“Pattern and Dispersion for November 4, 2010″
When I was at Vermont Studio Center in October-November 2010, it was a great opportunity to work on a backlog of ideas I’d accumulated in my sketchbooks. I had been pondering the idea of setting up a grid and progressively disrupting the pattern somehow. So I bought a bunch of boxes of Froot Loops cereal at the dollar store and set them out in a grid (2976 of them, actually) on canvas. It took a while.
When they were all neatly arranged, I spattered blue, then hit the center with compressed air to mess them up, then spattered red. Here’s how it looked at that point:
Yellow and black disturbances and spatterings followed.
My goal was to explore the idea of context and disturbance. Pattern and dispersion. Intention and accident. We create ordered systems of context to orient ourselves every day. For instance, consider what we do with time. We’re immersed in an amorphous flow of past, present, future— so we divide the time stream into years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds, to give us a point of reference, a way to make sense of where we are in the stream. But events happen independently from the gridwork we overlay onto time. The car battery dies (to take a recent example) and this event disturbs the careful meshwork arranged for the day. These disruptions often become the main subject matter for the day. Likewise in this painting, the disturbance seems to become what the image is about, not the grid.
During the Monadnock Art Tour, a lot of visitors responded to this painting saying it reminded them of a map. Perfect! What’s a map but our effort to take something huge and organic and overlay a gridwork (latitude and longitude) to provide context, to orient ourselves in the vastness?
A friend in Maine puts away all clocks and watches when he and his wife are on vacation. They eat when they’re hungry, sleep when they are tired, get up when they feel rested. He says it refreshes their brains, bodies and spirits to live outside the gridwork of time for a while. He warns it does take a few days to get back to “normal.”
“Swarm for April 3, 2010″
In my ponderings about control and chaos, I’m really intrigued by the idea of swarms: you know—how thousands of little fish will all swim in one bunch then—zing—all of them hang a quick left turn in unison, so it seems. Bees and some birds do it too. There are sometimes thousands of individuals, each with their own path, but acting as one and making—really—one path. How does this work? Is there a leader? Do they have a greater kinesthetic awareness than we do and just instantly cue off each other? Then where does the “Hey! Turn left!” impulse originate? Or is their individuality overridden by some kind of “one mind” experience? Do all those little brain waves somehow converge?
Last Summer, I read “Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead” the autobiography of bassist Phil Lesh, and he said their concerts were experiments in trying to achieve a kind of “one mind” experience. From the vantage point of the stage, the music (and of course, pharmaceuticals) caused the crowd to move and respond like one organism.
Cool National Geographic article on the subject: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/07/swarms/miller-text
Which made me think of the Christian idea (okay, weird connection, but what do you expect?) that believers are “the Body of Christ” and Jesus acts as the head (Ephesians 4:11-16). It’s the same fascinating balance: an immense numbers of individuals, with individual paths and wills, some straying, lagging, or out ahead, but all engaged on this one path, one destination. Some overarching force or mind or awareness is causing individuals to achieve a single path. There’s always strays and stragglers, rough edges and the like, but the general vision happens. And God doesn’t seem to mind using this fuzzy-edged means to get his perfect plan accomplished.
So I’ve been working on a series of “swarm” paintings where I try to achieve a particular vision by vaguely influencing independently-acting individuals. In the painting above, I dumped hundreds of ping pong balls onto a smooth, white masonite surface with the vision of creating an orange circle. Before I spattered blue paint, I took a stick and pushed the balls vaguely where I wanted the orange circle, so they’d block out the blue. After the blue dried, I herded the balls to the center and edges to open the circle shape for the red spatters, then the same for the yellow, and so on.
Ping pong balls really like to roll on smooth masonite, so there was a limit to how much I could influence the swarm—their assertion of their independence is strong, and there were a lot of strays each time. But after dozens of layers and repetitions, the swarm actions created a unified image that reflected my intended vision, but a vision filtered through the unruly movement of hundreds of individuals.
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?
God’s Appointment Book for 11.27.2009
Here’s a painting I did using the “golden rectangle” built on the Fibonacci sequence. The Fibonacci sequence starts with 1 and adds to it the preceding number, i.e.: 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21 etc. If you make a rectangle with these proportions, (13 x 21, say) it’s a “golden rectangle”. You can snip a square off the end of the rectangle and what remains is another golden rectangle. Snip another square, and a golden rectangle still remains.
I chose a different target color for each square, each square using a 2,3,5,8 color proportion (30 cyan, 80 red, 20 yellow, 50 black, is the target for the largest 13 x 13 square on the left. Upper right is 50,20,80,30; lower right is 80,30,20,50). Each color was subjected to a random number sequence, i.e. to get 50% red, 50% of the masking squares were removed randomly.
The pattern eventually spirals down to the white square in the lower right.
Each block displays a distinct color identity, even though the code for each color is sifted through randomness. The smaller blocks (the 3 x 3- and 2 x 2- block units in the lower middle don’t have enough data variety to paint their true ‘identities’. It looks like the blue 5 x 5 block is as small as I can get and still have enough cells to display the range that the randomness inflicts.
Here’s a diagram of the color targets for the painting. It’s interesting to me to see how the randomness fragments these targets, yet their color identity still comes through.
“God’s Appointment Book for 12-21-09”
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…
Filed under: Systems and Deviation
This painting was an exploration into having a target color on each side, and allowing randomness to degrade the color’s dominance as the other’s strengthens. Notice that even though there was only a 1:8 chance for red to dominate on the right, one block kept its red identity against all odds.
