The Garages of Wilmette, Illinois

I'm spending the week dog/house sitting in Wilmette. The suburb is very quiet over the Holidays - then we had 3 inches of lake effect snow, then I developed a cold, and now the temperature has dropped to the low 20s. If it weren't for video on demand, (first season of 'Homeland' - amazing), and my new Kindle with loaded with 'Sweet Tooth' (Ian McEwan) and 'Gone Girl' (Gillian Flynn), I'd be going a little bonkers. But I do like Frankie the dog, and enjoy the walks, particularly through the alleys. I tote my camera with me and try to pay attention to what I'm paying attention to. Without comment, here is a small series of photographs of some of the garages of Wilmette, Il.

30 Buildings In 30 Days

"30 Buildings In 30 Days" was the original idea for this series of digital images when I began it last winter. I was toying with an old photograph of mine from my series of Chicago housing projects which were very flat and patterned. I have acknowleged the connection between the toy building blocks I had as a child and some of the things I am doing in collage, both digitally and in paper. With 'Photoshop' as a tool it is easy to make digital building blocks, and your imagination can take off from there. All of these images are improvised off the one photo, and most elements reoccur in multiple locations. I like these resulting images, they read as buildings, admittedly fantastic and a little brutal, but still rooted in photographic reality. I tried to work quickly, not over-think, and avoid and impulse to be too critical. Hence the choppy nature of the buildings and most obviously the sky. I never made it to 30 buildings, but here are nine interesting examples, and I'll hold on to the title as an homage to my first impulse.

Available Drawing #2

This drawing is a couple years old and the medium is India Ink on Stonehenge Paper. It came from that period when I was using the edge of Foamcore or some other such material to make a mark for me. I would dip the edge of the material into a dish of India Ink and then impress the edge onto the paper. In an odd way the resulting piece exists somewhere between a drawing and a print. The drips on the piece are 'sincere', in that they occurred accidentally as I made the piece. At the time I was coming out of a series of much tighter grid drawings and the looseness and more organic architecture of this piece still feels very fresh. Materials: India Ink on Paper. Size: 50 x 18 inches.

Available Drawing #1

As I refer more and more people to my blog, I often have to clarify what is for sale and what is not for sale. So in an attempt to simplify things a bit I'm creating a new category on my blog. I'll call it 'Available Work'. As I post new pieces, mostly drawings, that are available for sale I will label them as such using the tag 'Available Work'. If a person specifically wants to look at my blog to see what could potentially be purchased, all they have to do is hit the label 'Available Work' and all such drawings should appear starting with the most current and proceeding backwards by date posted. In the text accompanying the blog posting I will attempt to include as much information about the piece that is possible at the time. The drawing below is my first attempt at this new category.

This drawing is titled 'The Numbers 1 Through 16 Cubed'. It looks like a building but the cubes, starting at the top, are a drawn depiction of the mathematical concept of cubing each number. For those of you who do not remember much of high school math, or is it geometry, the cube of a number is when you multiply it by itself. So for example 3 cubed is 3 x 3 which equals nine. 4 cubed is 16, and so on. The drawing is pencil on arches watercolor paper and the size is 28 x 40 inches.

Variation on My Grid Drawings

I've been in the mood to make a few more grid-like drawings, (and it is always good to have a few on hand), but I wanted to change them up a bit. In architecture school, one method of perspective drawing was to make an axonometric drawing, where diverging lines remain parallel to each other. There are a number of types of axonometric projection, (see the chart below, thank you Wikipedia), and this type where the angles are at a 120 degree pitch is specifically called an isometric projection. I think of these drawings as abstract, (as well as minimal and optical), but it could be a building too. This drawing is India Ink on Bristol Paper, and its' dimensions are 30 x 40 inches.