One of the balances that gets me going is when you make something concrete in order to make something ephemeral. A poem doesn’t really happen unless it encounters a pen and paper, or computer and printer, or voice and listener, right? Unless an idea becomes concrete somehow, does it exist at all? Nah— not really.
So when I do my art, I make concrete, hard edged, 3-d fixtures that end up being the thing that ‘makes’ the spattered, nuanced 2-d images appear on canvas. One fixture I’ve been using for a while is a 48″x48″ wooden grid with 2″x2″ cells and 3/8″ dividers. I lay this grid over a surface, and with a set of 361 2″x2″ wooden blocks, I can open or close the cells of the grid to allow them to get spattered or not. I can also dump items onto the grid, let gravity and chance sort them out, and let them act as masks for the spatters. (You can see a painting made with this process in my entry for January 9, 2010, “Circular Logic..”)
But! Problem: My grid’s tied up in the middle of a painting I’ve had building for over a month. It’s coming along nicely, thanks, but still needing more layers. I wanted to use the grid on another piece, so what to do? Since you can’t go to Conceptual Depot and buy this stuff, ya gotta make it. So, I spent a day in my shop last weekend building another 19×19-cell grid. The challenge is to make the 3/8″ wood strips interlock perfectly so the cells are a consistent 2-and-1/16″ square. I used a tablesaw and dado blade to make my last one, and it took some fussing to get them to fit, so I decided to try a router with 3/8″ bit this time. Below are shots from the process. First, I had to make a fence for the router so I could cut 3/8″ grooves exactly 2 and 1/16″ apart across a bunch of 1 x 6s. Here it is, screwed to the base of the router with a straight edge and the router bit coming through the bottom.
Halfway through plowing grooves in the boards.
I then cut the boards into 3/8″ strips, slapped them on the floor….
…. and hey! they interlocked perfectly.
So, this piece of carpentry is going to be making paintings soon. How much can the fixture dictate the work, though? This grid’s just an elaborated paintbrush, really– just another way to control how and where paint hits canvas. But when the cells are controlled by random numbers, something besides me is dictating the image. How much of a life of its own can a work of art have before it becomes something separate altogether?
