24 Short Pieces

When I was in graduate school at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn I used to frequent the library to browse the art books. I found a catalog of a suite of drawings done by the painter Cy Twombly entitled 24 Short Pieces. The drawings looked like exactly that, various scribbles and paint smears, what my wife jokingly refers to as "chicken scratch". Even though the drawings seemed as though they were done in a few seconds they still held up, individually and as a set. For years I've been wanting to do some sort of riff on this idea, and finally that day has come.

I've done abstract paintings for years, and I've also done computer animation and design as a means of supporting myself. I love doing both but for a long time I resisted combining the two. I had a rather old fashioned Greenbergian view of abstraction as being a pure, autonomous object. Years ago I was having a conversation with the painter David Reed and I told him that I was taking some computer graphics classes at Pratt, but I was trying to keep that from influencing my paintings. He rightly said, "Oh, don't do that!" The point being, the more outside influences that enter the work, the better and more interesting it will be. I tried to infuse that spirit in my work ever since.

I decided that I wanted to take my interest in animation, computer animation in particular, and mix it with my interest in abstract painting. I decided to create a series of twenty four, three second abstract animations loosely based on the suite of Cy Twombly drawings. Although the pieces are very time consuming to produce I wanted them to feel as direct and inevitable as a pencil scrawl done by Twombly. Ideally, once complete, the pieces could be shown in a gallery context but I also want to make at least some of them available for viewing on this blog. In the spirit of open source, in the future I plan to also post the After Effects and/or Maya source files for anyone to download and learn from. So without further ado, here's the first post from 24 Short Pieces.

I tried to upload video but the conversion process that happened on the software side of the blog made the resulting image quality unacceptable to me. So instead I uploaded an animated Gif file. Click on the image and the animation will load, a low tech option, but I like the idea of using an out of date technology to display my work. It may stutter the first time through but once it loads it should loop at a decent speed. Enjoy.