the concept rang true for me.

Changing it up with new materials and tools and unfamiliar processes keeps me in beginner’s mind. Over the last two years, I’ve touched lots of different materials, cutting them, folding them, moving around, gluing them down, just to see what they do.

I learned from a book on origami architecture numerous ways to make volume by cutting and folding a flat piece of paper. And I copied the polyhedron patterns from an ancient geometry text and started drawing on them and then drawing the drawed-on pieces.

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I made more screenprints, etchings, reliefs, stop-motion animations, and tried different ways to make shapes come out of the wall.

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I now make time to experiment with no goal in mind. Even if I have a project with a deadline, I start the process out with an experiment, one that I’m not sure will work, keeping that open, beginner’s mind. A dead end might only be a dead end for a particular project. I put all the dead ends and mistakes in my back pocket.

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Last year I completed three large projects in fairly quick succession. All of them were quite different from each other and all drew on my back-pocket experiments, from all that time I spent in the studio trying stuff, not sure what the “thing” was that I was producing. Each had fixed parameters they had to meet, presenting both technical and aesthetic challenges, and each drew on old skills and forced me to learn something new.

I came up with Sweat of My Imagination in response to a tall, curved wall in a stairwell. I drew on my time in film school, making animated films by drawing sequential imagery. The technical challenge I’d been mulling was how to make “fins” stick out of a wall. One revelation, when it was all done, was how these thin bits of plywood could create such a convincing illusion of volume. The other was what color could do on its own, unleashed from representation.

The structure of Jello Salad Deconstructed came out of my Origami Architecture experiments. Making a flat piece of paper, or in this case fabric, have volume just by cutting and folding it. The technical challenge of scaling it up involved learning how to translate these geometric experiments into steel pipe structure around which to tension the fabric. The parameters were ones I’d set up myself, by organizing a show for printmakers’ ventures into three dimensions. This time I only needed to set the wayback machine a few years, to when I was a painter of jello salads and CMYK afficianado (the latter of which I still am). The result was something that was translucent and hovered somewhere between solidity and porosity. It gave the illusion that you could walk through it, but you couldn’t.

As I was unmolding my jello salad, I was offered a residency at the Amazon Spheres Understory. The givens in this case were a very large video screen and the requirement that my installation be something the public could interact with. In my back pocket, I happened to have these handmade stop-motion animations of pattern which I’d made in the isolation of 2021, and which I’d been wanting to revisit. I also thought that maybe that RGB pixel idea had more potential, especially in high tech land. In the installation, Mega Pixels, I created stop-motion animations out of crowd-sourced arrangements of giant pixels, and I learned to code in the process (didn’t see that one coming).

I’m hesitant to categorize or summarize all this into a “process”, for fear that it will become prescriptive, a new rut. (But, since they were expecting some sort of conclusion when I gave this talk, I had to at least take a stab at it.) I’ve found that a new meta-process has evolved for me: A new parameter causes me to come up with a new idea to respond to it. Executing that idea presents a new technical challenge; which prompts me to I learn a new skill, tool, or medium. The new tool presents new possibilities for the next idea or project. Rinse, repeat.

And I’m also hesitant to define the ongoing themes that have emerged, for the same reason. Again, throwing caution to the wind, here’s a swing at that: The idea that technology is something you can touch and move around, something we already do. Low-tech, hands-on, digital in the sense of your fingers; meets other sense of digital technology, manifesting the continuity between different kinds of technology. Humans have been working in tandem with technology since we started chipping stone tools, and making art with them at least since we started weaving.

I think the thing that had kept me in my lane for so long in the past was that I was afraid that if I went wide, I couldn’t go deep. Perhaps now I’m not quite as worried about the depth part any more because I’ve learned how to stay open to what the new materials, tools, and crafts, and their demands, will teach me. Even when I’m mostly using tools I already know, I always remind myself throw in something unfamiliar that I have to learn on the fly, just to keep a little of that scary-wobbly feeling of beginner’s mind.

 

July 3 – August 29, 2025 at A Gallery, 117 S. Main Street in lovely Pioneer Square.
Opening reception: 1st Thursday, July 3, 6pm – 9pm
Hours: 9am – 5pm M-F and during Seattle Art Fair, July 19/20, 1pm – 5pm
The installation will be lit and visible from Occidental Square 24/7 during the run of the show.

At the beginning of the year, I was contacted by someone at Integrus Architecture about installing a show in A Gallery, the space adjacent to their Seattle office. I said yes, of course, because filling a 9-foot wide by 15-foot deep by 15-foot tall blank white cube with floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides, with whatever I want is exactly the kind of assignment I live for these days, somewhat inexplicably.

I say somewhat inexplicably, because I spent so many years doing more or less the same thing: representational paintings that exposed the uncomfortable underbelly of the American Dream. That underbelly now being the overbelly, those days are over and that gently satirical representational artist is out of a job. Partly because of those circumstances, and partly because of an independent, deep-seated need of an artist to periodically shake things up, I now approach every project almost as if none of my previous work existed, even the recent work. I have to re-invent my own wheel every time.

Naturally this causes me some anxiety, especially when there are deadlines, and daunting technical challenges that come up with each iteration of an idea. The scary, wobbly, uncertain feeling that replaced the relative purposefulness of the representational painter I used to be sometimes feels like a problem, i.e., that I’m doing it wrong. And it sometimes feels like the point.

This piece was especially technically challenging to execute due to its scale. There won’t be pictures of the final work posted until it’s installed and open. Assembled, it would be too large to fit in my studio. What I can tell you is this blurb I managed to eke out: A twelve-foot-tall translucent corrugated wall of geometric pattern traverses the gallery. Kinetic colored lighting projected across its angled surfaces illuminates both the unreliability of perception and the relative nature of color and movement.

Here are some photos of the various stages of the process of making it.

The Hungarian artist Vera Molnár, who died last year in Paris just shy of her 100th birthday, made geometric drawings using algorithms of her own invention, beginning in the 1950’s before she had access to a computer. She would invent geometric and mathematical rules for lines and squares to follow, and injected them with a bit of randomness. She referred to this process as her machine imaginaire. In the late ’60s she gained access to the one actual computer possessed by the Sorbonne, and subsequently became a pioneer of computer art, learning the early programming languages BASIC and FORTRAN and generating complex plotted drawings of intricate lines and nested squares, a forest of repetition made interesting by a soupçon of disorder. When I learned of her existence (through her obituary), and of her methods, I finally had a conceptual framework, a name even, for the art-making process I’ve been fumbling my way toward these last few years. I’ve previously alluded to Andy Warhol’s stated desire to be a machine, but this idea of an algorithm clicked, bringing my human-machine to life, or at least giving it a more catchy elevator speech.

I’m also pleased as punch she was named Vera, since Vera also happens to have been my grandmother’s name. That Vera, Vera Uresh, née Knapik, was born in Cleveland to Slovak immigrants, from whom she picked up the catchphrase “Clever, those Hungarians,” later passing it on to my mother. For those readers not versed in the history of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the phrase represents a sort of typically Slavic, wryly fatalistic response to whatever innovations that were presumably introduced to the Slovak peasants by their Hungarian overlords back in the old country. The phrase made its way across the ocean with my people and at some point was translated into English. When I was a child none of this was known to me, it was just something the old people said. I have no idea if anyone outside my family says it.

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Left, Vera Knapik Uresh, my grandmother, looking sharp.
Right, the clever Hungarian Vera Molnár.

Recently, I had left over from my residency at the Amazon spheres, one metal whiteboard and a several hundred magnetized masonite pixels, four inches square. I hung the whiteboard on the wall and one day I started arranging the pixels in accordance with a series of algorithms that I made up on the fly.

The new algorithms also involved a grid and rotation: A group of four pixels arranged in a square constitutes a unit. The first unit has one green pixel and three pink pixels. As you move across the row, the pink and green pixels sort of duke it out according to the algorithm: The green starts to overtake the pink, increasing the number of green squares in the unit in a clockwise manner. When the unit is down to one pink, the pink starts overtaking the green in the opposite direction. That’s pretty much it, but it was visually hard to keep track of. The magnets in boxes that I drew on the side were to remind me where each row started.

Moving squares on a board, like moving a squeegee across a screen, is physical movement, requiring its own little dance. I realized while I was thus engaged that the resulting pattern reflects not only the machinitude of the algorithm, but also the physical movement of the human fulfilling it. My first two algorithms have rotation as their main component, and I don’t think that’s coincidental. Rotation is a fundamental movement for us symmetrical creatures. For many years I rotated a baton in a marching band. My little dog runs around in clockwise circles in the elevator when he’s excitedly anticipating dinner.

Piet Mondrian was big on the connection between physical movement and visual art: He himself was an avid dancer, with a particular preference for the Charleston and Fox Trot algorithms, although he often improvised his own steps. Eyewitness reports say his dancing had a weird mechanical, staccato quality, which isn’t surprising.

I continued with the pixel blocks, trying out variations of the new pattern. I took the most promising ones and extended them into longer repetitions as drawings on graph paper, to see how they would behave. I chose the two of those that I liked best, made larger watercolors of them, and traced a copy of each watercolor drawing. I laid the tracings in different positions over the watercolors, landing on a slight offset for one pattern and a reversal for the other.

I wanted to see the patterns competing with syncopated versions of themselves, in the form of wood reliefs. One of the versions of the pattern would be manifested in the colors, and the other version in the different thicknesses of the wooden pieces, with the two versions overlapping. I had no idea if it would work. (They’re now finished and I’m still not sure.) I mapped out the various shapes that I’d need to make, in either thick or thin versions depending on where they fell. Some shapes were just little squares and rectangles that I cut on the chopsaw. Others were more complex and required me to use the ever-photogenic Cutawl:

While we’re on the subject of tool porn, I have to mention that for every project where I set out to use up existing materials, I inevitably have to buy a new tool in order to complete it. After contemplating the several hundred teeny-tiny pieces that would need sanding, I purchased the cutest little tabletop bandsaw ever:

In all I ended up cutting 374 pieces, laminating some of them together to make the more complex thicker pieces, leaving a mere 244 for me to sand, paint, and keep track of.

The weird thing about working as a human algorithm machine is that the results often resemble humanoid-machine hybrid creatures, reminiscent of characters in some primitive video game. It’s as if the bodily motion that created them has to manifest itself, along with the machine-like repetitions, resulting in these vaguely anthropomorphic forms. Or at least that’s how I see them and those are always the ones I’m drawn to. After flipping and layering one of my algorithmically generated patterns, I found myself with four robots to cut out.

I kind of had to paint them red.

See the finished reliefs here. (I named the orange and green one Cherry Street Boogie Woogie in a nod to that dancing, painting fool Mondrian.)

This summer I co-curated, with Dawn Endean, The Exploded View, a satellite pop-up concurrent with the Seattle Art Fair. Urban Visions donated an immense and impressive new space, Pioneer Square Business Improvement Association supported us with a grant, and we had crucial help from technical expert Steve Coulter and numerous volunteers. More info about the show, including a list of the stellar artists we somehow convinced to be in it, is here. Crosscut and the Seattle Times both gave us some nice ink, and we had a great turnout and an all-around lovely experience working with the artists and partners.

We were fortunate to be able to hire photographer Mark Woods to document the whole thing for posterity. Here are some of his pictures.

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There used to be a boxing gym here in my building, directly above my studio. It took up the whole of the third floor, where there are now more artists’ studios. The joint was run by a character named George Chemeres, who trained numerous world-class champions here for a couple of decades in the middle of the last century. In addition to his formidable training skills, he was also known for a Yogi-Berra-esque command of the language. A frequently-cited example is that one night during a championship bout, when the crowded room got to be unbearably stuffy, he bellowed, “Somebody open the window or we’re all going to be sophisticated in here!”

Another time, while promoting a fight at a news conference in Glasgow, he insisted that the Scottish referrees all get eye exams. An indignant uproar ensued—and subsequently a packed house at the fight, which was the point of the insult. Revisiting the incident years later, he said, “That was me; I lived by the sweat of my imagination.”

Which brings us back to the art studios. I have always felt that buildings’ histories live on in their bones. Of all the enterprises that have inhabited this building in its 130 years—diner, flophouse, haberdashery, storefront mission, underground jazz club, underage brothel—the one that resonates for me the most is the boxing gym. As to why that is, well, Chemeres hit it on the schnozz: We artists, too, live by the sweat of our imaginations.

These last few years, as I reinvented my own art from the bottom up, my imagination sweated harder than usual. During the same period, a more practical section of my imagination simultaneously sweated, to secure the deal that ensured the future of imaginative sweat here in the building. All that sweating made me feel even more connected to my sweaty pugilist forebears.

At the top of the third floor stairs is a curved wall, a remnant of the questionable corporate taste of one of the later twentieth-century occupants. The wall has fabulous visibility from the staircase, but is impossible to hang paintings on. It was practically begging for a site-specific installation.

What does the sweat of an imagination look like? What does the history of a building look like as it oozes in and out of the walls, floors, and ceilings? What color is it?

For a couple of years I thought about these questions while I worked on other stuff, including how I would bring my printed patterns to life in three dimensions. After a series of detours (which live in my back pocket for later use), I landed on a series of fins that stuck out of the wall, their shapes evolving as they progressed along its curved surface and around the corner, creating illusions of volume and movement.

My mental model for this evolution was hand-drawn animation, which I studied in college, back in the Pleistoscene when we shot the frames individually on film. I used a trick called “in-betweening,” in which you draw what you want to be the first and last images in your sequence on tracing paper, lay one atop the other with a third piece of tracing paper on top, and draw what you see as the “middle” image. Then you take the first and middle drawings, and do the same thing to get the one in between THEM, and onward, until you have a series of drawings that form a visual sequence. You can do this trick with a bunny rabbit, a not-so-bright hunter, boxing gloves (which I tried and rejected), or abstract doughnut-like things like I finally landed on.

After sweating over a couple variations of my model, I took it apart and scaled the individual pieces up into full-size paper patterns. Even though I used a grid to enlarge the shapes, there was a fair amount of approximation involved at each step, which kept the gesture of hand drawing in each step. I laid the patterns out on 3/16″ birch ply, and cut them out with my beloved Cutawl K11.

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I painted them a cool yellow on one side and a warm yellow on the other, both as saturated as I could find in the standard Ben Moore paint deck. The “fins” are thin: they get their volume from their numbers and proximity, and also from the yellow glow that surrounds them. The two yellows also reflect on each other, making the colors appear changeable and ambiguous.

At some point, my Technical Support Team drew my attention to the sheer number of holes I was going to have to drill to get these things up on the wall, about 150 on the metal brackets and another 100 or so on the pieces themselves. TST then drew my attention to an inexpensive drill press on sale at Harbor Freight, and what girl doesn’t adore a trip to Harbor Freight?

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Pictures of the finished The Sweat of My Imagination are here on my installations page— and you can see it live in the sweaty flesh at the ’57 Biscayne open studios on June 1.

Horse by the author, circa 1971; crayon on found office paper

I grew up with five older siblings. We had around the house lots of books and toys from eras past, representing the accumulated passing interests of a slew of children. I never knew where most of the stuff came from or to whom it originally belonged. It was just there. Of these random vintage possessions, the most influential on my development were two books by Walter T. Foster (1891-1981), “How to Draw” and “How to Draw Horses”.  My cousin and I spent hours on end with the horse book, first copying the drawings, and then using his method of constructing the animal out of ovals, boxes, and lines (which also happened to be WTF’s method for drawing grapes, humans, landscapes, and most of the visible world).

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These kinds of how-to books are a remnant of a time in America when leisure time was newly accessible to a wider demographic (thanks, labor movement) and their proliferation testament to the new consumer hobby market publishers sought to tap. Most of the authors were successful commercial illustrators and admen pitching their foolproof, easy methods to a public with time on their hands and an admirable wish to better themselves, for fun or profit or both. Unlike similar ventures into this market—paint-by-number, for instance—these books actually taught you a skill, and could be a starting point for a budding serious artist who found them lying around the house. They vary widely in their usefulness, production values, and applicability to fine art, but they all share an insistence that ANYONE CAN LEARN TO DRAW!

These are a few from my present-day collection.

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Walter T. Foster was possibly the most prolific of the bunch, and he was more geared toward realism than those who were riding the comic book wave of the 1940’s and 50’s. He began his own publishing company, Walter T. Foster Publishing, which produced other artists’ how-to books as well as his own. Possibly one reason he could be so prolific can be found in the off-the-cuff, sketchbook quality of his books. They are full of bits of advice, hand-written in pencil, that usually, but not always, correspond to the illustrations, as if he just remembered something important and had to write it in the interstices of the drawings before it slipped his mind. Sometimes the drawings run right off the page. Possibly they are just his sketchbooks, barely edited and annotated.

He’s full of advice and encouragement. In the example above he is mighty specific about the exact size of drawing board you should use, as well as where you should lean it. Elsewhere, after laying out the 1/3 rule of composition, he exhorts:

Don’t hold to any cut-and-dried rules. Think for yourself and apply what you learn from all sources.

On drawing a vase of flowers:

Fine, go ahead, but if you have trouble just know it isn’t an easy thing to do.

Many of his snippets of wisdom are indeed signed “W.T.F.”

Here’s a helpful, if confusing, hint on the pitfalls in composition, which also looks like a recipe for a successful cubist painting:

The irrepressible Andrew Loomis, author of “Fun With A Pencil”, mixes instructions for drawing cartoon caricatures right in more with realistic figures and perspective theory. His formulas are rather more formulaic, but he also proves a pleasant companion for your drawing journey. “Never mind if they are a little off” is timeless advice for learning any new skill, and people particularly need to hear it when they’re drawing, since the disastrous results of early attempts are always staring you in the face.

This chart of standard facial measurements is from 1939, so we’ll cut him some slack on his ethnocentricity, of which, trust me, this is a more mild example:

The ideal American is not only white, chiseled, and afflicted with lines all over their face, but is also possibly transgender. Note the identical features transposed from Mr. Ideal American to Ms. Ideal American.

Actually, I do hand out a version of that formula to beginning students tackling portraits for the first time. I find it helps them to see what’s in front of them, and usually if not always keeps them from putting the eyes at the very top of the head.  I do add the warning, “actual results may vary,” which one should keep in mind regardless of the subject’s ethnicity.

I’m not entirely sure what this diagram is supposed to represent. It doesn’t even really make sense internally: why is the brow line perpendicular to the ear line? And, besides, one should NEVER use a real knife to draw another human. While we’re at it, let me also state that real children should never be allowed to play unsupervised with perspective:

Next to the Ideal American, the most important formula for the budding commercial illustrator to have in their back pocket was the Pretty Girl, the pleasingness of which, according to Loomis, is “99% in how well you draw it”. Incidentally, this validates Jessica Rabbit’s oft-quoted observation that she wasn’t bad, just drawn that way.

Even into the late 1960’s, it was still important to keep those gender roles straight when learning to draw.

George Carlson, author of “I CAN DRAW!”, from which those were taken, was no Walter T. Foster, but WTF is a valid response to these unhelpful diagrams. This book was aimed at children, but evinces little respect for their ability to distinguish drawing from tracing dotted lines. What is “The head is drawn this way” supposed to mean? Those are two identical pictures, except one is red and one is black with an arrow pointing toward it, but no further instructions.

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Mona Lisa is painted this way.

W.T.F. himself wasn’t immune from the illustrative conventions of his time, either. In his books, men’s hands are to be drawn realistically, while ladies’ hands tend to taper unnaturally.

In my experience, drawing a “leaf shape” first has never, ever been helpful in drawing a hand. It is only helpful in drawing a leaf. You can’t argue with this, though:

Hands are not easy to draw and you should devote much time to them.

Unlike the learn-to-draw-in-five-days-and-get-rich school of art instruction, Foster doesn’t sugarcoat the sheer hours and sweat it takes to learn to draw. You can tell he really loved his vocation and wanted to make it accessible to anyone with the inclination. As a child I had the inclination but I didn’t know any artists (or horses for that matter). Doing the exercises in his books gave my initial inclination some focus and direction. Breaking horses down into their component ovals, however formulaic, demystified drawing for me. I started with his horses and grapes, but I kept on drawing while Foster assured me that, although it was bound to be difficult, I could get it with practice. “Do not let it scare you. Just take your time.”

I will give Mr. Foster the last word:

Draw everything you see, it will come in handy when you start making a living at it. Sure you can. Try.

W.T.F.!