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About the Work

These prints come in small editions of eight. The price includes a hard wood frame, 4” museum grade mat and backing, and Plexiglas.

The plates for relief prints are traditionally wood or linoleum. The plates for this series were plaster, cast in custom built molds. The artist carves the plate, taking away everything that will not be part of the drawing (negative space). The ink is rolled onto the highest parts of the plate, which is the drawing (positive space). The artist places the paper over the inked plate and transfers the ink by carefully rubbing the paper over each inked part of the plate.

I developed the drawings for these prints using intricate processes. The driving force was the desire to bring together extremely rational and extremely irrational procedures. In other words, control and randomness.

For example, the algorithm for Random Numbers was as follows:

1. Control: on a vertical 3x5 index card, find the Golden Section implied in those proportions and draw the resulting perfect spiral of the Nautilus
2. Random: draw horizontal lines, changing the interval every time the line bumped against the spiral
3. Control: Open the Handbook of Mathematical Tables to Random Numbers.
4. Random: With closed eyes point to a page of Random Numbers
5. Control: copy the numbers as words in the sequence in which they were printed.
6. Random: distort the resulting image through a computer program called “Pond” which drops a pebble into the “pond” of the image.

For the last five, I memorized paintings by the artist given in the title and traced the shapes in those paintings from memory, i.e. with closed eyes. Self with Millstone was also drawn with closed eyes, the Millstone Collar being a fashion statement found in much of 17th century Dutch art, a subject I have been studying for a long time.