Hitchcock

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Comment by Ian C Dengler on November 1, 2013 at 6:53pm

My younger brother was supposed to get the cello. Haha! String quartets can't wait out that much of a generation gap. We had a big dude ranch near Palm Springs, California. Eventually we just hired a cowboy guitar singer and a square dance orchestra. I turned to rhetoric/speech and practiced what became those slogans and sayings that I put on top of my paintings.

Comment by Ian C Dengler on November 1, 2013 at 6:21pm

The golden rule is one of several, and the sum set makes up art criticism, for any creature. I haven't done the math on my own stamps. It really takes a complex calculator. Every artist has probable, preferred features. That's part of detecting forgeries. I retired my ink bowl, grinder and brushes in the 1970s. The principles. Perhaps I paint in the manner of Tung Chi Chang/Dong Qichang, perhaps we share the same golden rules. There's text literally on those paintings. I do that too, of course, with state names, and slogans.

Comment by Ian C Dengler on November 1, 2013 at 5:41pm

any rule works for me, golden, silver or just rusty colored seagull beaks. Ratios are something humans work very effectively. You are probably right in that: effective painting has some very predictable angle, and I'm looking forward to a complete mapping by the mathematicians.

Comment by Ian C Dengler on November 1, 2013 at 5:02pm

There is a color dominant in all my stamps. That is something I have a lot of control over. Lettering is the most obvious. Here I have the "tungsten' white/blue/grey. Then comes the red/orange: there are bits of it around the eye of the bird, in the pillars along the street and even in the shading on the sunnyside of the building. There is a small, orange spot between the 4 and the 9, which I have as a movement, or action flicker. If I remove that, the 49 becomes...well, more passively flat. I don't have a dominant reading of any stamp. In my mind, I try to make the whole thing into a churning of visuals and metaphors--mathematical metaphors if you wish. It can take me a long time to match up colors for a collage, or just the right self-draw. This stamp was composed out of two separate images, but each was then reworked to match the other. Sometimes I use a half dozen splices, and then some recoloring and sizing. I have a very good eye for color/form. I have a just-terrible hand. I thought to be an artist of pixels before I was ten. The family thought about music, music music. And more music. They wanted a string quartet. My father played the violin, my older brother played the violin, they gave my older sister the viola, and guess who was supposed to lug around that big cello?? OH NO. I got a flute instead. It was small, but not nearly as small as just my own voice box. I should have just gone for the painting classes. Instead, I practiced art criticism, art history, and eventually 

Chinese brushstroke painting. I put a lot of that into my little stamps: complex edges, brute lines, ascending enthusiasms, vanishing landscapes. But then there is the story: wheretofrom cometh that?

Comment by Ian C Dengler on November 1, 2013 at 3:49pm

I use the basic paint program in Windows. I may or may not precollage, color, or draw.

The structure of my work is frame-complete: everything to the edges, and the implied beyond is included in the formal set forth. To get movement to, along and from the edges I use a variety of devices: the figure may peek, evolve or spring out of just about anywhere (flat frame two dimensionalism being the limit). Dead spaces, or areas that have poor design, or just plain flaws get lettering, or--in this case, very large value numbers. The structure of this is very tricky. If you mark off a geometric by dominate lines in a Vermeer you will see a similar octo-pentogrammatic. The dominate white lettering is there to force your eye on an adventure from CALIFORNIA POST around, along and back wholly within the frame. The seagull emerges, but not quite in center, and then its beak pulls back, around and down into the blocked space of the 49, which then curves backward and to the left. There is a tree to the upper left, but it does not continue out of the frame. It caps off and again your eye is returned into the frame. There is a window awning on the right, which seems to open away from the center, but..again, it is pulled back by the dark edge, and the bright white 49. The idea is the create a merry-go-round of movement. I seek to do this in all my stamps. Frequently there is no center at all--that is, the exact, focal middle is down played and the action moves all around it.

Comment by Ian C Dengler on November 1, 2013 at 8:38am

All the shapes are exciting, random to raunchy, for my mind. I haven't done the equivalent of a B2 bomber in electro-format. It is one of those easy things to use in a sky-fill-up sketch.

Comment by Ian C Dengler on November 1, 2013 at 3:49am

My stamps are amphibolies. They are multiple in interpretation, and I like to play with the words, mixing standard and slang English, or even something I've just made up. Probably encroachment is bad, but not always, and humans are a part of the natural world as well. In this stamp--SEAGULL HORROR MOVIES--I am interested in all things that fly into the mind, and create shock, displeasure, aghastity. California is the home of at least some Hollywood type films. Many are about other kinds of flying creatures: UFOs, ETs, Nazis, Japanese, drug dealers. There is a lot of Shock & Awe when some kind of Big Bird marches onto the screen.

Comment by Ian C Dengler on November 1, 2013 at 3:22am

that's a lot better than my explanation

Comment by Ian C Dengler on November 1, 2013 at 1:55am

birds, yes. I'll post a similar themed birds, humans, and the feeding problem.

Comment by Ian C Dengler on November 1, 2013 at 1:19am

When I made this stamp I had CALIFORNIA in mind. Recently, standing in line to buy bird feed, a woman told me she quit feeding birds because all she got was “bad” birds. A few minutes later, in line at the grocery store, I overheard a conversation concerning the “bad” birds. Anything that catches my attention twice so quickly usually requires further thought, and so I came home and watched birds eating in the front yard while I thought about the good, the bad and the truly obnoxious. Haha. BAD BIRDS MUST LEAVE ALAMEDA. Officials After Squawk Herons That Disturb . . the Peace. Feathered Bipeds Scream at Night and Awaken the Residents. I had not thought much about gulls and fisherfolk, or the rest of the world.

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