Lucian Freud Etchings

A beautiful website from the MOMA show. As is quoted on the site, Freud says "Etching's not drawing exactly, but it's a sort of drawing." You can zoom in a great deal on the images, which is very satisfying. Freud is a very prominent British painter and printmaker.

Tara Donovan

In response to Chris Jordan/Running the Numbers, here is an artist who uses some of the same source material but transforms it entirely into something incredibly beautiful with more complex associations. Here is her gallery page at Ace, and a link for a show at the Hammer Museum in L.A.  The content of the work is entirely different, but worth comparing to Jordan's images.

Whitney Biennial

A quick preview of the new Whitney Biennial from the New York Times. Just a reminder of something everyone should see in New York if you get a chance, though not specifically related to drawing. A touchstone for contemporary artists- love it or hate it, it's all discussed and absorbed.

Running the Numbers

Check it out...even looking at the images on your computer screen will probably blow your mind. :)

Running the Numbers
An American Self-Portrait

This series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 410,000 paper cups used every fifteen minutes. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. The underlying desire is to emphasize the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.

My only caveat about this series is that the prints must be seen in person to be experienced the way they are intended. As with any large artwork, their scale carries a vital part of their substance which is lost in these little web images. Hopefully the JPEGs displayed here might be enough to arouse your curiosity to attend an exhibition, or to arrange one if you are in a position to do so. The series is a work in progress, and new images will be posted as they are completed, so please stay tuned.

~chris jordan, Seattle, 2007