10.1.2014 Already a day and an evening under my belt, getting up early Sunday morning, taking only coffee and half a sesame bagel that was left in the fridge, sitting at the drawing table in my boxers, energized by my dedication to the project, in front of a brand new piece of bright white five dollar drawing paper, with clean brush in hand, and a fresh dish of water, I poured out a measure of heavily pigmented black ink and divided the page into rows and columns of squares; each one to be filled with a unique composition.

Peter Greenaway's "Prospero's Books" was fresh on my mind that morning. I was working from a vision of the books described in the movie; books filled with endless and interesting variations of water, mirrors, motions, and colors. The drawing project I proposed to complete that day was to create my very own "Book of Compositions".

My use of a creative strategy of capturing and cataloging a small, personally specified subset of images from a much larger database of endless possibilities first happened in 1985 when I exhibited 15 images selected from the 30,000 Viking Orbiter photographs of Mars. A fascination with plucking something singular and amazing from the endless unknown was furthered that Sunday morning in 1992 as I made tiny improvisational compositions by hand. This iterative method of making art finally came to fruition in 1996 in the form of a piece of software art called "Every Icon" and has been the basis of much of the work that followed.
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