Transferring my home Page to Powweb, My New Webhost

I had the help of my daughter Nancy Kaye in selecting the web host powweb and downloaded some software with 'Fetch' as my essential tool. I wanted to convert my original iweb Apple site into one I could view on powweb. The site provided me with tech support guidance. Accomplishing this followed easily. I was being allowef a very limited window for accomplishing this. Apple charged me nearly 50 dollars for their participation in completing this.

It was Apple's decision to close down iweb and discontinue this access to clients like me with no html literacy.

My building web site mission was to find an audience for the slide shows I made showing many masterpieces by artists who employed 'planar grids'.

Initially it was in the paintings of El Greco I made this discovery. I went on to discover 5 centuries of works (painting and prints) by famous artists.

February Post

The blizzards of December and January made these months seem actually to speed by. It gave me a reprieve from the world and more time for drawing. The storms kept me from the appoinments scheduled. Scheduled and rescheduled: appointments with my doctors, my Apple store for mentoring sessions, my senior men's meetings at the the Senior Center.

I'm scanning some of my drawings of December and January, the weeks of the new year when I didn't go out into the freezing winds and teen temperatures. I'm upload into my Mac Book Pro these pages, some of what I believe are signifcant images.

You see here pages that are sequential. Drawing from one side of the page (the right hand page) is colored. I use markers which bleed through the paper. When I turn the pages, verso side shows on the left page what you see which I use and add pen lines to obtain another drawing.

On the right facing page, the drawing I make continues my continuing this motif. The drawing is a dyptych like accompaniment. Same motif and colored to match with the one on the left.

The motifs explore patterns I make by drawing a closed loop and pairing it with what will become another closed looping line that zigas and zags with the one I had started out with.

Working in color helps me to map the shapes. I do not know, till I use color what's is 'wrong' or 'right' with it. Or if it I omitted something. Geometric yes, but how algorithmic?

Whe I imagine I'd succeeded, I say ah, yes, I've made a 'Theorem'. That is to say, The drawing not merely demonstrates, but validates that something metaphyiscal and topological exists!


This last drawing needs no colors. It is simply readable without it. It is a two color theorem. The zigzag at the intersects (terminals) make a kind of swastika.

Such configurations were find in very ancient times in the decorative arts of Islam.

From Algorithms To Manifolds

I've been scanning my most recent favorite drawings from my drawing/ log books this past month. They range back to the algorithmic drawings that I found in my 2007 drawing book collection. The drawings I made this year, 2010, contain a preponderance of studying the Poincare' topology defined as 'manifolds'.

Alternating with my 'manifold' motif drawings are those that begin with closed loops. These rely on triangle and on pentagon patternings.

The drawing on the right differentiates structure, assigning, each of the 4 singular zones is denoted using its own color hue.

New and Old, My Drawings Are About Fantasies, Closing The Loops

The fantasy foremost: is I am still at it, making my drawings, living the life of my ostensible identity, doing what I do, being who I am: an artist. August 2010 approaches. And so too September, the month of my birthday, my 82nd year. The momentum of this daily work I engage are stylus pen drawings made in my store-bought drawing books, acid free, archival -filling pages of what are pictures made with lines that are closed loops, geometric... That as the lines represent plane shapes, trivial manifolds, experiments, improvisations. Each is dated, signed, identifying the time of day and where I happen to be at the time I've been doing this. I leave each page intact. Some, I'll come back to and add some ink or color marker stains. The whole excedes the parts, seems alive, has that 'tensegrity' that Bucky Fuller coined the word so as to reinvent with a new word what it is doing. Each drawing is a doing of something that gesturally implies such as is indescribable in words. You simply know it when you're looking at it that you are seeing it. It is a 'I-do-not-know-what.' It is, like Frankensein's monster, ALIVE!

I upload this image an open 2 pages in my drawing book. The image floats. On the right page it is there, the drawing.

A something that is structural, sculptural, sturdy,

pentagonal, of pentagons, filled with pentagons

containing connecting, Enclosed-looping

Curved shapes

the lower one empty, the upper one filled with hugesharp edge 5 gons right to, but not quite to its edges.

Insides. Outsides. The same pen line yet not the same on the inside as the outside

White, ephemeral is actually the paper pages I draw on. Here in cyberspace it is so much 'Infinity'.

How do you imagine it? Vast? Submicroscopic?

No knowing.

Unknowable, unknowable but for my fantasizing.

Seeing it here surrounded in black... More mysterious still.

Lucky me you're looking at it!

What do you make of it?

What of it would you like to know if you'd ask me?

El Greco's Geometric Grids, Cont'd

I downloaded many of El Greco's painting reproductions from the internet. I've with each and all done what you see on this reproduction. Before going into cyberspace, I used tracing paper over printed reproductions I got hold of. Of the ones I copied and of the versions I analyzed using straight edge and compass, the composition you see her gives testimony as to El Greco's keeping it secret. It would have been considered damning by the Spanish Inquisition.

It has remained his secret for centuries. Experts and writers whose works were published are unanimous in telling us bout this painter's contempt of geometry. The above image says otherwise. We can see plainly the close proximity of his images with the geometric planar elements. It is no fluke. El Greco was indeed a follower of a metaphysic that was Platonist, The intent was Pythagorean. That is he believed in a pagan mysticsm and metaphysics.

The geometric grid is flat, planar, and precedes and intercedes those aspects representing th dimensionality of what viewers deem as 'picture space'. My anaylsis is derived from the straight edge drawn diagonals of the rectangle of the actual reproduction I download. I also fit at east one circle to derive geometric units based on the square and triangle. I've no doubt that the artist worked in a similar manner to obtain what he deemed would be a suitable proportioning suited to his sacred motifs.

It is this purpose and function that was being this served! The ordinal sequence of the planar grids was to establish proportions. The figures in the virtual field of vision, the entire picture field was in alignment to his symmetries and golden rectangle harmonies. No artist before or after went to this added procedure. None.

I now use my computer tools for the tasks I performed on tracing paper.I am collecting as many reproductions of El Greco's art to determine how each and all fit the Plato, Pythagorus mysticism as to the role of geometry in making truly the most 'perfect' renderings of that which is holy, sacred, and sublime. It is a 'Sacred Geometry'. Each and every canvas I examined, convinces me that he knew that this was pure heresy! El Greco knew very well that he transgressed the prevailing beliefs of his christian patrons. The truth now be told, it was why there never was a 'school of El Greco'. His real methods could not be taught, had to be maintained in total secrecy.

It was not the art of a man with astigmatism or sheer eccentricity. The increasing use of elongations and distortions, his compress perspectival foreshortenings, his flattenings appeared hallucinogenic, his heightened colorations , its luminescence were not random but algorithmic!

Another Look At an El Greco Painting and his Metaphysical Proportioning of its Canvas

In every painting I've investigated by the artist, El Greco, a 16th century Spanish painter I've found these hidden grids determining the proportions of his canvases. Seems that this grid making was this extra step he took. No other artist did this. Not to my knowledge. In my readings about El Greco I've found no scholars taking notice of what I've found. I used reproductions, tracing paper, and a straight edge when I made the first study of one of his canvases. Every single reproduction showed that the grid making was essential ordinal first step in the preparation that went into the designing of his compositions.

Proportions came first. It wasn't just one or two, but all I came across ranging across decades.


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 vanishing points and perspective geometry to create illusions of three dimensions, but not for the purposes El Greco had. He was harmonizing the shapes of his canvases, creating 'platonic' proportions, metaphysical proportions. He was pent on finding in geometry the most appropriate formats for representing the sacred images that his choice of subject matter required.


WIth a straight edge and a copy of a reproduction of his painting, I analyzed the given shape. I started with drawing the diagonals of the rectangle. At first glance Christ Healing the Blind and Laocoon seem very much alike. But the grid revealed the differences.

Nor did I suspect I could derive a triangle grid from the rectangle grid I started with. Nor that from the triangle grid there was also a square hidden also in the Laocoon. A recent slide show I put together illustrates the whole process, shows step-by step how one grid precedes the next. El Greco did not have a computer and the software I am now using. He did all the way Pythagorus did it.



What astonishes me, blows my mind is that I may be the only person who knows about this.

El Greco's vision of reality is existential and Platonistic. His secret use of ancient Greek geometric planar grids served an essential purpose. His was of such a mysticism in which only such a methodology enabled him to incorporate Golden Rectangles in his depictions of what he held was sublimely sacred.

This kind of alchemy he kept secret. He would never allow it to be guessed at or discovered.

It accounts not only for the proportioning of his canvases, but also for the distinctly singular and unique distortions he employed in his representations of the human figures!

Quitting And Not Thinking I'm A Quitter

There are things I've been years at doing that I'm now thinking of I ought to quit, stop doing.

I'm reminded of the time I quit smoking. It took me years to get fed up enough to give it it up. I remember the resolve took years before I finally quit smoking and stayed off the habit. I'm contemplating quitting 'making art'.




Or maybe thinking that the drawings and what-other things I make is art. This work I do and have done goes back many decades. Got very serious about it especially when I retired from teaching. I was 57 when that happened. That is, wanting to, aspiring to 'make art'.




The easy part of it was the aspiring. It was between me and myself. I could spend hours and days at drawing, painting and pretending. It didn't much matter how anyone else thought of my work. I didn't much show it, didn't much be deterred by whether I exhibited or didn't.

The high, the intoxication came in the doing... At least that for me had to suffice.





It sufficed that I found such sublimities in my examining of great works of art by artists living and dead. Moments of awe and revelation that evolved out of my own singular efforts.

I'm now thinking I might quit, walk away from my thinking and doing such things I've been doing.




To be continued.