Harvest Alchemy

Initial Alchemy

Some times talking about art is zero sum game. Perhaps this is because artists often work in the proto linguistic languages of intuition, imagination and feeling.  Thought they can be very articulate in there own way, these creations do not always have an analogue of words that make any sense. In other words this will be short blog entry. :)

Recipe for art: 

Pen

Rock

Paper

Blossom

Grass

Paint

Glass

Ink

Over Pass Evolution

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. 

Ghost Trees

Not quite white nights

 

 
In Russia, as the days grow long near the summer solstice, it never quite gets dark at night but stays in a prolonged state of twilight they call the white nights. Here in the Northwest we don't get real white nights but we do get a taste of this manic magic where the daylight can last 20 hours. The Sun sets in the Northwest and rises in the far Northeast. For a few weeks the north side of the house actually gets a healthy dose of sunlight. 

The other morning I was up early for a video shoot and watched the Robins building their nests with intense energy at 4:30 in the morning. They used their beaks to break off twigs and then flew them up to  their construction sites one after another.  Perhaps there is an overlap between the long days, early morning bird energy and that heightened zing that accompanies the inspiration of new art and new projects. The above print kind of captures a bit of this prolonged dusk magic I'm talking about.  This print was made again on washi paper and then merged with a painted maple panel to form the image below.

One interesting quality of washi paper is that in places where there is little or no ink the paper practically disappears as the collage medium saturates the fibers, making it transparent. In this case the clouds in the first image were not reading at all when it was pasted down on the panel. ( I kind of knew this would happen which is why the texture on the panel had a sort of cloud thing going on it.) So in a fit of improvisation I scratched with the back end of a brush and disrupted the wet paper  which promptly dissolved and formed into thick, well, cloud-like shapes. Happy Result. To see a vivid example of the paper pulling apart look in the lower left corner of the piece and see the wavy torn edge of saturated washi paper. The final step on this piece was putting the thick creamy sun/moon paint on and, again, using the back end of a brush to pull a spiral through the paint. voilà.