“Pattern and Dispersion for November 11, 1012″

This painting started with a large canvas spattered with primary colors in a graded pattern: yellows merging into greens and blues. Over this I placed thousands of froot loops in a grid.

The canvas was about 6 and a half feet by ten feet. Lots of froot loops. Lots of time for contemplating these little organic/nonorganic shapes. All the same, no two alike.

They make a beautiful pattern that has nothing to do with the final image—all the loops eventually get swept up. I like the idea that the objects that make the images are absent from the final painting. The artwork is just their shadows.

Then I spattered multiple rounds of primary colors, disrupting the center section with compressed air each round. Here’s how it looked halfway through the process:

The underlying layers assert themselves or disappear, depending on how much they contrast with the subsequent layers.

“God’s Appointment Book for July 10, 2011″

Late last Spring, I set up this 19 x 10 grid of 2″ squares and chose a red color target for the left of the grid and a blue target for the right half of the grid, then spattered primary colors using random numbers to open and close the cells of the grid as usual. After a lot of rounds of spattering, the colors began to define themselves. Then I reset the numbers to grade the colors horizontally—blurring the distinction between the halves. So they’re still two distinct colors, but the border between them is in the process of becoming more indistinct.

This painting got finished just in time to be a present for my middle daughter and her new husband for their wedding this July.

“Pattern and Dispersion for November 21, 2011″

You can’t step in the same river twice, Heraclitus tells us, but is it possible to make the same painting twice? If it’s the same idea and same events that produce them, are they the same? Accident and chance and human error always interfere, but suppose chaos is part of the plan?

So to investigate this, I prepared sixteen 12″ x 12″ panels and set out a 4 x 4 pattern of sixteen froot loops in the center of each.  Here’s a shot of just getting started:

I decided to spatter four rounds of four colors (sixteen layers of paint—are you starting to see the deep web of repeated repetition I’m weaving here?) I then worked out a plan for each spot masked by each froot loop. Each spot would get different exposures to the layers of paint, but they’d have the same plan from panel to panel—so the spot on the upper left would get all four rounds of yellow and all four rounds of red. I’m aiming at sixteen different color recipes. Here’s the schematic I did to help me keep track of which loops to remove each round of paint:

But the spattering process is inexact—I can’t get the coverage perfect. You can see how some panels got more yellow or blue than others. How does this affect the plan? Will the target colors be the same from panel to panel?

To add another level of obsession to the project, every round I randomly placed an additional loop on each painting. But exactly randomly: I divided each panel into 12 x 12 and randomized two sets of digits 1-12 to provide me exact coordinates for where the random loops will go (the example below shows me placing a loop at the 4, 4 position: 4 spaces over, 4 spaces down).

So all this to say—what? Well, what happens to our intentions when exposed to happenstance? Does repetition reveal intention? Each painting imperfectly reflects my intention, but do the images accumulate and present a clearer vision of my intent? How does revelation happen through accumulation of layers of data?

How does the experience of seeing only one painting alone differ from seeing all sixteen?  The randomized loops initially look scattered and apparently chaotic, but can you can spot the light blue one in each painting? Look long enough and you’ll see other patterns. But they sure look accidental at first glance, no? How is the perception of these works changed by hearing the obsessive, detailed plan behind them? How is your experience of the art changed by knowing what the heck I was up to? Does it enhance or spoil the experience? What does it say about my intent  as artist to share or hide my process?

And finally, what about life’s chaos around us? See any patterns? What’s hidden? What’s revealed?

“God’s Appointment Book for November 7, 2011″

I’ve been collecting books on the creative process, and the latest one I’m perusing is “Creators on Creating” a collection of writings by authors, artists and musicians on how they go about doing their thing. One chapter that struck me was by the poet W.B. Yeats, who thought that “will is the enemy of creation,” that creativity comes in a flash of enlightenment when the mind is wandering or in meditation or even in trance. He strove to “prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the moment of creation…”

So I was right all along about the value of lounging in bed in the morning—my most productive part of the day!

I’ve seen a lot in my reading of this tension/balance between the inward and outward. Some take a scientific/psychological approach that meditation allows the subconscious mind to work on the problem. Others take a mystical bent (like Yeats and Jung) that reflection dials us in to the “collective unconscious,” the “great memory.” Still others take a spiritual view that in order to be creative, we need to be filled with the spirit of the Creator.

My vote? All of the above! Hey, anything that promotes letting the mind wander is aces with me.

It’s a central idea in theology— “Islam” literally means “I submit.” Bhuddism is all about emptying and filling. And—especially appropriate to mention this Christmas season—scripture says Jesus is “seated at the right hand of God” because he “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant.” Power through relinquishing it. Cool.

So, does the will restrict creativity? Do we let something slip through our hands by grasping too hard?

To explore this idea in my paintings, I always deliberately introduce an element that forces me to relinquish control. In this painting, I submit to a random number generator, my good pals at www.random.org. Then I set out a 7 x 11 grid of 4″ square masks. Here I am setting up the grid: (Notice: this technique requires a lot of time spent on my knees. Hmm. Love it.)

Then I exerted my will and decided this painting would be created by removing 40% of the squares and spattering primary colors. So I generated a bunch of random digits 1-10, and every time a digit came up 4 or less, I removed a square from the grid. Then I spattered blue paint. Here’s what it looked like at this point:

Below is the grid after spattering a round of all four colors. You can see blues and pink and yellow squares, and also orange and green and purple starting to emerge. Notice in the lower left I’ve begun to inset the squares by half to divide the 4″ grid into 2″ squares. I’ll do another round of four colors with the masks in this position.

Then back to position 1 for another round of all four colors:

Here we are after a few more repetitions of the process. Remember, I have no control over which squares get exposed each round, because the pattern of the masks is dictated by the random numbers. Always a random 4 out of 10.

It’s wild what patterns the numbers come up with. Look at the second and third rows from the bottom in the photo below: almost all the masks remain on the 2nd row and almost all are removed from the 3rd row. Then on the 5th row only one is removed. It’s an interesting art experience to just let the process do its thing, rather than enforcing aesthetic judgments of my own.

The staging nails pounded through the plywood squares keep the masks off the surface so paint doesn’t creep around the edges of the masks. The strict grid is made by a soft fuzz of droplets.

So, how to get more creative? I give up!

“Pattern and Dispersion for May 16, 2011″

I had set up a grid of froot loops on this smaller canvas, intending to disrupt the middle section after spattering a couple rounds of color. I was working on something on the computer when I turned to see that Marley, my springer spaniel studio dog, had eaten half of the froot loops off the canvas. Glad I’m using non-toxic paint!

I took this to be an intervention of a chaotic event on the work and decided the the plan was now modified: one side would now be different than the other. Thanks to Culture Hound.

“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.”

I was honored this month to be asked to have two of my paintings be part of the worship experience at my home church, Trinity Evangelical Church in Peterborough NH!

I chose two from my “God’s Appointment Book” series, where a perfect/imperfect circle is striving to emerge from the context of chaos and randomness. It’s an encouragement to me to ponder how God, though absolutely perfect, doesn’t seem to mind doing his creating with imperfect tools in a context of brokenness. Thanks to Pastor John Engle and Minister of Music Chuck Clark for the opportunity to share.

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?