Digital Totem Poles: Experimental Computer Graphics By Rick Doble

DIGITAL TOTEM POLES Experimental computer graphics by Rick Doble Very tall narrow digital pictures inspired by the art and craft of both modern and traditional totem poles.

WITH EACH TOTEM POLE YOU MUST SCROLL DOWN ITS PAGE. YOU WILL ONLY BE ABLE TO SEE A PORTION AT ONE TIME.

Copyright © 2000 Rick Doble

Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Public License

INTRODUCTION YOU MUST SCROLL DOWN EACH PAGE; YOU WILL ONLY BE ABLE TO SEE A PORTION OF EACH DIGITAL TOTEM POLE. Where you stop determines the view that you will have of the totem pole at that moment. I encourage you to use the enlarge feature of your PDF viewer to look in more detail at a section of a totem pole.

This art is an experiment, like much of my art. More than 15 years ago I wanted to find out how long I could make a picture before the browser would not display it properly. I turns out is was about 100 inches long. So I made a number of tall, long narrow abstract pieces that I created using man made and natural patterns and which I then processed in a computer graphics program.

From my Internet display of these totem poles that I put online in 2000.

The following eBook is that work from 15 years ago in PDF format. Using the PDF format was an experiment in itself as I was not sure whether I could make different sized long pages, how long I could make each page, whether I could get a completely black background and if it would display properly. Fortunately all of this did work as I had hoped.

ABOUT THESE DIGITAL TOTEM POLES These are the major artists and artifacts that influenced this work: • The Endless Column by Constantin Brâncuși: "Project for a Column, which if enlarged, would support the vault of heaven." • Greek columns • The great hall in the Karnak Temple in ancient Egypt • Stonehenge, UK • The movie 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick & Arthur C. Clarke • Totem poles of North American Indians • The long painting by Sonia Delaunay, The Prose of the Trans-Siberian (1913) • The long narrow bands in the abstract paintings of Barnett Newman • Long narrow dripped paintings of Morris Louis • The late organic work of Wassily Kandinsky • The organic paintings, drawings and poetry of WOLS No art comes from a vacuum. Everyone draws on the work and inspiration that has come before to create his or her own stamp. I believe it is important for artists to discuss where their art comes from. At the same time, I believe that as an individual I can create a unique combination of these influences and infuse it with my own particular vision. I have had a fascination with columns and poles for many years. I designed a garden with long stone pieces that I placed at intervals around the flower bed of my back yard in Durham, North Carolina. Columns are both rooted in the earth, strong and sturdy, and reaching to the sky. Columns have been used for thousands of years for both practical and spiritual purposes. Greek columns supported the roof but also created a sense of majesty and awe; the most famous example is the Parthenon in Athens. The great hall at Karnak in ancient Egypt had numerous columns covered in hieroglyphics. These are still the largest columns ever made (3.5 meters) to this day. My close friend, Bruce Chapin, made a detailed model of this hall for a school project in 7th grade. It has always stuck in my mind. Stonehenge is another ancient ceremonial site composed of large upright stone slabs. I visited the site in England in the late 1960s. In Stanley Kubrick's movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, from the novel by Arthur C. Clarke, the monolith is the pivotal discovery both for the primitive humans and the astronauts on the moon. If I had to pick one artist with the greatest single influence on this work, I would pick Brancusi. I have always appreciated Brancusi's visionary idea of an endless column, an almost conceptual sculpture before the idea of "conceptual" was in use. I saw his preserved studio in Paris. Brancusi's soaring simple forms, often drawn from peasant art, are very powerful.

The organic flowing forms on my digital columns come from various influences as well. The designs and calligraphy type images on my columns are from natural and man made forms that were photographed, enlarged, and then abstracted. I did not paint or apply a digital brush anywhere nor did I work on any one section. I applied computer processes to the entire image as a whole. I used traditional photographic techniques (in software form) since I have a photographic background. A major influence for these organic forms is the superb painter Wols who is not well known in the USA. Here are quotes from two of his poems: [on the sea in the south of France] At Cassis the stones, the fish, the rocks seen through a magnifying glass the salt of the sea, and the sky... they showed me eternity in the little waves of the harbor which are always the same without being the same. Eyes closed I often watch what I have to see it is all there, beautiful exhausting WOLS (Abstract expressionist painter, greatly revered in Europe, died 1951)

The Endless Column by Constantin Brâncuși : "Project for a Column, which if enlarged, would support the vault of heaven." These photos of The Endless Column and the Alaska Totem Poles are from commons.wikimedia.org.

The Endless Column by Constantin Brâncuși