A Gift From A Friend

The first week of 2008, I received the e-mail below from Chris Ashley, a good friend from Oakland (and my writing partner in the now-languishing-because-we’re-both-too-busy blog, Two Artists Talking) to announce an online solo show, I Made This For You, at the Marjorie Wood Gallery. Here’s his e-mail. Pay special attention to paragraph four:

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Each day during December 2007 I made an HTML drawing for my online exhibition I Made This For You at Marjorie Wood Gallery. The final drawing was uploaded on December 31, and all thirty one drawings are on view until January 31, 2008.

The exhibition was reviewed by Timothy Buckwalter for San Francisco public television station KQED's Arts & Culture blog: Art Review : Chris Ashley: I Made This For You.

I'd like to extend special thanks to artist and MWG proprietor Chris Komater for this opportunity, and for taking on daily upload duty.

Special offer: in keeping with the spirit of I Made This For You, I'd like to offer a free 11 x 8.5 inch inkjet print to the first ten people on this mailing list who reply to me with the date of the print they'd like and a mailing address. . . . .

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I didn't read more than that. I got right on line and sent Chris an e-mail, hoping to make it into the lucky 10.

I am a huge fan of these drawings. (I curated his work into a summer show last year for the Marcia Wood Gallery in Atlanta--similar name but different venue from the one that hosted the online show). If you follow Chris’s work, you know that he makes one HTML drawing a day, which he posts on his website. These geometric images are made on computer using code, and originally they were meant to be seen only on a monitor. Eventually they migrated to the wall via inkjet prints. As a painter, I love the tangible as well as the visual, so I was delighted with the way pixels of light became spritzes of ink on paper. When Chris posted his offer, I knew exactly which one I wanted: December 27th.

I lucked out!

My print arrived on February 1. The paper he printed it on is velvety and thick, so the work looks very much like a gouache painting. Two weeks after it arrived, I had a mat cut at the framer. Since then it has taken me some weeks to actually frame the piece, but here it is—in tangible form—in my loft:

A home for Chris Ashley's print; a print for my home. December 27th, 2007, inkjet print

Thanks, Chris, for your splendid gift!

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