More About My Algorithmic Drawings

I call such drawings I've made 'algrorithmic.

I work with a felt tip pen and fill pages of my drawing books with closed loops and polygons. I design patterns to fill the insides and see what happens.

















I think I get the interesting patterns with pentagons and right triangles. Right triangles even work with pentagons.
The drawings being in the centers and fill out the page with patterns. I stop when I feel it's as far as I can take it.
I imagine there is no sure way or certainty as to whether this way of drawing produces anything I'd think of as 'finished'.













When I get something complicated and think I need to sort it out, map it. I resort to doing this with color markers' It doesn't buckle the paper and there's a wide range of colors (tints hades and tone I can buy in the local art store.







I'm learning all the time. It is about space, spacetime, about my drawing sessions as events.

I'm curious as to the spaciality these drawings illustrate. They're 3 D because I count the actual time I spend as a dimension. It My drawings is additive. Where was the last line made? Where did I make the first? It would take a lot of study and guessing to figure this out.

New Skills, Fantasies of Fame and Fortune

New skills, ambitions, fantasies. I am thinking now of ways to build web galleries, sites, that will empower me to share the works I've made to a wider audience. Till now, I've been giving it away.

Perhaps I can allow myself, give myself permission to put a price, a monetary value on the things I've made.

It will entail web pages that have to do with buying and selling. Hmmm.

Being, Having Been An Outsider

Since childhood, I've come to see myself as 'On The Outside', an 'Outsider'

We had no such word for it in the decades of the 30's and 40's. Back then, the word that worked was 'Rebel', as in 'Rebel Without A Cause.' The title to a star-making movie with James Dean. If I thought at all about defining myself, it was as 'The Rebellious Adolescent'. My parents could connect with that. Also as I learned of it in Brooklyn College: 'Defiant Of Authority'.

I wore Such a puerile sense of my own rebelliousness without the compensation of notoriety of being any kind of celebrity. Long decades went by. I sought other aspects of who I was by searching for my origins. Who was my 'Real Mother?' There was in 'identity' a child born to a woman I never knew about, was never told of?. The searching of this aspect of 'My Who' led down many other paths.

Given the documents and records that I was indeed my father's son, there was this ambivalence as to which woman better deserved credit for who I was and how I turned out. Legitimacy and illegitimacy made a mess of my psyche. Was not ever to find closure or complete composure as to finding my Who. Not as a Jew, nor as boy or man 'believing' I 'Belonged.' Not really anywhere except in the precincts of my own home with my own wife and daughter.

No affirmation, nor dedication at any moment in space and time to G-d or Country.

Through the twenties, thirties, forties, even till now, I've despaired of emotionally feeling capable of anything real authentic 'As A Member Of'. No sense of being 'A Member Of'. More 'Impostor.' The feeling is what I'm referring to. The sense of the word, my choosing it. 'Outsider'.

At times it felt merely inappropriate. A secret I kept. I'd smile secretly. Say silently 'Imposter. ' Tongue-in=cheek. Too much sorrow and grief. Anger, too. Shame. Yes. (Self denigrating.) It was about my insignificance. My being in other people's lives 'On The Periphery.', A status in society that had my name thus ordained.

Anger, inadmissible and outrageous: unpardonable, intolerable.

Undeserved.

Obscene. More invidious than outright torture or brutish punshment! Anonymity. Had I ever wanted celebrity -adulation? Ha! My oxygen. How often have I felt stifled at its absence. What I needed was my name in The Paper, my name in the History Books. Ha ha!

Now, years gone by, those deluded aspirations not nearly gratified< I am who I am. Not quite 'a Shapiro', not a 'Jewish jew'. After a fashion am 'a full time' artist mathematician.

A New Yorker. A Long Islander... Husband. Father, Old Timer,

A 'Loner' still (Nothing denigrating.)

In the art world the loner comes in many grades -short of qualifying as an 'Outsider' in the art marketplace or Museum Row. Capitol 'O' outsiders are au currant, designate the naive, the unschooled, the primitive maker of art objects, highly sought after. Ubiquitously on exhibition.

In my case a misnomer. My stuff (Book Art, Mail Art, Copier Art, Algorithmic Drawings. etc). I'm an entirely 'Other-kind- outsider. (small 'o'.) Unknown, unpropitiated. The old guy, the too advanced in years to be lumped in with the unexhibited new-be emergent artists.

2/19/09

Just When I Think I've Cleared The Last Impediments

Just when I think I'm in the clear, I've disengaged from the last brambles, I am humbled, learned humility: I collide with clean glass doors, my faced dented by the metal frames of my glasses. I forget things, my keys, my wallet, my cell phone.



Blood breaks the skin in two places. Dries about when the ambulance drivers arrive. The rat poison I take every day prevents the blood that is beneath my skin from clotting. Bleeding continues inside my skin, leaves huge visible discolorations. Those who see me during the week that followed see 'd been badly beaten up. I tell people it was NOT my wife. A brush with my 'mortality' happens frequently. I live daily with reminders of how old I am and my Humpty Dumptyiness.

I'm monitored closely. The dosage of thewarfarin must be insufficient, not too little or too much. A hyperdermic needle in my arm extracting blood is never invisible, always leaves bruises that takes a week to fade. Even as I sit here writing, I've this massive bruise on the right side of my face. The blotch slides down, pulled by gravity, till it is eventually absorbed.

So I can with reason conceive entitlement to feel for those on chemo. They and I face imminent extinction. Thus far I've been spared. My dear friends have not been so fortunate. They, I -we do what we are able.

Fortitude, fortitude -I, they do what we are able to -are, within dire limits, capable.




Just when I'm in the clear, or think I am taught humility: Am served daily with reminders, (redundencies) of ...
of incremental diminishments, incapacitiesies. Mightlily do I determine to stay focussed, keep my calendar, log, tod do lists, muddle through....

January Travails

"Travails."
"Ordeals."

Moments, days, weeks, I'm talking about experiences with this work I do. Talk of "My work makes me." (Owns me too. )

It was more than a year since I made this drawing. The illusion is that these polygons are 2, 3 layers deep, and behind them is an infinite blackness, an abyss, a vast darkness, a cosmos.

As to what I was doing, thinking, feeling I can't recollect. Not without consulting my drawing book notes and logs from that time period. (These store bought black books are not just fro drawing; I keep my logs, in them -some record tracking significant events, get glimmers later of to how I felt. 'Enduring' when the events were hardships bouts with ailments or what I call 'my misadventures'. (Read: un-adventures.) The daily misplacing and or forgetting my wallet, keys glasses.... -mishaps. I do not beat myself about it. I (ha!) take it in my stride....

Right up to and and including giving Annette, NancyKay an eightieth birthday party -inviting some old friends and current neighbors, new friends and colleagues.. We did it at Bottino's on 9th between W 24 and 25th in Manhattan.



From that party to and beyond into January I was inhot water, thinking I wrecked my website, lost the entire 'ufemisms,com web site. For a while, it entirely disappeared. Gone. I face the consequences and tell myself, "No looking back." The whole e enterprise undone after my having purchased a spanking new 17" Mac Book Pro.

This idea I had, "Learn to be my own web master! Doable." Sure. I'd be my own webmaster! (Read webwaster.") Ha! The lone and only web address that was up and working is this one. Agony of agonies? A sort of lightness of being? I am very relaxed. The serenity is my atenolol tablet calming me down. The end is not as 'imminent'

Kim, Arthur, Eva: they know fear and dread -enduring the agonies of chemo, the scurring to doctors, hospitals, even to other cities like Kim at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore...

Still way off. -not nearly coping with that kind of brink ... Well, not that stage of annihilation.

PS: My web provider was able to recover the missing site. It is up and running after all.


At this moment I'm looking at a page in one of my drawing books -its dated 2/21/08 ... mentions I'm planning a mailart series of books. The recipients are archivists, gallery directors, colleagues, also a friend or two. Some 26 plus envelopes to address, weigh, lick stamps for and mail. I'd been on a binge of doing a lot of drawing. Happily gratified I've as many favorites to scan, print -replicate. They fill the pages of my book/mailart numbered and signed editions. These are looking more like my ones of a kind 'Waste-Nots'. These are laser replications using a new HP copier/printer/scanner. Oh Wow!


All of 2008 (except toward the end) was a great year! The book artist loves the library, -Blithely goes to as many different branches of them for readings on cosmology. I'm in bliss thinking how I will be remember having read what will years later be regarded as 'The Great Books' on the subject. My musings lead me to lead small library discussion groups in Long Beach, giving Interactive topics like "Does the Universe Have a Purpose?" Workshops that are more about evolution and cosmology, the Big Bang and the expanding universe. Ah,me, those of bible-reading prognosticators. How they gnash their teeth! I was making and fantasizing that my '5gontess' jpeg'd pages were so very 'really cosmological'.

I wind down doing volunteering: the '08 spring art festival (Art Launch). For the last time, (I hope/think.) Perhaps.
Meanwhile I'm doing workshops at Molloy College in Rockville Center, the New York City Math Fair later in march, the Family Math Day in Massapequa,....

Above is a view of kids assorted members of their families in one of the galleries at the art museum where I was invited (and paid too) to present activities that were 'hands on'. The show was of art inspired by numbers, geometry and mathematics.

The bald bearded guy in the glasses, the tallone toward the left (in the blue jacket): that's me.

The one who spent months 'agonizing, harnessed'. How I 'endured'! The anxieties, the agonies!-in the thrall of "Travails!" Yes, "Ordeals" preparing for it, "Moments, Days, Weeks" ..... hacking away at this difficult work I say I love so much. Yes, the "Work That Makes Me," Just now, I'm grateful I'm still up to staying the course, doing it.

Secrets, Those I discovered About El Greco

Hidden in every painting by the great 16th century Spanish painter El Greco are these geometric grids. Seems that this geometry formed the basis for the proportioning of every one of his canvases.


As far as I have discerned in my investigations he was the only painter to take this extra step. That is to say all European artists were using geometry, for the optical illusions they were creating, but not so for harmonizing the canvas proportions with its visual contents as El Greco was doing. The grids varied widely, Many based on unit squares.


When you compare paintings and grids, 'Laocoon' at first glance may seem the same proportions as 'Christ Healing the Blind'. Nor would you with a straight edge suspect you could derive this triangle grid you see here from grids of squares as I had accomplished in my exploration of the proportions of 'Laocoon'.



What astonishes me and blows my mind is that there is a kind of cosmology to this. El Greco had a vision of reality that entailed this secret making of geometric grids. His religious beliefs encompassed the philosophies and mysticism of the ancient geometers. To my mind, two metaphysical points of views stand out: those of Socrates and Pythagoras. Mysterious to me is why he kept his planar grids, the ones that most certainly are not sheer accidents, coincidences. Not only do they precisely determine the proportions of his canvases, but are marvelously adhered to. We view the imagery in elegant conformity to its elegant patterns / symmetries.

Drawings: A Cosmology?

I bring to my drawings my fantasies. I have thought and now think of myself as an artist who is an illustrator.
As a child I loved making comic strips and full page comic books, I still bring that same laying out of picture fields to what I imagine I am depicting here.

I've done work like this hundreds of times. Only now the pen drawing lines are not about humans but about 'cosmology'. I want the drawings to express the same sense of visual space and existential energy. All is in motion, in flux.I would like you to be immersed in this space - time - transformational part whole interaction that I am visualising.




These are scanned from pagesin my drawing books. I oen my log entree along with the drawings I make. I use a stylus pen or a fine poingt felt tip pen. I will use pens with a variety of thicknesses. I've learned to improvise everything by working in a medium that cannot be erased. My inks, color markers an papers are archival. The idea is to save my improvs and go back to the ones that withstood the test of time and take them further if I know how it can be accomplished.







Cosmology has always fascinated me. When I was a student in art school, the sections of the library dealing with myths, religious beliefs and the history of and comparisons of beliefs about God and the Universe had great meaning to me, I wanted to come to a realization of who I was, And I thought in metaphysical terms, This art that I'm doing is a revisiting to these preoccupations.A lot has been studied and learned about the origins and configurations of the Universe since then. A lot of water has gone under the bridges I've crossed when I was a boy preparing preparing for my Bar Mitzvoh and my reading the Book of Genesis.






The books of current theories of the Big Bang genesis of the Universe, and the scope of not only its expansion and our own expansion technology in exploring its galactic reaches were yet be written or published for the general public.

Such frontiers are only recent in my awareness and orientation. I am at the initial sectors of the learning curve playing catch up. My study of these drawings avers a sense of a different multiverse realm as to space and time relative to the speed of light. I see in the circle, thethe right isoscles triangle, the pentqgon and hexagon attributes yet to be fully imagined or even comprehended in the context of scientific concepts of cosmology .