Filed under: Developing the Process
When I started work on the series, “God’s Appointment Book” back in 2008, I found that getting ideas out on canvas brought with it a strange and wonderful by-product: more ideas. Each painting opened up a rabbit warren of more paths to explore, variables to try, and ponderings that needed further pondering. So much so I would lay awake at night thinking, “Oh, that would be so cool to try. Gotta remember that!” Someone would mention an artist to look up, a website to check out. I’d come across a quote that hit the nail squarely, or I’d think of supplies to experiment with, things to build, things to buy. You get the idea. Too many balls to keep in the air. Too many ideas, too little brain capacity. A pleasant surprise, and not a surprise.
Solution? I bought a paper brain. A sketchbook/notebook/journal where I could dump all the plans, ideas, lists, sources, quotes, drawings, notes, doodles, everything.
My criteria were:
Consistency: I didn’t want a mishmosh of sizes, bindings, shapes. I wanted it to get to be familiar—a fixture.
Availability: So, if consistent, then it had to be commonly available, not a one-off, made by one-dealer-who-promptly-goes-out-of-business thing.
Size: Big enough to draw in, not so big it was a pain to carry around. A plus if it could fit in a large jacket pocket.
Cost: Reasonably affordable and not fancy so I wouldn’t treat it too preciously, i.e., “Gee, is this idea worth wasting a sheet of deckle-edged, handmade paper?”
Durability: It had to be tough enough to be carried around for a few months and not fall apart. Spiral binding proved bad at this.
After a little experimenting, I settled on the black 5 1/2″ x 8 1/2″ hardbound generic sketchbook. They’re available pretty much everywhere, cost 6 or 7 bucks, and if you scout it, you can find the occasional good deal. But your desires and criteria may vary. All I know is that it’s been a good thing—and a bit of a relief—to carry a paper brain.
“Occurrence for October 13, 2011″
It was a nice overcast day yesterday morning (before the rain started), so I took advantage of the diffused light to photograph some recent work. In the series I call “Occurrences” I set up a grid of circles but let the grid decay in some way. I put my trusty wooden gridwork (see its construction story here) over the surface and randomly dump in ping pong balls. I lift off the grid and some balls stay put and others wander. Between layers of spatters, I replace some and remove others. The result is a grid that’s not really a grid. In “Occurrence for October 13, 2011″ above, the grid appears and fades in the yellow and pink and blue swirls.
How much order do we need to see a pattern? When does the grid cease to be a grid? At the bottom edge, the paint barely delineates the circles, and at the top the circles wander to the point of not really being a pattern. How much order is necessary for us to make sense of our lives? Too much order and we’re bored. Too much variety and we’re disoriented. Maybe you’ve heard the Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.”
And when the pattern is decayed, what clues remain of the original system? Knowing the backstory helps, doesn’t it? Telling how I did the wooden-grid-overlay bit makes the image—and the reason for the encroaching chaos—more understandable, yes? I’m fascinated by the idea in Genesis of a world that was created perfect but then suffered a disruption, a breakup. Perfection decayed. Order disordered. I find it makes an interesting backdrop for pondering the world around me—which daily proves to be a shifting mix of gorgeous and goshawful. What clues remain of the original plan? Does knowing the backstory help with detecting the pattern?
“God’s Appointment Book for August 8, 2010″
(In this painting, a color target of 50 blue, 20 red, 80 yellow, 30 black grades into a target of 30 blue, 80 red, 20 yellow, 50 black)
“God’s Appointment Book for August 9, 2010″
(In this one, 80 20 50 30 grades into a target of 30 50 20 80)
Relinquishing control is hard to do. Whether it’s giving your teenager the keys to the car or pondering how to do business with a Supreme Being in the mix, it takes some head-scratching.
Working with random numbers is an exercise in letting go. With my painting method (you old-timers know this in your sleep, newbies can click “About My Process” for more), I open up a certain percentage of the grid randomly to expose it to a spattering of a primary color. My target color for the left side of the painting at the top was 50 blue, 20 red, 80 yellow, 30 black. That means when it’s time to spatter yellow, I get a set of random numbers 1-10 from random.org, and any time the number comes up 8 or less, I remove a square and open that part of the grid to the rain of yellow paint.
This means a lot of the grid needs to be open for the 80% yellow to happen, right? But random numbers do what they want. So I’ll get a sequence like “10, 9, 10, 10, 5, 10, 3, 10, 9 , 9, 9, 9 …” No kidding. Grrr! 20% of the grid’s getting exposed, not 80. It’s not coming out the way I’ve planned. Panic? Cheat? I feel like it sometimes. This is what random numbers do when you let them loose. (see http://www.random.org/analysis/ for an article on this, including Dilbert’s take.)
But, random numbers have another property: they average out. Guaranteed. Over time, 80% of the numbers will be 8 or less. I can be assured that the next time I do the yellow part of the grid, the numbers will push back toward exposing 80% of the grid to yellow. I’ll bet I will even get some sequences like “5, 3, 6, 2, 2, 7, 8, 1, 5,…” when NO occurrences of 10 or 9 will come up. Probability is a bulldozer. If you set it up for 80%, even though the current numbers are not looking good, it WILL come out 80%.
Are you still with me? Come on! This stuff is fascinating! Buckle up for the philosophical/theological-pondering part of our day:
If God is perfect and omnipotent, how can he abide the current system of stuff going on that is so chaotic, evil, and generally not apparently what his plan should allow? In other words, it looks like he wants 80%, but a quick scan around the globe looks like it’s currently coming up a LOT of nines and tens! But if 80% is the plan, 80% will happen. Randomness IS a chaos – you never know what will happen next. But probability IS a bulldozer. It WILL achieve 80 percentness, heck or high water.
A life of faith means betting on the bulldozer.
Filed under: In the Studio Now
Gallery on the front porch…
…more art in the studio with work-in-progress
The Monadnock Art Tour was a lot of fun this weekend. Over 100 people visited my cleaner-than-it’s-ever-been studio Saturday and Sunday. It was very encouraging and inspiring to hear people respond to the images, the technique and the philosophical/theological/kinda logical ideas behind it all. A few people mentioned they saw my work at the group show at the Jaffrey Civic Center and were intrigued to see more. Almost everyone could relate to the balance of control and freedom in everyday life. Margaret (my wife) served pumpkin whoopie pies with cream cheese filling, chocolate chip muffins and cider. (I exercised way too much freedom versus control in that instance.) Wait a minute… at least I THINK it was the paintings that people were excited about…
More photos on my Facebook page here.
Filed under: Control and Chaos
“God’s Appointment Book for August 10, 2010″
Thought much about circles lately? One of the balance-of-opposites that I love to ponder is the circle and the square. They are the most basic items of geometry (with the triangle coming up as a distant third). Every kindergartner who knows their shapes will list these two first (unless they are a smartaleck like me and say, “dodecahedron”).
It strikes me that the circle (and sphere) is the only geometric form that nature strives to makes perfectly. Think about it: a soap bubble floating in the air wobbles out of round as it drifts, but it is always straining for perfect sphericity. Let that bubble land on the wet countertop, and it will outline a perfect circle. A drop of water floating in the space station would eventually settle into a perfectly round ball. Take a hot ball of burning gases and put it out in the middle of the universe and it’s a perfectly round sunshine in the sky. Okay, you may quibble that the soap bubble is out of round because the soap film is thicker on the bottom, and the sun’s rotation skews its shape, but all things equal, nature loves a sphere. In the midst of the jumble of forces and energy clashing all around us, things want to settle into a circle.
So in the painting above, I’m seeing if a circle can emerge from the chaos of my random-controlled grid. I’ve assigned a target color for the squares that vaguely outline a circle and another target for the background area. So for instance, the background gets 20% yellow and the circle gets 80% yellow, so I randomly remove 2 out of 10 blocks in the background, and 8 out of 10 blocks in the circle area. For the squares that border the circle, I split the difference, 6 out of 10. Spatter yellow, let it dry, replace the blocks and do the blue layer. And the red and black layers. Repeat a whole lot of times. (Yes, this took forever.)
The circle did emerge, and though it does look a bit diamond-shaped close up, stand back and squint your eyes, and it gets pretty darned circular.
Amidst the chaos of the day, it’s nice to ponder an underlying force pulling everything toward a calm circularity.
