About
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In transcendental meditation, a phrase called a mantra is repeated over and over to achieve a state of calm and inner peace. For some, it is a name or a place, but it can be anything at all. My mantra is a simple, five-inch square.
Concerned with my lack of formal training in the graphic arts, I made a conscious decision in early 1997 to explore geometry (which I viewed to be the basis for 20th century graphic arts) on my own.
When I entered a printmaking class at the University of Iowa in the spring of 1998, it seemed only logical to continue this idea.
In traditional woodcut, chisels and gouges are used to scrape away portions of the surface of a piece of flat wood. Ink is then rolled onto the surface with a brayer, a tool much like rollers used in painting the walls and ceilings of houses. Where the chisel has carved part of the surface away, no ink can reach. This mark then becomes white space.
Finding it difficult to recreate precise geometric forms with traditional woodcut tools, I turned to power drills for the circles I desired, and saws for my straight edges. The holes I drilled became white circles, and the wood around them black (or orange, or red, or yellow…) with ink. When printed, these early printing plates made rectangles of ink on white paper, and where holes were drilled, the paper showed through in brilliant white circles, as this greeting card from 1999 shows.
Drill Study #1
1999
4″x5.5″
Drilled woodcut on paper card
In the beginning, I gridded 18″ x 24″ plates in one-inch segments, then drilled somewhat arbitrarily, wherever I felt a hole should be. The results were pleasing to my eye, but I felt there should be more order and logic to the pieces I was making.
So, I decided to take the geometry a step further. My next piece became an artistic expression of a mathematical equation, y equals x squared.
For my next piece, I cut squares of wood in varying sizes, from one-inch square to 12-inches square, ascending in whole-inch units. In all, there were 12 wooden plates. I then drilled one 5/8″ hole in the exact center of the one-inch block, and in each square-inch of the subsequent blocks. In the two-inch block, there were four holes, in the three-inch block, nine, and so on. The measurement of the side of each plate became the X in the equation, the number of holes, the Y.
Inked and pressed, the completed print measures just over nine feet long, and eighteen inches high. All total, I drilled 650 holes to create 12 Blocks (y equals x squared). Due to the size and massive amount of time required to print even one of these woodcuts, I only completed two of these prints.
Orange 5×5 (section from 12 Squares: y equals x squared)
1999
5″x5″
Drilled woodcut on paper
For the first time in my life, I felt like a real artist, staying in the printmaking studio for hours and hours each day. I’d been making art since I was a child, but not with the sense of purpose and satisfaction I got from this piece. I was so determined to get it done, to see the thing I had visualized for so long actually completed.
The first print of this piece shows the struggle required to create it. Covering the margins around the block are inky fingerprints and smudges from where maneuvering the nine-foot long piece of paper through a press six feet long.
The second is a cleaner, but the first four blocks have “skipped” on the paper. They are a bit crooked and visibly “off.”
I think it was after this ordeal that I realized that art was not about perfection. It’s an experience, a story in the making, like an old pair of paint-smeared jeans. It’s the idea that’s most important, and the imperfections caused by the human hand implementing that idea are what makes a piece beautiful.
Once, when I was younger, I remember reading somewhere that it was impossible for the human hand to draw a perfectly straight line without mechanical aid. I tried for days; I remember filling an entire notebook with nearly-straight lines. I felt sure it could be done. Sure enough, though, it proved impossible.
Sarah, now my wife, lived 60 miles from my Iowa City home, in Grinnell, where she attended Grinnell College. I used to drive to visit her frequently, most of the time driving west along Highway 6. I got bored driving on the interstate all the time, and when you drive on a deserted highway, it lets your mind wander. Some of my best ideas came while driving on this road, and my next piece was inspired by the experience.
Highway 6 Squares uses the same 12 blocks from 12 Blocks (y equals x squared), but instead of pressing the inked blocks onto a piece of paper in the studio environment, I decided to use them as stencils, laying the blocks down on the asphalt and spraying white paint over the blocks.
The idea was to lay the blocks 12 feet apart, so that when you drove over them, they would appear to get larger, like a flip-book animation.
Me and my artistic accomplice Gabe Lueders set out one Wednesday evening to create the piece. It required both of us to do it, one to lay the blocks down and measure the distance between us, and another to spray the paint. We took turns at each job.
After we’d finished laying the third block down, we saw a car coming. We’d talked about the possibility of getting caught, and what might happen to us. Of course, I hadn’t gotten permission to do the thing; that was part of the fun. It was kind of a renegade thing to do, graffiti meets fine art. Well, that car was a highway patrolman. Gabe slyly dropped the backpack full of spray paint on the side of the road, but I was afraid to throw the blocks for fear of damaging them. So, I kind of hid them behind my back as the car slowly approached.
A patrolman with a slow drawl pulled up and asks, ‘What’re you two boys up to out here so late?’ I start to say, ‘We’re working on an art project,’ but as soon as I say the word, ‘art,’ he’s already speeding away. After that, we just moved out of the way of cars, not caring in the slightest who saw us.
Highway 6 Squares didn’t end up at all how I imagined it would, either. Originally, I’d planned to repeat squares 1-12, and then back down, over and over again for a mile. But, we ran out of paint after approximately 1/4 mile.
I remembered the asphalt being a lot darker than it actually was. Because it was so light, the paint didn’t stand out nearly as much as I thought it would, and the blocks required way more paint than I’d originally counted on. And of course, the blocks weren’t evenly spaced. Some were closer to the center line than others, some were twelve feet apart, some were twenty. Originally, I’d brought a measuring tape, but it just took too long to do.
The piece still exists, faded now by the thick treads of passing tractors and trucks, but still just barely visible two miles past Oxford, heading west towards Grinnell. For a week following the installation, I hung a sign at the start of the giant “print,” marking its beginning. Beyond this, all that remains is a single book of photographs I made that night, a single picture for each block, and one shot of the flag blowing in the evening breeze.
Highway Six Squares (Flag)
1999
9′6″ x 18″
Black spraypaint on bedsheet, wooden stakes
After taking three months off from fine art to intern at an advertising agency over the summer, I returned to my blocks in the fall with renewed passion. I’d been thinking about the blocks all summer, different ideas I had for color and texture, size and material. But the immense work of printing all 12 blocks still seemed prohibitive to trying all these ideas out.
Meanwhile, in my work at the ad agency, I started to appreciate the graphic simplicity of a single block taken away from the others. Some looked like good logos, like the simple double-arches logo of McDonald’s.
Reconciling fine art and commercial art has always been a struggle for artists. Most “real” artists view work for hire as a way to pay the bills, a form of artistic prostitution, good only for money and sure to make an artist feel cheap. But what these artists often forget is that fine art is commercial as well. Art is a transaction as surely as making a burger is. A painting is created and sold. Sculpture is carved and sold. If an artist kept everything he made, he’d be broke with a barnful of work. Sooner or later, an artist must sell work. Art is a profession like any other, and artists have to eat, too.
A lot of artists have this concept of, ‘I’m not doing it for the money,’ and I agree with that, too. If you’re trying to make money, stock-brokering is your best bet, not art. But to pretend that you’re too pure to take money for your work, that’s another thing entirely.
So, on that note, I’ve decided to make art my business, complete with company t-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers and hats.
The first step in the process, I decided, was to focus on one block, which would function as a logo and springboard for further work. Taking my cue from advertising, I conducted a focus group to select a few of the blocks for further survey.
The five-inch and seven-inch blocks were the chosen favorites of the focus group, conducted in one half-hour session with five students and two professors.
From there, I made up 200 “Visual Preference Surveys,” which were distributed in classes at the University of Iowa. The surveys asked participants to select either the five-inch or seven-inch block (reduced to fit on a 3″ x 5″ card) based on overall visual appeal.
Visual Preference Survey (No. 00004)
1999
3″x5″
Copier toner and black stamp ink on paper
Out of 79 respondents, 55 chose the five-inch block.
You’d think that by narrowing my focus so much, the rest would be easy. But now, it seems that since it’s less work to try an idea, the ideas just keep coming. With this project, I think I could go my whole life and not do everything that can be done with this tiny little idea. That’s a pretty exciting place to be, as an artist, and as a human being.