I’ve been thinking about the wise men from the East—most scholars think they were astrologers from Iraq, or thereabouts— and how little data it took for them to get up and go to Israel to look for the King. And mounting a caravan expedition any distance in those days was a major, big deal. The prophecy in Numbers they probably acted on is oblique at best:
Numbers 24:17 “I see him, but not now; I behold him, but not near; A star shall come forth from Jacob, And a scepter shall rise from Israel, And shall crush through the forehead of Moab, And tear down all the sons of Sheth.”
This messiah business wasn’t part of their culture or tradition. But, they were astrologers and saw something remarkable in the sky and took what they could piece together and went. And ended up with more revelation as a result.
Revelation is always partial. Nobody gets the full picture on anything. Revelation comes in layers, and following up on a little revelation seems to bring on more.
I’ve been working on a series made on gloss-primed masonite, and have been experimenting with techniques to produce tiny, consistent, opaque spatters. The droplets bead up on the gloss surface, and make a nice rich texture. The 4′x4′ square above is the proving ground, and I’m making some headway. I love the imperceptible shifts that go on within these fields— how one color will assert itself and influence the overall tone, and then another. The color field effect is very atmospheric and soothing. But then, I relax pretty easily, and teeny droplets of paint fascinate me. (I’ll have to test this on some type-A friends and see if they’re soothed too.) Plans in the works to explore this on a large scale.
But I wonder— how much or little spatter causes the viewer to see a pattern? How much revelation does it take to cause enlightenment? How much or little does it take for us to see, understand, and then act? (Musical interlude with Tracy Chapman’s song, “Change” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drXwsVYrd20)
In this work, I lightly spattered the remaining layers over a loose gridwork of ping pong balls. Here’s a close up:
Here’s the whole painting. (Pardon the bad lighting.) Is there enough here to mount a caravan expedition to Palestine?
God’s Appointment Book for 4-6-2009
I heard someone say yesterday, “God is so powerful he doesn’t have to be in control to be in control.” He allows randomness, evil and chaos and yet isn’t thwarted in his overall purposes. How much control can I “give up” and still control my paintings?
Each of my paintings are an exploration of the balances of control and accident. This painting is an experiment with one of the control parameters of my art—the percentage of canvas exposed by the movable grid. I generated a fresh random number table of digits 1-10 for each layer of paint, then chose a color target of 50% blue, 70% red, 10% yellow, and 20% black to act as an element of structure for the painting. I then removed 5 out of 10 of the masking blocks of my grid for the blue layers (to make a 50% exposure to blue), 7 out of 10 blocks for red (70%), and so on.
The result is a “color portrait” of the target, an essay on a mix of purple. Some of the resulting blocks are almost a perfect match of the 50,70, 10, 20 swatch, others are aberrations darker, lighter, more yellow, more blue, etc. Is the whole painting a perfect match of the target swatch? No. But in exposing the elements of the color and revealing the parts that make up its whole, doesn’t it become it a “truer” revelation of what the color really is? Isn’t deconstruction part of investigating the true nature of a thing? Maybe God’s purposes in the world are somehow going to make his character and purposes all the more vivid and distinct because of the chaos and randomness he currently allows.
Filed under: Revelation Layer Cake
“God’s Appointment Book for 3_10_09″
In this diptych, I saved the random numbers from the first painting and used them to create the second. The paintings, as you can see, did not come out entirely the same— for a few reasons. First, spattering, by its nature, never comes out the same twice. Even if the spatter path and rate and volume was duplicated by a machine, the droplets would fall differently. Second, I’m part of the process, and I make mistakes. I lost track of the number sequence at a couple points, so the resulting image is a little different. But it still reads like two copies of the same image. How different can two images be and still be the “same”? Paging Dr. Warhol…
This makes me think of God’s situation: He’s perfect, flawless powerful, unlimited in his abilities. And, he has a perfect message to communicate. But he chooses fallible, mistake-riddled people to communicate his message. Then, say he decides on the Bible as a way to speak. He chooses 66 books, written through fallible individuals, and these books have to travel across time and translators and preachers and governments and egos to get to me. Yet he says these books are good enough, clear enough, to reveal himself to me. Inspired from him and suitable to teach and lead me. Perfection thinks it’s cool to express himself imperfectly.
My brother Jim said, “You should paint 20 of these—none of them would be the same, yet by the time you viewed the 20th painting, you’d have a pretty clear idea what the essence of the ‘real’ painting is like.” Jim thought this shows how confident God is in his message: he allows it to go out in such a matrix of imperfect ways, knowing it’s so powerful, and he’s so in charge, the message will get through anyhow.
Kind of a Christmasy thought after all— “Word made flesh.” Infinity in a pair of Pampers.
Filed under: Developing the Process, In process #1, Revealing and Obscuring
I’ve been noticing how droplets are a lot more defined on a glossy surface– which fascinates me in the ongoing quest for the perfect spatter. The pointillistic effect has a sharper feel when the dots are distinct. I’ve been working on a series of paintings on gloss-primed masonite and wonder if I can get the same “droplet crispness” on canvas. So, I’m spraying white gloss enamel over a 12′ x 5.5′ stretch of canvas. I plan to do more with white, especially with the idea of defining / negating an image. Hmmm… More pondering to come on the idea of revealing / obscuring.
Filed under: Systems and Deviation
“God’s Appointment Book for February 28, 2009″
I went for a backpacking trip with my friend Mike in the White Mountains a few years ago. As we hiked, I noticed alongside the trail there were always three small plants in the undergrowth: a dark moss, a light moss and a little three leaved plant, called oxalis, I think. Always these three— they ruled the undergrowth. But it was interesting to see how their little world worked out: sometimes one moss would dominate, sometimes two of them would intermingle, and the other was sidelined. Sometimes all three would butt up to one another in clear territories.
This got me thinking— each plant was its own system with parameters: preferences for soil type, pH, sunlight, moisture, soil depth, etc. It must have been that sometimes one factor (like sunlight, maybe) favored the darker moss, sometimes maybe the pH made it easier for the oxalis to dominate. So— does God control which plant dominates? I dunno— it looks more to me like he sets up these three systems, throws them into this woodland ecosystem and lets them duke it out decade after decade according to happenings and situation. Sometimes a tree falls and sunlight increases and the dark moss has a time to prosper. Soil improves or erodes and oxalis triumphs. Does He control these happenings that influence the systems? If you’re infinite, you’ve got the time, I suppose…
So I set up a large canvas with a plan to bias the spatter patterns to favor red in one corner, yellow in another, blue in the third, and no color in the fourth. Then I set up the random grid, removing half the squares using a 1:2 random ratio. My intent was to let the forces of each corner sieve through the “happenings” of the random environment and see where some colors “succeed’ and “fail,” in an effort to mimic the systems God sets up and lets run through the events and conditions of this world. Interesting to see that even in the corner where blue has the upper hand, chance works out for yellow to have its say. In manipulating a system that includes randomness, am I in control? Yes, and kinda yes with a little no thrown in…
