Painting on Water
By George Lawson
Chris Ashley uses the original and rudimentary instructional set of the internet to make art, and delivers the results to his audience via the web. His studio/gallery is an online journal he maintains on a daily basis, a digital version of Malraux's Museum Without Walls. Still, for all his accomplishments as a critical writer and community blogger, as a digital artist and rigorous conceptualist, Chris Ashley remains fundamentally a painter. This is so not just because he does also paint paintings in traditional media, but because the color work he creates without paint, the HTML images he is becoming known for, promote sensibilities historically associated with painting. Ashley's roots are classical. The substantive value of his imagery will outlive any novelty of his working in HTML. He never forgets that his true medium is color and light, and he wields these basics with a deftness any painter would envy.
Ashley creates his art through coded instruction, simple commands that give his rectangles hue, width and breadth, and determine their location relative to one another. His method is constructivist but his manner is decidedly expressionist. He discovers his grid-based images intuitively, almost in spite of the grid, through a series of choices that accumulate and graft onto one another. The resulting cluster is organic, like rectangular grapes on a rectilinear stem. He feels his way into the color, and into the broader implications of his task.
Considered as a form of painting, Ashley's HTML, virtual and non-physical as it is, prompts musings such as, "What direction is the light coming from?" or, "How big are they?" The works don't conform to painting's standard vocabulary, deriving their color as they do neither from mass tone (the light reflecting off an opaque surface), nor undertone (the light filtering through a translucent skin). Distinct from painting in this corporeal aspect, what seems most salient to the experience of viewing them is their transparency, how readily accessed they are. Ashley's HTML images are to canvases as emails are to handwritten letters, ephemeral but profoundly convenient. What digital correspondence lacks as perfumed, autograph, keepsake, it makes up for in its immediacy, and the same holds true for Ashley's art.
Ideas and images flow unfettered out of Ashley's agile familiarity with his chosen medium and with art history, every day calling forth a new piece. The serial offerings often unfold around a conceptual theme cued in by the title. A week's worth gives one the chance to see the development of Ashley's running exploration and to consider the relationship between his formally constrained abstraction and the narrative references he is prone to attach to each piece by association. It is in this chronological accumulation, with images so easily archived and cross-referenced, that Ashley finds the real strength of his medium, creating an art which is as rewarding to ponder as it is to view. He is basically publishing, and his issued output accrues its own built-in currency. A visit to Ashley's blog always feels like late breaking news.
Traditional painting, by its static nature, has a way of arresting and stretching time. Painted images reveal themselves according to inner clocks. By working in an iterative medium that is so responsive to the moment, so readily updated and refined, Ashley has found a fresh grasp on this plasticity, painting's inherent ability to manipulate the perception of time. He enjoys both the suspended release of static painting and the serial accumulation of the web, a kind of painted journalism.
Artists have described the challenges of making online art as tantamount to designing on water. Ashley seems perfectly at home with the flux of this medium, with colors that shift from monitor to monitor and an oeuvre that consists at its core of nothing but electronically stored chains of zeroes and ones. Nonetheless, the basic language he chooses keeps him much more closely aligned to the painter's vocabulary than to the dizzying technology of computer generated imagery. He uses the inherent constraints of HTML to create new freedoms, extending in a realm that is anything but solid the vernacular and experiential impact of concrete art.
Oakland 2004/ revised 2007