Attended an opening of Kim Frietze at the Brooklyn Artists Gym (BAG) tonight.

It’s too bad the BAG events aren’t more attended, they ought to be; Kim’s work is very painterly and I enjoyed looking at it - and the visitors where very friendly (plus a couple of really great kids running around). 

If a website can be visualized as a canvas of the site owners intensions (I often do this in my imagination) can you go the other way?  Can a painting be visualized as a web site?   And what would the metrics be such a website/painting be?   Those are some of the thoughts I had tonight as I looked at Kim Frietze’s paintings.

My earlier posts on Wikipedia (post 1, post 2, post 3)  today that were actually inspired by an earlier post on SmartMobs by Judy Breck.   That’s how I start, I take any problem I encounter and work out to find the "edges" of the "painting" which in this case, was Wikipedia itself.

It was not one of my better pastel sketches - I was trying to work through the idea of what a search funnel would look like of terms that drive traffic to the Wikipedia and then, what the traffic would look like as it left the site (which I did not really show in the sketch); this is the clickstream.  

The problem with doing this kind of visualization is it’s so easy to just fall into literalism and stop at illustrating the idea rather than using the language of art, which is color, line form and the mystery that occurs when all three interact.   For me, a good work of art evokes feelings that go beyond the work.  What I really wanted to show was a funnel (both incoming and leaving Wikipedia) and a story  about the site.

I see that I failed to do what I set out to with the oil sketch, and then again, maybe it was the wine - if all else fails and I do a lousy painting - blame it on the wine!