1280×1024 wallpaper image

Poem from artwork.

whiteSpaceTRANSMISSION
3/16th shy of
totalLife: totalDeath

All knowing falls off
Into timelessSpaceless
No matter; no phenomena @ all
This total burst of power

I’m currently playing with a concept for a new gallery site in which users can upload artwork and see their pictures displayed in a number of editable gallery settings. Users of the site will then be able to download the resulting view as a desktop wallpaper. This is just a mock-up without any functionality.

Exhibition work coming soon!

Carlos Primo is a brilliant Spanish art critic who has written for a number of noteworthy Spanish publications. Last month Carlos launched a new blog http://www.elpintordelavidamoderna.tk/. In this site Carlos, hopes to illuminate emerging web based artists and provide a critical eye to this new genre and evolving artistic language. Below are some of the questions Carlos asked me for his blog and my way too serious answers:)

The full interview and an introduction is written on Carlos’s site in Spanish although he informs me a English translation of his introduction will soon be available.

CP - How did you get to create works with a mathematical basis and inspiration? have you ever been accused of doing “cold” art?

The geometry in my work is not there as an underlying structure which organises an additional independent artistic language, but it is the very fabric of the work. The choice to derive the work using specific families of geometric relationships has to do with limiting my options. This is limiting my options in terms of where and how I can create one element relative to another and relative to the entire work. In poetry and music, we call this ‘meter’. Meter in art is as old as art itself. Actually all artist’s subconsciously and consciously create meter in their work. It is what determines the style of one artist compared to another. For instance, Picasso, when he was young, limited his palette to predominantly blue hues. There was much more to his output at this time than just this, but as a simple example this stylistic limitation, or meter, as I call it, gave the young Picasso the artistic freedom to express something very precisely. I believe limitation is just a necessary condition of creative expression and it’s the invention and variety that is found by the artist within the limits that gives an expression power. Of course, this again is nothing new. The ancient Greeks talked about it in terms of ‘variety within unity’. From Zen we have ‘All in One: One in All’, in Zen however, the whole of reality is like this, not just art.

CP - You work with geometrical figures, but what are your other aesthetic (or ethic, maybe spiritual) influences and inspirations? because your images are complex and interesting, but also so beautiful…

I think our interests and personalities inevitably find there way into all our creative work and activities. In my case I have broad interests in many things, such as technology, architecture, mathematics, engineering, and, of course, all areas of art and design. Perhaps what influences my work the most, however, is my practice of Zazen. This is Zen sitting meditation. Through this practise I am learning to breath with my eyeballs and see with the pit of my belly. This is the most important skill for any artist. Without this, an artist can not make one original mark.

CP - Why so many black and white images? something to do with minimalism?

My use of a greyscale palette is again about limitation - ‘meter’. Actually, for the first few years that I was developed the Root2Art canon of work, I only used three tones: white, black and a mid grey. A large majority of my more recent work only uses 5 or 7 tones.

Sometimes, when I am struggling to resolve a piece of work I use colour, but once I become clear about how I want the structure to work, then I will be able to define the piece in monochrome. Introducing colour to my work would be like playing a piece of music composed for solo piano, with an entire orchestra. The Orchestra would bring with it a certain richness and complexity, but more often than not at the cost of structural clarity. For me, it is about revealing precisely and clearly the compositional invention of a work. I think this is best done without the distraction of colour. We can reduce colour to a tonal monochrome structure, but not vice versa.

I remember clearly, over ten years ago, looking at a pebble on a beach and thinking - “How can I create anything that adds something to the infinite complexity and richness of nature. Even on the surface of this simple pebble is a beautifully subtle texture and an infinite variety of colour. If I am to make anything that is a genuine contribution to the visual diversity of the world, then it would be futile to try and beat nature at its own game. “Using a limited monochrome palette and eliminating all texture is therefore also about removing the more sensual aspects of art, simply because this is something that can always be found in boundless abundance in nature.

As for minimalism I don’t know what minimalism is! Isms are really just the creation of the art theorist and historian. When we place a piece of art in to a category we become partially blind to it. If we think we understand what a piece of art is, then we’ve already lost sight of it. Me, here today, talking about my own work is also like this. I am much worse than any art historian. People who’s job it is to talk about art don’t know any better…LOL.

CP - You have worked in projects that are nearer to design (e.g. the greenhouse) Are you interested in the relationship between art and daily life?

When I make art then this is my daily life. When I am designing greenhouses, fixing the car, cooking dinner, talking with friends or playing with the kids, none of these activities produce or require a state of mind different from that when making art. When I am fully concentrated on what I am doing then that activity becomes a creative activity. Creativity is not something I draw from a certain place and wilfully apply to making a work of art or solving a design problem. As I see it, creative problem solving is about seeing a problem clearly and completely. Since when we look at any situation with our whole body and our whole mind, when we are fully present, then we see that every situation is unique and unique appropriate responses and solutions naturally arise. If we are fully present in daily life, them we will naturally find the ability to express ourselves creatively in all our daily activities. Yes, this can be the case, even when going to the lavatory…LOL

CP - Which kind of reaction do galleries and public have when they look at your works? do you consider yourself a successful artist?

I do not know what kind of response I would get from commercial galleries if I were to take my work to a random selection of them today. I gave up trying to find a gallery to represent my work about five years ago. The typical reaction I used to get was that my work was somehow something other than art. A parallel to graphic design was often drawn but my works relationship to anything more meaningful was often not apparent. It is not surprising to me that I have been unable to locate my work within any noteworthy gallery because at the end of the day these places exist to earn money despite any genuine motives to champion new work. If any art is immediately recognisable as being contemporary then its language must already be widely permeated throughout visual culture. When a work not merely reflects, but creates truly new visual language, then we should expect that work not to be instantly recognisable, not even as art. If something is not seen as art then how can you sell it in an art gallery?

As for success, how do we gage it? In conventional terms my ‘career’ as an artist is pretty woeful. In over 15years I’ve never made a dollar from it and I am still an unknown entity within the wider (offline) Art World. My exposure on the net is steady, but I’m unsure how a large percentage of this traffic is responding to my work.

Its funny, occasionally I’ll get an email from a student asking how I became a successful digital artist? Some people assume from looking through my site that I must make a good living from it. So in conventional terms I have managed through my website to at least, create the impression of success…LOL. Very funny, because to pay the bills, I clean industrial cooling towers, which is physically tough, wet and filthy work. It is one of the least glamorous jobs you could hope for.

I have learned this much in my life so far: if we place importance on abstract notions of success, then we will also place importance on the perceived absence of success. Both success and failure are both an illusion. The life of a man who thinks he is ’successful’ is not always happy, and the life of a man who thinks he is a ‘failure’ is not always sad. The life of a man who sees no reality in success or failure is beyond disturbance…LOL

yes i am a fan of ‘Square Pusher’ tech maestro, but no this piece has nothing to do with his music. it just seemed like an apt name.

Checkout my all new www.patterncooler.com. Its a seamless pattern resource to replace the one i used to have on this domain, but had to remove for technical reasons. This collection of patterns are fully color editable plus you are now able to view and download them at different sizes. Its a cool feature that’s adds a new dimension to the collection.

The site is primarily aimed at those seeking MySpace and Blog backgrounds as this is where the demand is. There is, however a fabric shop where any design in any color combination can be ordered on a range of quality cotton fabrics.

One thing I’d like to develop for the future asides from adding to the collection of available designs is to have a flash based color editor. SVG which is what is used in the current editor still has accessibility issues and I have not been able to get the current editor working in Opera browsers.

Eihei Dōgen is a famous zen monk who lived in 13th century Japan. In his time he was a great teacher and established the Soto Zen sect in Japan after first training in China for many years under numerous great Buddhist masters. Part of his legacy is the ‘Shobogenzo’ in which contains the chapter called ‘Zazenshin’ which translates as ‘A Needle For Zazen’. Zazen being the type of sitting meditation that forms the core practice of Soto Zen Buddhism. In his translation of master Dogen’s Shobogenzo’, Gudo Nishijima writes the following at the start of the Zazenshin Chapter. “Shin means a bamboo needle that was used for acupuncture in ancient China. So shin means a method of healing the body and mind, and the word came to be used for a maxim that has the power to cure a human being of physical and mental discomfort. Subsequently, the word shin was used to describe short verses useful in teaching the important points of a method of training. In this chapter Master Dogen… …praises a zazenshin by Master Wanshi Shokaku, and finally, he wrote his own Zazenshin.” which is the one you now see above.

I’ve had to remove my pattern library, color gizmo and related elements from this site due to problems they were creating for my server. I will be moving these parts to a new pattern orientated site sometime in the future. This has also prompted me to purge my site of various bits that were only here to drive traffic, but traffic I now figure on reflection, that is not really interested in the core theme of my site.

Generally however, over the coming months I will be taking some time away from creating artwork and other projects to concentrate on deepening my Buddhist meditation practice.

I haven’t posted anything in a few weeks, the simple reason being: I have made nothing worth posting. I’ve been going through old simple motifs looking for suitable material to print on t-shirts.

I wish I could think of something intelligent to write on my pictures.

Yes, i’ve been making a new homepage. The top is the same, but if you scroll down you’ll see I’ve had a tidy up. My site has become a bit messy over the last year with lots of pages left over from older versions of this site. The new home pages marks the start of a concerted effort to unify and condense the different parts of this domain.

The picture above is nothing really, I just liked the retro brown vibe going on.