The next installment

Here's the next quadrant of sold panels....ahem! Only one panel to date, S6W19, has been sold in this quadrant which runs from S1 to 16 and W17 to 32. I hope that some of you will step up and buy some of those other panels. They are being offered on eBay right now with a starting bid of $1!

It will be exciting to see these pages fill up. You can help!

Thanks!

Where am I?

This image represents the panels which have been purchased to date in the nearest (N1 to 16 and W 1 to 16) northwest quadrant. I figured out how, with the help of my Open Office software, to set up this grid and load scans into it. Hurray! This was a big breakthrough for me. Now if someone will just set up a similar grid on the internet we can begin to assemble the whole map there.

I'll add other quadrants as eBay sales are made.

My other life

Contrary to the general conjecture in the vimeo comments I am not a recluse or a hermit but lead a pretty ordinary life. If you'd like to know more about it my wife, Meg Staley, has a blog, too, and that's a good place to start: right here!

Thanks again for your comments and please keep letting me know what you'd like more of!

The Journal

As I work on The Map I record changes to the rules in a journal. I started it in 2003 when I resumed work on this project. I now also record changes in the color palette. Let me know if you'd like to see more!

What's in the cards....

Here are the last nine cards drawn in the process of making The Map. As you can see, there is a lot of emphasis on scanning since it is such a daunting task. I tell people that it is like painting the Golden Gate Bridge- it's never finished. However, I do let myself change the instructions on the cards. I make my execute the current instruction and then change it for the next time that card is drawn.

In the deck somewhere is one card which reads, "Shuffle the deck and add one new card." The deck gets shuffled three times and then cut. The new card's instruction comes from a wait list of tasks that I want to see incorporated into the making of The Map.

And the winner is......N1/W14!

I drew the ten of clubs today and moved ten more panels down in the stack. That put me at N1/W14. The instruction was to make map blanks, the patched together heavy paper panels I use as a base for the painting and collageing. I have been doing this since the fall of 2009. You will start to see beer, pretzel, and cereal boxes as well as ticket stubs and old shopping lists.

You may be relieved to know that I put in a new cartridge today, and the print colors resemble reality. Yay!

Back in the saddle

I got back to my studio in Cold Spring, New York a couple of hours ago from our old farm in Northern Michigan. On the way back I resolved to try to give you more insight into The Map via this blog. I'll try to do a post every day and explain the steps as I go. I will also try to put a new panel on eBay each morning.

So.......I drew the next card- the four of clubs with an instruction to either make a new sheet of reduced (1/16) images or, if I didn't have the scans I needed to do that then to do more scans from where I left off last time. I haven't checked yet to see which will happen.

Then I counted down four sheets in the current stack I am working on (N1 and N2). That took me to the sheet above, N1/W24. I made two copies. The original  (a generation II) will be archived, one copy will become the new generation III, and the other copy will be offered on eBay soon. The colors came out way off from the original, but part of the random function of my rules dictates that the miscolored print must be used as is. Tomorrow I will try to resolve the printing issue.

I am working now on adding collage to N1/W24 and adjoining panels. I work in a clockwise manor along the periphery of what had been painted in generation I. Had the card been a red suit I would have worked counter clockwise.

Any questions?