I catalogue my artworks by number, and have done so for almost thirty years. I assign numbers not to individual artworks, but to art projects which result in one or more artworks. There are often many different pieces in a series under one number. The actual artworks in a given series receive a main number and a letter that designates the order in which I did them. Larger or "stand-alone" works of art simply receive a number.

I started with number 1 in the fall of 1976. Interestingly, I met the owner of Number One after 28 years of no contact, at the World Science Fiction Convention in Boston last year. He said that he remembers it but the original artwork, which was no bigger than a business envelope, has long since disappeared due to the many moves and unceasing domestic clutter of his life. I remember it too; it was a little watercolor depicting "Elric," the albino knight of the Michael Moorcock series. (None of the art on that site is by me, unfortunately; it is by artists Michael Whelan and Robert Gould, among others.) Back in 1976, I was very fond of the Elric fantasy series. I haven't read an Elric book or done an Elric picture in about 10 years.

Back to the catalogue. In the old days, when I did lots of tiny pictures, numbers went quickly and I went through the first five "centuries" or so in a few years. But as I did larger works, or larger series with more sub-headings, the count went slower. As of January 2005, more than twenty-eight years after starting my catalog, I am now in the 900s.

I wonder if all this methodical and numeric art cataloguing means that even when I was an ignorant math-incompetent artist, I had the nucleus of a mathematician and scientist within my color-ridden mind.

I tend to mark "significant" numbers with "significant" pictures. Thus the artworks which get assigned "century" numbers are important to me. Number 600 accompanied one of my first published articles, in a long-gone and much-missed magazine about Western esotericism called GNOSIS. Number 700 was a major project I did in 1992, the "CorelDraw Tarot," in which I used my primitive computer graphic resources to do a more than slightly ironic Tarot Major Arcana. This art still exists, though in a degraded state due to its translation through subsequent versions of CorelDraw, up to CorelDraw 11. Number 800 was a big commission, CITY OF LIGHT, painted in 1995, which can be seen at my main Website's art gallery. And number 900, painted in 2003, was an architectural/religious fantasy, mixed with science fiction, called "The Cosmic Cloister."

By the year dates, you can see that it took me eight years to get from number 800 to number 900. As of January 2005, I am working in the second "decade" of the 900s. Last fall, I came to number 911, which was made only too significant by the events of 2001. So I decided to dedicate project number 911 to a commemoration of the cataclysm, in whatever way I thought best.

This is probably an insincere way of making art. I was as horrified and saddened as most Americans when it happened, but I didn't lose anyone I knew and had no personal connection to it. My feelings about 9/11 and how our world has changed since then are confused, if I have feelings at all about it. I don't have anything "important" to say. Really, I am just doing a 9/11 picture because my catalog got to number 911.

I decided to take it seriously, though, and set out to do a geometric abstraction which would be a meditation on the architectural forms which were destroyed or damaged in the attacks. I am doing a lot of geometric work these days, along the lines of the blue and orange picture ("Earth-X") which is at the header of this Weblog. Project 911, a single picture, is a network of straight lines and circles, with a central roundel in which the two rectangular blocks of the lost World Trade Center towers are inscribed. A pentagon intersects another circle nearby. The predominant colors of this picture are somber greys, dark blues, and mid-blues, with one bright accent of red in a central place. It is acrylic on a black-surfaced illustration board, 20 inches by 16 inches. The title will be, "The Geometry of Remembrance."

Due to time constraints, I can't paint very much on it at any one session, but it is getting done and I will show it to you all when it is finished. I've been through eight centuries since 1976, and it's a long way from Elric.

Posted at 2:13 am | link