Back to Digital

This piece, called Over Pass,  is one of the first Physical Alchemy pieces I ever did, even before I came up with the name. When I look at it now I see that at this point I was still thinking very flat. I think My embrace of 3D art is an uphill climb, the gravitational force of my habit forces me towards 2D, But 3D forms the frontier I'm now moving into. You will note that the larger photograph  looking underneath the over pass is upside down. I'm not sure why. Well I kind of know why. Its an over pass but were looking under it, but does that make it an underpass, no, I don't think so. So there's the play on words thing. Also, I think the idea was that when you turn an image upside down if forces you to process it as abstraction. Which is a fine idea, but to tell the truth, every time I look at it I want it to be right side up. It bothers me.  What I like about this piece is the 'discussion' on color that is going on. There is a carefully crafted chromatic strip  which I did with acrylic paint. Below it is a section of black paint. each pigment on the strip was 'encouraged' to drip over the  black. most of them disappeared, but the interference pigments in the strip, which appear mostly white suddenly turn into vivid color when they go over the black. I like this. I don't know why. Well I sort of know why. I like it because the painting is having a discussion  about the technology of paint itself.  So some things about this work I like, some things I don't like. When I get into it, I'll probably be replacing the underpass image with something else. Or doing something to alleviate the awkwardness of it. I'll try different things and I'll know it when I see it.

Speaking of something else, I made a high end scan of Over Pass, today and then I started to mess around with the digital file. My creative energy is really strong when I'm just playing and discovering this way. After about an hour  'play' I got to this.

One thing I need to point out, and it has to do with a problem with all art on the internet, is that its almost impossible for you the viewer to have the proper experience of pieces like this. When a print is destined to be 30" by 40", you just can't get all the sense of it by looking at a 1000 pixel wide jpeg. So you have to try an imagine a lot of nuance and detail in the depths of this piece and being able to get up close and look at this.  This is not the final state, in fact, as of this writing, I've actually taken it a whole generation further, but that will have to wait for another post.