Similar ideas in different heads

For about the last thirteen years, I've been making drawings that relate to literature - they use the text of poems, stories and essays as a structural element. Sometimes those words are encoded, sometimes they are spelled out. Sometimes they are concealed in photographic imagery, and other times the arrangements of letters - in Braille, signal flags, or whatever - creates the image.

In 2000, I began making drawings where the arrangement of dots in Braille created the image. (Some one on my website, here.) These were - at first - made through a complex process of applying ink to the back of sheets of absorbent rice paper and allowing it to pass through the paper. I often chose passages from books in which authors tried to describe the effects of color as my source material. I was very fond of Frank O'Hara's poetry, and his poem Why I Am Not a Painter is one I used over an over again...

I am always interested in other artists who work with similar ideas, so I was fascinated a when, last week, I heard about Jaz Parkinson's work on Smithsonian.com (another story recently appeared on the Wired website).

Jaz Parkinson, The Red Badge of Courage

Parkinson told Wired that she reads the books looking for mentions of color and notes them on an Excel spreadsheet. Not surprisingly, Liz Stinson (Wired's reporter) has assumed an algorithm was involved. I was struck when Parkinson was quoted as saying "I find it absolutely irresistible to order them into a spectrum. It is kind of like when you have coloring pencils when you’re little, and they come in color order — they just look right." It made me think of another artist whose work I feel connected to - Jason Savalon - who has analysed the color scheme of films (yes, algorithms are involved...). His visualization of Titanic (below) struck me, when I first saw it, as perhaps the best way to see that movie.

Jason Savalon, The Top Grossing Film of All Time, 1 x 1    2000

Digital C-print mounted to Plexiglas.

Kidding aside, it revealed something to me about the movie, something about its structure. By reordering the references to color in the texts she selects, Parkinson gives us some sense of the proportion of the appearance of colors in the imagination of a book, but sacrifices the rhythm.

What I liked about Savalon's work was that it was constructed out of the act of reading and analyzing the film that it took as its subject. Its ultimate form was determined by its subject - and that is consonant with what I have tried to do when I consider writing in my work...

In 2011, I began to work with James McBride's memoir, The Color of Water. I was struck by how a book in which the role of color in establishing identity used reverence to color in the writing. I was also reminded of a news story I'd read about an oceanographer who was using the color seen in satellite images to determine the health of the seas. It seems to me necessary to cross these two ideas - that neither one would be sufficient.

I began reading McBride book for just its references to color and produced an edited version which consisted of only the names of hues

and translated that list of colors into Braille, substituting one dot for each pixel in a satellite photo of the sea. I wanted the resultin image to be large, overwhelming, so I printed it digitally and framed the 32 separate pages of the resulting image in narrow whote frames, that created a kind of window-pane through which one looked at the image...

Gerard Brown, The Color of Water (after James McBride), 2011, digital print on 32 sheets, 88 x 68 inches total

In the end, I wanted what I have wanted from these drawings since I started making them - something Parkinson touches on and Savalon delivers. I want to see the text anew through making images out of it, as a kind of active reading. I think Parkinson's work - as much as I like its crisp, graphic quality and appreciate her ingenuius take on a problem I have long thought about - doesn't excite me because it comes off as information, not as transformation. I learned when I set out translate a chapter of Moby Dick into drawings that, for me, it's not really enough to change the way information is looked at (as when Tauba Auerbach puts the Lord's Prayer - or the Bible -  in alphabetical order). That can be revealing, but it's somehow not enough of a gain.

The fundamental question that animates my work has long been, how much can something be changed without losing its identity? Is it still a text when it's translated into Braille? Sure. How about if that Braille is flat and large? Well, maybe. What if each of the six dots in the Braille letter is a different value, determined by another kind of text (a photograph) related to the first text? Now we're starting to cross a line from translation into transfiguration...