Earl Childress, Frank Stella's Assistant Large Scale Print on Plexiglass, 1990

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FRANK STELLA’S ASSISTANT 1990
Artist Earl Childress works with lines that are constantly twisting and bending throughout the composition, creating … Read more FRANK STELLA’S ASSISTANT 1990
Artist Earl Childress works with lines that are constantly twisting and bending throughout the composition, creating both a disorienting illusion and the sense of a nefarious maze.
color screen print on Plexiglas (from the numbered edition of 35)
Signed and dated on the lower right by artist.

Genre: Contemporary
Subject: Abstract
Medium: Print on Plexi
Surface: Plexiglass
Country: United States
Dimensions: 39" x 39"
Dimensions w/Frame: 41 3/4" x 41 3/4" x 2 1/2"

From Wired magazine March 1999

....While he was musing in fractals and waves, it seemed time to revisit the idea of sculpting smoke. Stella had two comrades-in-art at his studio, Earl Childress and Andrew Dunn, who had both come into the artist's life for eminently practical reasons. Childress's teenage art hero was not Stella, but Andy Warhol, who Childress says he admired for "staying ahead of every question." Childress signed on in 1979 as the general contractor for the renovation of Stella's studio and stayed on to design an apartment for the artist's sister in an adjacent building. Dunn, a gifted young cinematographer, was hired in 1990 to sweep the floor. Soft-spoken and self-effacing, Dunn says his plan was to "learn while you earn." They both ended up becoming invaluable collaborators in the cottage industry of making Stella's art.
__ Stella's latest inspiration began with a Cuban cigar. He could see right away that puffing smoke rings could be a way of "making imagery, of creating shapes that I hadn't seen before - a kind of Faustian fantasy." __
Childress and Dunn constructed a device for freezing the flow dynamics of smoke in mappable form: an 8-foot-square enclosed box, lined with black cloth and lit by four bulbs, with stop-action cameras on every side focused into the center. Drilled into two of the vertical edges were holes through which Stella could exhale Cuban chaos into the space.
It worked. Stella puffed and pursed his lips, the six cameras fired simultaneously, and, like God's own Heraclitean snowflake factory, near randomness was harnessed into a production line and unrepeatability was made reproducible. Soon, the Stella team had thousands of photographs of smoke rings. Using off-the-shelf programs like Illustrator and Photoshop - and, later, more sophisticated 3-D imaging packages such as form-Z and AliasWavefront - Dunn and Childress turned the complex swirling forms into files and maps. "My approach was to study vortex systems and flow dynamics," Childress recalls. "Frank's issue was the image."
Some of the photographs and printouts were shipped to Sweden, where Stella has a connection at AB Tumba Bruk, one of the few producers of the superfine line engravings used on most of the world's paper money. The presses at Tumba Bruk aren't supposed to be employed for anything but banknotes, but if you look at Stella's work over recent years, you can see what his friend has been clandestinely running off on those precision presses at night: the same crystalline webs that lace the bills in your pocket - but folded, stretched, twisted on themselves, brought into the visual currency of Stella's universe.
Stella, whose tireless work ethic makes him an omnivore of source materials and images, didn't stop with smoke rings. The shelves of his studio are piled four feet high with prints and printouts, shards of already-used forms - scaled up or down - that will be recycled into new work. (Art in America critic Carter Ratcliff once dissed Stella's compulsive repurposing of his own riffs, calling him an "image administrator.") Now, even lumps of clay and the luminous ephemera of soap bubbles are scanned in and plotted - their accidental poetry, too, added to the library of forms available to Stella's eye and hand.
It's not the artist himself, however, who puts in the long nights at the G3 and the other machines lined up on a rack on the studio's first floor. Stella admits he can't type (his left hand was mangled by a falling concrete urn when he was a child), and Dunn says Stella never touches the computers. As Childress explains in characteristically elevated language, "Frank's ambition seems to be to transform the object into the specific condition of the work of art at hand. Our job seems to be to produce the materials."
Or, as Stella puts it with characteristic directness, "We use the things [computers], and I never think about it. I yell at Andrew and say, 'I want to do this.'"
For a long time, Stella wouldn't even stand in front of the computers while the images were being manipulated, preferring to dictate instructions based on printouts - even on two-dimensional screenshots of three-dimensional models. Stella germinated ideas for collages in physical space, and Childress and Dunn articulated and refined them in cyberspace; but they had to be brought back to the world of atoms, volume, and mass before Stella felt comfortable working with them. "He was almost afraid," says Childress. "You'd have to let him look at the piece of paper. But I just got tired of outputting color images. Now I make him come down and look at the screen."
As Stella's ambassadors in the digital domain, Dunn and Childress perform functions as indispensable as those of Stella's longtime collaborator Ken Tyler in the making of his prints. And as Stella's ever more ambitious projects have required the manipulation of forms and ideas in virtual space to become more elaborate, the roles of Stella's assistants have become inextricable from the process of invention.
__ Stella's ambassadors in the digital domain: Earl Childress, once his general contractor, and Andrew Dunn, hired in 1990 to sweep floors, are now inextricable from the artist's process of invention. __
When Stella was commissioned in 1992 to provide murals for the Princess of Wales Theatre in Toronto, the scope of the project quickly widened to placing images at the end of each row of seats and in the stairwells, foyers, and lounges, mounting bas-reliefs around the dress circle and backlit murals above the proscenium, and, most spectacularly, installing a ring of forms around the central dome in the ceiling. For the images encircling the dome, Childress scanned an X-shaped collage of Stella's, copied it several times, and then mapped the images onto a virtual representation of the quarter-torus surface of the ring. ("If you were doing that on paper, trying to cut the paper small enough, you'd never get it to look right," says Childress.) .....
Childress says that he's been showing around a computer design for a building in Paris and calling it "a Stella," though most of the fleshing out of Stella's original idea has been done in virtual space by himself, artist/programmer Alex Cot, and engineers Peter Rice and Martin Francis. He's pragmatic: "If you call it a Stella, everyone gets interested in it."
There's no doubt, however, that even the works that have spent the most ripening time in the ether are Stellas, expressive of the artist's spirit and aesthetic that has, over the course of four decades, expanded beyond the bounds of a single consciousness. Stella's studio itself - from the thousands of paint cans on the tables to the beige machines downstairs to the stacks of art history and math theory that bury Stella's desk to the explosions on the walls awaiting the airbrush or torch - is a prolific ecosystem, a big mind that thinks in collages.
Now that the little mind of silicon has been harnessed by artists to do everything from plotting the arcs of Merce Cunningham's choreography to uncovering the fact that some of Pollock's most startling lines were inscribed with a brush, Stella's still doing what he's been doing since 1954: making judgment calls by eye in a room that smells like solvents and machines and pumps out beauty that changes the way people see. See less