A MIRHAB OF PICTOGRAMS

What I hoped to achieve with these small pieces was an

infinite shimmer between "letters of the alphabet" and the "text", much as calligraphy and pattern blur together in an Islamic Mirhab, or Prayer Niche. . Originally, I wanted to make these into a scroll  from left to right but it occurred to me that a similar effect might be done from up to down, as is done on this page. Most of these were done in the winter of 2009--2010, but I tossed out more now and then. At one time I went through a Kufic calligraphy derived period, at another something quasi-Aztec. They were begun as a divertissement and then I became fascinating with the notion that no two  pictograms or any page of drawings might be the same.

(I would like to obliterate the margins which blogger puts between these images, so that one drawing might blend into another but alas this can not be done)

  Originally, they were meant as a kind of  memory of the dance floor at the Paradise Garage, and the use of pictograms as a  nod to the late Keith Haring, who I often saw there. There was also a sense of biding adieu to the "lovers of the dance floor"--those charged semi-encounters with perfect strangers known and not known.There was also that sense of the variety of humanity, the belief that each human note has a purpose in the larger whole--it would come over me often in the subway, of all places.

  I also recall a moment in the midst of a bicycle marathon involving ten thousand people which I participated in--the cyclists suddenly seemed synathestically  identified  for me as  the  G major Brandenburg concerto, in a celestial/terrestial dance with God.. Consequently, each pictogram was done as a prayer for all sentient beings.( I am not at all sure of the efficacy of such prayers except to say that is is harder to lose one's temper in traffic  while repeating them than not,and that this may be little but it is something ) 

Mainly,however, I wished to give the oriflammes, sylphs, and salamanders which appear in my earlier drawings a rest. The upshot  is that the pictograms underwent a number of permutations, of which these are  among the earliest types. They were however preceded by a large group of drawings using pictograms on grids. 

There are twenty individual drawings  on this page. The actual size of each drawing is 6" x 8 "/ there are between 300 and 350 pictograms per page, which means there are

6,000 pictograms on this page by the most conservative estimate; I have done not quite two hundred of these drawings.