This is part of my 100 doodles project. An art newsletter published about twice a week with small paintings and writing.

The Temple
Acrylic on birch panel 8” × 10”

The old Scottish Rite temple loomed outside our kitchen window, a big green rectangle. A massive poured-concrete Art Deco-meets-classical structure that stood silent every day I’ve lived in Tacoma. I saw signs for this and that church supposedly holding a service at this or that time. I never saw an open door until last August. Last August 24th they held an estate sale. The building had been condemned. The church that had been using the site had moved on to another location and they were selling off anything of value.

I took the opportunity to slip past the rope and sneak around upstairs and peer into musty rooms.

The building had slowly fallen into disrepair over the years and an electrical fire sealed its fate. When I was able to go inside I found the interior had been white-washed from floor to ceiling. I was walking around old bones.

This building was so beautiful. It had a modernist commitment to its material. It was unapologetically concrete. It’s massive walls created a huge square shape in the sky. I loved the way it contrasted the hokey, theatrical, neogothic snore of a church next door with its faux German windows, its faux Italian roofs, and its Vegas-like inauthenticity. The old temple was modern. It was American.

An enterprising developer could have carved this place up into wonderful apartments. If the stewards of the building were anyone other than a church, they may have recognized its uniqueness. Now it’s gone. A crater with rubble. The hole is soon to be filled with some soulless cardboard condominium with inadequate parking.

One weekend, thankfully after I had taken all my reference photos, the bulk of the building came down. I walked to get coffee in the morning. Over the roof of the ugly neogothic church I saw a giant pincer arm clipping into the concrete like cutting into cardboard. The pincer would sometimes grab onto rebar that wouldn’t budge. So it gave the building a shake. The entire wall would bow and bend. Once the pincers had clipped out a big enough chunk, it was knocked down into the interior of the building.

Like ants…

With the walls coming down the cavernous spaces inside were illuminated with sunlight. Bleached bone walls with bits of fleshy wood remaining.

Seeing through to the windows on the back wall gives a sense of scale.

Process

Digital squash and stretch

This painting is a constructed vantage point. You can’t really see this view unless you can fly down Division Ave in a helicopter. I created the composition from a number of reference photos. I squished and stretched them into a front-facing view. I created a line drawing from this photo and transferred that to a birch panel for painting.

Ironic coffee mug in action.

From there I built up the painting in a more or less traditional way, background to foreground. I had one error in my drawing. The transfer (or my original drawing) became distorted, so I had to come back and correct the horizontals.

I’m happy with the result except for the bike lane indicator on the street. I’m tempted to come back and remove it. We’ll see if I have the willpower to leave it be.

Am I winning?

I finished “playing” Universal Paperclips last weekend. This is a “cow clicker”, also known as an incremental game. Incremental Games often start out as web sites or web apps. Popular ones might make their way into an app store where you can pay for the opportunity to simulate work.

I’ve played a number of these, Cookie Clicker, SpacePlan, one based upon particle physics that I can’t remember…they all have this common theme. You start with something innocuous like making paperclips, or baking cookies, or reactivating your space probe with a potato-battery.

Each of these actions are simulated by a single click of the mouse. Click - you get a cookie. Click - you get a paperclip. As you click, things begin happening. You click enough cookies, you can buy a clicker to click for you. Keep it up, and you’ll soon have an army of grandmothers baking cookies. And then it gets weird.

“Universal Paperclips” works the same way. Make some clips, sell some clips, buy an auto-clipper, sell some more clips, buy a tool to automatically buy more wire. Soon you’re investing in quantum computing.

This game is an exercise in minimalism. While the visual aesthetic is “old fashioned internet” and pretty minimal, that’s not really what I mean. The game - in as much as it is a game - is a minimal pavlovian experiment. Proper actions are rewarded. Improper actions are not. The game logic or internal mechanics ultimately become management of an artificial resource. In this case you can trade paperclips and money for computer operations which you can trade for machines that make more paperclips and money.

After a while the reward for clicking goes away, and the game becomes fountain of streaming numbers, getting ever larger and more and more ludicrous. Adjusting this or that changes your flow of the fountain. And then the space combat begins.

So…should I click it?

That’s the other aspect of these games that makes them work - the innocuous activity ultimately reveals something wholly opposite. Click enough cookies to reveal an eldritch horror. Make enough paperclips, and you create an artificial intelligence that consumes the universe.

Universal Paperclips is an unfolding epic story told through a silly game mechanic that pulls you in with pavlovian trickery. Universal Paperclips is evil, but is it art?

Look at it go!

I saw “All I possess“ linked on an Internet Art thread on Reddit.

It’s a straightforward idea - the artist (Simon Freund) is documenting everything they own on a web site.

At first the artist appears to live an incredibly minimalist life. But then you scroll. And things keep loading. There’s always more stuff. Each item is photographed against an off-white ground as if it were a high-end product in a boutique retailer’s shop in NW Portland, OR. The project is “supported” by Shopify - which lends heavily to the shopping aesthetic.

Freund has good taste in things - and I found myself tempted to click an item and shop for it, even though it’s already owned. I also found myself comparing my own possessions to Freund’s. Would mine measure up? If I photographed everything would my stuff look as good?

There is a small amount of glee in scrolling past something which I also own. Oh hey me too I own the same thing an artist owns.

I don’t have a grand unified field theory of art or anything, but once you get past the particular media or execution I think art comes in two categories.

• Art that makes you think
• Art that makes you feel

This art work, being the work of a conceptual artist, definitely succeeds at the former. But it also, perhaps accidentally, succeeds at the latter. In reviewing all of the items on this site, I become conscious of everything I own. I think about my own failed attempts at minimalism. I think about all those books that I know I will never open again, but I feel guilt for recycling.

If you scroll far enough, you will find that the artist possess old his own artwork. And well, of course he does. No artist sells everything, and no artist can part with everything.

Precedent

When I saw this work I was immediately reminded of Sol Le Witt:

“LeWitt’s practice of photographing the contents of his Hester Street loft eventually led to the 1980 publication Autobiography, a composite self-portrait comprising hundreds of snapshots organized in a grid. His possessions are documented with a leveling, deadpan aesthetic: artworks by his close friends are given the same banal treatment as bathroom fixtures or potted plants. This indexical presentation belies the intimacy of the project, in which readers are invited to become voyeurs, peering into cabinets or scrutinizing personal notes on a bulletin board, admitting a certain fascination with the historical and personal circumstances of the artist’s life and work. Autobiography is read with different levels of specificity or abstraction relative to the reader’s knowledge of the subject—the items she recognizes, the extent to which the significance of a bottle of liquor or book on the bookshelf is registered. It exemplifies the project of LeWitt’s conceptual art: indexical clarity that recognizes, even elicits, the subjective and historical nature of perception and experience.”

Excerpt From: Kirsten Swenson. “Irrational Judgments.” iBooks. https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/irrational-judgments/id1054383969?mt=11

Sol Le Witt’s Autobiography is different in tone - it’s somehow more intimate in recording family photos and more focused on minutiae like keyholes. It’s not so laser focused on things. Freund’s approach to this idea, particularly the execution of the web site, frames all of their possessions as former things for sale. All of these possessions are ex-products. Le Witt seemed to be capturing evidence of his existence while Freund seems to be capturing the end of a vast funnel of supply chains, commerce, and kipple.

The modern man’s conceptual art studio, Visual Studio Code

My work life and my art life are colliding a bit lately. I have started using ReactJS for small art projects I make for the web after using the framework at work for work-like practical things. I recently wrote Guacamole Tips in ReactJS and a I rewroteShtacks in ReactJS a little while earlier.It’s probably entirely unintended, but the design principles of ReactJS make it a good artistic tool.

When I started tinkering with the idea of making net-art projects I was pretty dedicated to the idea that I should write most things “from scratch“ barring some build tools or similar. Therefore, I didn’t use a framework for anything and wrote my own code to, for example, set up the download link on Shtacks.

In retrospect, this was silly. What I wanted was to write minimal code that was future-proof and broadly compatible with modern browsers. I was worried about the “archival” nature of the work. But the brainy engineers at Facebook care about the same thing when writing the ReactJS framework, so why not profit from their contributions? Besides, it’s not like I grind my own pigments if I want to make a painting.

React is bricks

ReactJS is a popular framework for making web applications, and its popularity is spreading far and wide. If you use Slack at work - you’re actually using a ReactJS application. ReactJS resonates with engineers because it provides just enough tooling to make small components which can be clicked together with other components to do complex things.

Yeah, it’s basically playing with Lego bricks.

Each little component you might write for a React application is small and simple and is completely knowable. When these components are stacked together, complexity emerges. This is like sticking wheels on your Lego castle.

Art is object oriented

In my ReactJS art projects I create components with names that correspond with their subject matter. My web painting “Guacamole Tips” has a Garlic component. It has an Onion component. These objects are the subjects of the painting and they can be stacked and composed with other objects to make a piece.

Like any traditional painting, elements are arranged from background to foreground

Composition

In visual arts “composition” refers to the visual or graphic arrangement of elements in an artwork. In programming “composition” is a logical arrangement of small units to complex jobs.

In a ReactJS art piece - these ideas are the same.

I compose React components to appear in the art work and do their job together with other components and an artwork emerges.

I’ve gone back to the well to turn an analog painting into a piece of net art.

I think a lot about time. I think about the strange nature of experiencing linear but relative time. I remember 3 months of summer vacation from school yawning out over the year like it had no end. Today 3 months blinks by and seasons suddenly change. I think about my hour-long train ride to work in Seattle and how long that ride is and how much time it costs me but how the experience of that ride is a fleeting vague memory.

When I woke up in Monica’s guest room, jet lagged and confused, I felt for a while like I had stepped out of time. Good travel can do that.

For this piece I wanted to capture this room again and express the feeling of time passing and thoughts bubbling up. When I was hunting around for a domain name for the work, guacamole.tips was hilariously available. An entrepreneurial person might turn this into a SEO rich link bait farm slathered in ads. But to me, it was just the sort of random brain flotsam that I had while waking up slowly in that room. So scribbled notes and ghosts of ingredients appear with the change from day to night.

Process

All of the imagery was created using Procreate on my iPad. Text was hand scribbled with an Apple Pencil. The components are composited and animated using CSS3 animation and blend modes. The entire piece is executed as a simple ReactJS application.

Browser compatibility

All modern browsers should display the painting. Microsoft Edge does not currently seem to support CSS3 blending modes. I don’t care. While MS Edge is a great improvement over traditional Internet Explorer, it’s usage is a rounding error compared to mobile Safari and Chrome. Besides, I build for the future, not the past. Speaking of Internet Explorer, it will probably not work at all. I don’t care. I didn’t test it. Netscape Navigator 4.0 won’t work either.

I’m working on a long tail of typography for Shtacks. I just added a plus (+), an equals (=), and a hyphen (-). The parts of minus, en dash, and em dash will be played by hyphen in accordance with the traditions of our typewriting ancestors.

   [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="925.0"]<img src="http://abouthalf.micro.blog/uploads/2018/100d7aeb4b.jpg" alt=" I also take notes in ProCreate. "/>  I also take notes in ProCreate. [/caption] 

I don’t think I want to complete the entire ASCII character set with lowercase and whitespace characters. But I do at least want brackets, braces, colons, and semi-colons so I can type a painting of programmer humor. I think also I need an ellipsis for pregnant…typographical pauses.

Once I get these last characters complete, I’d like to look into creating a mobile app. I want to inject type-written paintings into text messages and share them directly to Twitter and the like.

I also experimented with Emojipacks and created some custom emoji for Slack. The site above sells packs of emoji commercially (I love this) and also created this clever little widget which automates the uploading process for you. While this is fun, I think the real fun will be to create a small Slack slash-command so images can be dropped right into Slack. (Yes, Slack is the new exhibition space, why do you ask?).

  <img src="http://abouthalf.micro.blog/uploads/2018/62c4adafeb.jpg" alt=""/>
  


  
  <img src="http://abouthalf.micro.blog/uploads/2018/b29240529a.jpg" alt=""/>
  


  
  <img src="http://abouthalf.micro.blog/uploads/2018/42a33b0102.jpg" alt=""/>

I just finished Rafaël Rozendaal’s new monograph “Everything, Always, Everywhere” and I am baffled that this book exists as a traditional paper art book from an small publisher. On paper. Like a cave painting.

The book includes a number of critical essays, an interview, photographs of gallery installations and other physical works, and also screen prints of many of his websites.

How is this not an app? Why is this not an ebook? Such a wasted opportunity! I can imagine an ebook where one page is a scrolling essay accompanied by audio of the author reading aloud. I can imagine turning the page to reveal a video of a net-art-website in motion. But no, it’s paper.

My favorite essay is by Kodama Kanazawa entitled “A hint of Japan in the works of Rafaël Rozendaal”. The essay is written first in English, followed by a translation in Japanese. It’s interesting to flip through the Japanese text to find a URL in English or one of Rozendaal’s off-kilter haiku. It’s the visual equivalent to hearing your name uttered from across the room.

The worst essay is by Christine Paul, “Remotely Distant Never Nowhere: The art of Rafaël Rozendaal”. It’s tedious museum-speak. It lost me particularly because of this passage:

“The simultaneously cartoonish and painterly language of Rozendaal’s net art projects is created through his use of vector animation, which allows for a cleaner, smoother, motion than moving pixels since images rendered and resized using mathematical rather than stored pixel values.”

This is both false and wrong. How are pixels “moved” if not mathematically? By nudging them with a pencil? Vector graphics are geometric shapes defined by points and mathematical curves and lines, yes. This much is true. But vector graphics (and video and 3D graphics) they are converted to 2D pixels to appear on a screen. Remember - “pixels” is short for “picture element”.

That is why it was wrong. It is false because while Rozendaal’s early website projects used Flash, which was a vector animation tool for the web, his current work utilizes the HTML5 canvas element which is a programmatic drawing surface for pixels.

I may have unrealistic demands on an art critic, but I think if you’re going to discuss the technical underpinnings of an artist’s work and how it relates to their influences, you should probably get the facts straight. It’s like saying Andy Warhol was a lithographer.

The book itself is a joyful object, full of different weights and textures of paper. The cover is a reproduction of his popular site http://www.muchbetterthanthis.com/. It has a subtle relief that is pleasing to hold and run your fingers over…which is probably why the monograph is paper and not electronic. It’s a work of art like Rozendaal’s textiles and lenticular prints. But still. I’m disappointed I can’t carry around a portfolio of Rozendaal’s sites on my iPad.

The naked core of an Apple Pencil

On Thursday I was working late and scrambled through traffic to get to studio to join my figure drawing session. I was there late enough that it was hard to find a place to work. I stood in between two easels. As the lights went out, the person to my right turned on their clip-lamp to illuminate their easel. I was blind. I stepped forward and back and finally turned 45º to keep the light out of my face. If only everyone carried self-illuminating drawing tablets this wouldn’t be a problem.

A ghost of a painting that might have been.

I got moving on a drawing. Still a little rushed. I made some drawing errors. But I liked the direction my colors were headed.

Then I fumbled and dropped my Apple Pencil. Its tip struck the concrete floor and broke in such away that the mounting sleeve is jammed well into the barrel, with no way to extract it.

Ruined.

I’ve already ordered another, it should be here Monday. I don’t put a case on my phone. I don’t shield my laptop in a special sleeve. I just try to be careful and not be foolish. But a pen is so easy to drop. Maybe I need one of those foamy pen-grips you can slip over the end of your pen so it stays in your clumsy hand. Maybe I need a pen-lanyard. Maybe I need to learn to paint with my fingers.

I mean it even has USB

I am a mighty oak. I have $49.99 but I did not spend $49.99 on a turntable. I resisted and bought the cheapest 3’ HDMI cable I could find.

Before we moved to Tacoma, we lived in the St. Johns neighborhood of Portland, OR. St. Johns was a small town that was merged into Portland back in the ‘30s. St. Johns has it’s own little downtown and feels slightly different from the rest of Portland. It’s one of the more diverse neighborhoods in Portland, though new housing development and rising costs will probably ruin that soon.

On the West Coast, pizza is generally pretty poor. Recall that “barbecue chicken pizza” was invented in California. But here and there you can find a pizza place that understands that pizza is bread and you must make good bread first and then worry about the rest.

In St. Johns there is an old gas station that has been converted into a pizza place. They make a flavorful dough that bakes up with a chewy center and crispy exterior. It’s not the best I’ve had, but it’s very good for Portland. They sell whole pies or slices. On many Saturdays I would walk over and get a slice or two and a beer. The kids who worked there had a tiny little turntable and a milk crate of punk rock records. They played those records at full blast, distorting the sound and rattling the windows.

I paid for college making pizza, though it wasn’t in nearly as romantic a place. Not a small part of me wants to run away and join the circus get a job at that pizza place. If I buy the record player now then maybe I could borrow some of their records…

Portrait of Gary
Procreate for iPad Pro

I returned to life drawing on Thursday after a very long break. Gary was our model. He’s one of my favorites. He’s a pleasant older man who sits rock-still without fidgeting. He’s one of the few figure models who can hold a pose without slowly slumping and melting into the earth as the night wears on. He’s also visually interesting - a Peter Graves type.

Rough drawing under the painting

I failed to make it to figure drawing for a long while thanks to a terrible, tedious, but necessary project at work. Our predecessors, founders of the company and terrible engineers, made poor choices for just about everything except for the basic concept for the web site. One particular technology choice has been a plague of failure for about 5 years. Our task was to rip this out down to the roots. This required lots of error prone rework and migration of data and many late nights of incremental releases which threatened to bring all things down around us.

But now the dragon is slain and I have my Thursdays back again. I missed the regular practice. I miss forcing myself to make the best of bad lighting, weird angles, or a fidgety model. Drawing from life is such good practice.

While I was busy my painting app had a major upgrade. Procreate 4 has an updated painting “engine” which handles blending of digital paint in this eerily lifelike way. I’ve talked before about how working with layering color in a digital medium takes a bit of brain twisting to get used to. The team at Procreate has removed a lot of that problem. The digital paint just sort of works the way you expect it to. It’s incredible. I would buy it twice if I could.

Tomatoes
Procreate 4 for iPad

The mad geniuses at Savage Interactive have released Procreate 4 for iPad and iOS 11. Version 4 is a free update. A fresh new license costs only $9.99 from the App Store. This is a complete purchase. There are no subscriptions or in-app purchases to unlock additional features.

The updated UX for Procreate puts more actions closer to your fingertips and mirrors the design language of iOS 11

This software is criminally underpriced. Low prices are the hallmark of the new app-store software economy, and generally I think this is a good thing. But when I think back to the many hundreds of dollars I spent licensing Adobe software way back when, I feel tremendous pangs of guilt. I would like to buy it twice. I want them to sell t-shirts or something. This software is just too good for the price.

Procreate 4 has been updated to be consistent with the design language of iOS 11 and it feels right at home on my iPad. It takes full advantage of drag and drop features of iOS 11 - so importing brushes or images is a simple and intuitive operation, instead of many taps and swipes. The heart of this update, though, is the new rendering engine they’re calling Silica M built on Apple’s low-level GPU library Metal.

This new painting engine is the closest I’ve ever felt to “real” painting. Everything is faster and more responsive, which is great. But there’s something about how color lays down and blends with the new smudging tools and wet brush dynamics. Digital painting has, for me, always required bending my mind into thinking about digital color. Most digital painting tools - including industry standard Photoshop - pile color up in this weird additive way that works mathematically but doesn’t mirror the mental model of painting. Procreate 4 subverts all of that. The paint now feels like paint - it’s the hardest thing to articulate but there’s simply less mental friction in putting color down and it doing what I expect it to do. Perhaps the “M” in Silica M stands for “Mind-reading”.

Last Sunday I took a little time to consolidate my Twitters. I have two accounts, one mostly received updates from this site - @abouthalf and the other a “personal” account (@device55 - now defunct and private) which got most of my Instagram posts and my blog posts and whatnot.

This was silly. Why have two when I could have one? I don’t have an evil twin (that I know of) nor do I manage multiple brands. I don’t need two accounts.

I chose to sun-down my “primary” @device55 account. The username is terrible. I picked “device55” as an email handle a million years ago. That became a user name on Twitter and other places. But it’s terrible. If you have a username with a number in it you are either not very creative or you are late to the platform and your name was sniped.

Going forward, all of my Twittering will occur on my now-primary @abouthalf account. It’s a better username, it matches my website, and I can start fresh.

I took the opportunity to clean out all the junk accounts I didn’t need to follow. I stripped down everything to real people I really know, a couple of artists, and actually useful things like my local news.

I copied my following list over to my @abouthalf account, cleaned up my profile a bit, and it’s my new Twitter home. To discourage use of my old handle, I’ve made that account private, and left a tweet pinned with instructions to find me.

I have mixed feelings about Twitter. In contrast, I love Instagram. I hate that it’s owned by Facebook, and I hate their auto-playing video ads. But I love the simplicity of the concept. Hey you. Look at this.

But Twitter is weird. Neither fish nor fowl. When someone needs to share something longer than 140 characters they resort to screen capturing a note and sharing the image. Or they do a horrible tweet thread - stringing together tens of tweets in a row trying to make a single complex point. The format can be terrible. It is good for posting links and pictures and quips. Since RSS is a dying form, it’s one of the major ways people subscribe to content they want to read on the internet. I think if you want to be read, it’s wise to have a Twitter account.

Twitter is a company with no spine or moral center. Twitter refuses to police its users and refuses to take any sort of moral stand against horrifying content. It’s an unquestionably useful and valuable platform, but it’s hard to reconcile its value with how terrible it can be. I am torn - do I enable something awful by using it, or do I perhaps by actively trying not to be terrible and contribute to terribleness? I hope it’s the former.

I have just returned from celebrating my 10th anniversary on the achingly beautiful island of Kauai where danger lurks behind every turn.

These signs are at every trailhead and most beaches. They all seem to be saying the same thing: "This isn't Disney World, this is real life".

Limes
Painted with ProCreate for iPad

On Labor Day I took a break from painting to go have lunch with my wife. Labor Day requires at least one cheeseburger. She asked me an obvious, straightforward question that I, honestly, have never been asked: “What do you like about painting?”

I had never really considered it, not in those blunt terms. What a good question! I tried to come up with a good answer. I can tell you what I like about a painting. But why do I like to do the thing? I thought about it for a bit and came up with the following.

Shameless pride: It’s really gratifying to do something that most people can’t or can’t do well. This is shallow, but it’s honest.

Magic: Somehow the careful arrangement of colored mud or pixels becomes something else. This is the appeal of painterly illusion: tricking your brain (and other’s brains) into seeing something that isn’t there. If a painting goes particularly well, though, the colored mud or pixels can also create feelings and trigger thoughts or ideas. This is true of any art form, of course, but I personally find pictures particularly powerful in this way.

Meditation: Painting is slow and quiet and methodical. If things are going well I can find myself in a state of flow and lose myself.

Happy accidents: Yes I’m quoting Bob Ross. Come at me. Paintings are constructed. Even when you’re working spontaneously from life, you still have to plan, compose, and strategize. No plan is complete though, and accidents happen. Sometimes they turn out pretty good.

That doesn’t feel complete, but it feels like a good start.

Painting composite Created with ProCreate for iPad Pro

On the train last week I was doodling a desktop wallpaper and I suddenly remembered that on a computer it’s trivial to add things to other things. So I put some avocados and an onion onto an abstract background of stars and a moons. Why not?

When I was in art school I played around a lot with recombining my work. I recall making a painting on an 18″ x 24″ canvas. The Kinko’s near my school had a large format 18″ x 24″ photocopier. Kinko’s was open 24 hours. I went to Kinko’s late and made a copy of my painting on standard paper. Then I used their card stock. Then I ran some print making paper through the copier. Nice. Then I ran some watercolor paper through. Bonk. I created an epic paper jam. Since it was about 1:00 am, I opened hatches and turned levers until I got my paper out. I reassembled the machine and disappeared into the night. I laminated those photocopies onto luan panels and painted on top photocopies of my paintings. Later I learned Photoshop was a thing.

Tacoma Dome Station Construction
8” × 8” Acrylic on birch panel

Spring and summer have gone but the new Amtrak terminal is still under construction. Each day before my morning commute I have watched workers build a retaining wall, pour a concrete passenger platform, rip up the old platform and put it back together, and lately weld the superstructure for a passenger shelter.

It took a couple of weeks to build that retaining wall. Underneath the concrete there are large steel I-beams driven into the earth. Between the beams, fitted into the slots made by the “I” shape, are large slabs of wood. This lumber was stacked in great cubes along the wall. The workmen trimmed this lumber to length by hand, with a chainsaw. Each piece slid down in between the I-beams. Sometimes they would level the pieces out with a small shim. I never saw them make a mistake, even though they completely eye-balled each cut.

At the time this work was going on my work was not going particularly well. I was jealous of the clear and obvious progress these guys made every day. I am sure some days were better than others, but at the end of each day there was more retaining wall than there was the day before. Today the wall is here. Yesterday it was back there. Tomorrow it will be over there. Working on software can often feel abstract and phony by comparison.

This new Amtrak station will be next door to the commuter rail station. Both of these have been grafted into the semi-historic Freighthouse Square which a century ago was a warehouse at the end of a freight railway. Today it’s full of funky shops and fast food. There is a very promising looking Mexican restaurant there. It’s a weird ramshackle place. It’s very Tacoma. Looking forward while holding on to the past.

Back in June I arrived to wait for the train into Seattle and watched workers tying rebar into place so that the new passenger platform could be poured on top. They crouched before the new retaining wall, and above them is the freshly scraped hillside that leads up to a Best Western and the famous Tacoma Dome. I snapped several photos on the sly. For this painting I used elements from a couple of my photos. I used Pixelmator to rearrange the perspective a bit. I like how the under-construction landscape came together as repeating layers of blue and orange. You might have to squint a bit - but the sky is blue - of course, the earth is orangey brown, the concrete is blue-grey, the lumber concrete forms are burnt orange, the asphalt and gravel are blue grey, and the railroad tracks are rusted orange. I liked the contrast between the depth of the landscape layers against their graphical horizontal stacking. Less formally (romantically) I liked the one worker alone focused on his job. He was in a state of flow - I’ve had that. I was slightly jealous of his work, alone, in the morning sun. I was not jealous of his future back-ache.

This painting is acrylic on an 8″ square birch panel. I love the way acrylic paint behaves on these panels. You can apply thin paint and achieve watercolor like effects, or go thick, and build up a heavy impasto. You can lay down a wash of color, which stays damp while soaked into the grain of the wood, then build heavier color on top which blends into the color beneath, but just a little. The birch has a nice warm, but neutral, color so there’s no need to under-paint. The panel is light enough that pencil sketches are clear, but dark enough that you have contrast with lighter colors and whites. I also like the “object-ness” of these little panels. Even though it’s very small and light, it feels like a ‘thing’ in a way that’s different from a store bought canvas.

Work in progress

Overall this painting took about 8 hours to complete from set-up to varnish. It was nice to have a day off.

Sunday Avocados ProCreate for iPad Pro

Last Sunday I sat with Caroline in the park painting avocados on my iPad. Avocados might be the most fun fruit to paint. They have interesting ranges of color and texture and while all avocados look like avocados, no two look alike. We were spending a little time together, enjoying the weather, enjoying a wine in a can. As you do.

I suppose doodling in a sketchbook would be similar - but I really like the portability of drawing and painting on a tablet computer. The interesting side effect is one of de-isolation. I could sit with my wife and paint while we chatted. She has joined me while I’ve painted before. I paint in our spare bedroom on a small table, with a drop cloth beneath. But she can’t sit with me. She sits on the couch across from me and reads a book. That’s nice too but it’s not quite the same.

When I paint on the train to work in the mornings people strike up conversations. A lot of folks want advice on buying their kids an iPad to paint on. This is fine. I’m happy to help (and to clarify which model they need to get and the real cost and the cost of apps).

Something, I think, about the iPad makes it more accessible to other people. People might not have an iPad but they probably have a smartphone and they know how that works and an iPad is just a big smartphone right?

I stood up a painting kit in the park to paint plein air I’m sure someone would pop in and ask a question. But that’s so anachronistic and, frankly, stunty, that I wonder if it would bring people together the same way.

Avocados
ProCreate for iPad Pro

Hashtag  on Shtacks.com

I have continued adding things to Shtacks.com - things like apostrophes, quotes (smart quotes!), a question mark, and the critically important octothorp.

I was talking to a coworker and he remarked that I really needed a percent sign (%) and I realized I probably needed an ampersand (&) and a dollar sign ($) too. And while I’m at it, why not all 95 printable ASCII characters?

It goes beyond being a series of images and becomes an iterative artwork (with release notes). I like this idea. It’s not really “done” - one day I will stop adding things, but in principle I could always add more imagery, or change a feature of the web app, or something and it would be alive again.

I like this. This ties in nicely with the second big idea I gleaned from “Post Internet” — that art in the internet age is a performance in real time by the artist, mediated over the internet. Continually updating a piece of net-art and sharing those changes takes the viewer with you as you change and revisit. That’s nice.

I live in beautiful, downtown, Tacoma but I work in overrated, overpriced, Seattle. I spend a lot of time on the train. I try to make the most of my time commuting by reading, listening to music and podcasts, and doodling on my iPad. I have been doodling desktop images for a while - big high-resolution square format images that can serve as a phone, iPad, or desktop wallpaper.

Letters and numbers and more in Sketch

In April of this year I hit upon the idea of drawing the alphabet. I used Sketch to lay out a square and position a big Bodoni A, B, C, and D and got started. I exported those images from Sketch to my iCloud drive, placed them into Procreate on my iPad, and painted.

Painting the ‘M’ in ProCreate Each image uses the same color palette. 

I didn’t layout all of the letters at once. I probably should have. I learned in July that “Q” doesn’t fit the square as the little descending tail falls off the page. I also discovered that W is too large for the page. Whoops. I guess it’s a painting of a typographical error.

I started thinking that it would be fun to text these images to people. Once I had the alphabet complete, I stole a weekend to write Shtacks.com

Type something

In the text field at the top you can type letters and some punctuation. You can also get a heart icon with <3, data-preserve-html-node="true" :heart:, or _heart_. The letters are laid out based upon the size of the screen. So resize your browser window or rotate your device for a different layout.

On desktop browsers you can download the image with the download button at the bottom. Currently I don’t have image downloads working on mobile devices. But I hope to fix that soon.

As you type the text becomes part of the URL. So you can share what you’ve typed with friends by sharing the URL using your browser’s share function, or just by copying and pasting the web address. When the shared page loads, it will capture the text in the URL and regenerate your image.

Or at least mostly. It may be a different layout because the viewer my have a differently sized screen or device. Also the (typographic) spaces are multi colored and selected at random.

And how

After researching HTMLCanvas, I spent about two days building the web site. I wanted to write something very slim and functional. My day job relies on big, object oriented web frameworks. Building something fast and light with a singular focus was refreshing.

You can see that the main program is quite simple.

After collecting references to the page elements, the piece…

1. Collects any text any the query string and sets it as the current text
2. Writes the image out using the URL text, or the default
3. Creates two methods to rewrite the image, and to set the URL text
4. On resize of the browser window, rewrites the image
5. On input of text, rewrites the image
6. On input of text, sets the URL state
7. On a history event (clicking the back button), extract the previous text from the previous URL and rewrite the image

Writing the image is also a straight-forward algorithm. With a reference to the text input and the drawing canvas…

1. Set the square dimension for each letter
2. Prepare for drawing by getting the canvas drawing context
3. Get the current text
4. Get the width of the window, minus scrollbars
5. Calculate the dimensions of the drawing surface based upon the window and text
6. Clear the drawing surface and resize
7. Break the text up into a table, rows and columns of letters
8. Calculate the position of each letter, in each row
9. Load and place the letter at its position in the canvas

Iterative

Working on Shtacks was the first time I realized that both art and software are iterative practices. Shtacks is the first artwork I have done with release notes.

Painting each letter, I refined my process and got faster at getting the effect I wanted. Writing the site, I worked writing small building blocks to add up to the complete piece. I started by simply loading the images by letter. From there I worked on getting and setting the text. Then handling the heart icon. And so on. Small iterations leading to releases leading to the work.