Monday, June 27, 2011

Acci-dental-work

Another detail of a larger piece.

Some times it's the little accidents make something pleasing. Often in the world of audio the "happy accidents" are left in, a mistake or unintentional slip that ends up with something awesome that would be near impossible to come up with on your own in the context of what you were trying to accomplish. The random act of something you did with out intent, that yields unexpectedly positive results is something rare and precious. I think as you come to enjoy this influence of chaos you also learn to run with it. This little detail is full up accidents both happenstance and forced. The positive and negative of a stencil switch places, the seeming random colors are actually shapes and letters near buried. The little odd dots are constellations of bleed through of a larger object. The light criss-crossing lines of gray that look like brush strokes, are actually my finger pushing around dried ink. I like to look at these fluid squiggles and wonder what in my brain was directing this voyage? Turn here, stop, reverse direction! I guess it's the same thing that tells you "that's enough ink there" "don't cover that bit up any more than it already is". Interesting stuff. This little detail highlights, what to me (in a staring at clouds sort of way) looks like some sort of weird beak nosed strider. The actual lighter brush strokes seem to add a sort of depth that starts to set a scene for me. The point of all this dissection is that what may seemingly be random may not be random at all. In my opinion it's this costume of randomness that makes some of the most interesting media... it's something I definitely strive for, but also something I don't want to push too far that it becomes robotic and, ironically, 'forced'. Sitting on the fence between "by design" and "by accident" is a funky mental balancing act.

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Micro-looks


This is from a piece I did, that I actually have a title for (wow), called '9 Blocks'. I am rather fond of it. Like many of my works lately, I think the causal observer might glance at it and not take it in. Not what I see in it at least. I suppose that is an age old artist worry. In this one, as with some other recent ones, I have played with masking, in hopes that the 'pure' negative space will lead one to focus on the 'micro negative space' created by the overlaying. The more I think about it, this new style I have been playing with seems to be all about negative space, something I was told over and over I had entirely too much of in art class. I am posting these details of my recent pieces rather than showing the whole picture, in hopes that you can see a bit of what I see when I look at these, and not just the easily consumable chaos and colors. I particularly like the 'bleed' at the edges of the block in this one. This bleed is caused by the under laying watercolor and the ink as it seeped past the border of the mask. It's as if one world is seeping out into another. I have always loved the way liquids have spread into paper, going as far as they can into the little spaces and grooves between the fibers. I have often marveled at coffee stains or the spray marks left by stray food or water. It's a kind of art you just can't make.

Friday, June 3, 2011

There it is, in the details.

Me and Scott have completed three tracks for our Grackle Pop project, which will actually be released under the name Bluffs. This is a pretty big deal for us! Especially if you've known how long we have been making music together. You can get an idea of why it has taken so long by reading this post HERE. So we are still in the process of finding logos, fonts, making web pages and generally putting together a game plan for how we plan on putting it out and getting it into peoples ears. Fear not eager reader (and mildy interested reader) you will hear them soon enough. Part of the process is letting a few people hear the tracks as we decide what to do with them. So that involves creating the MP3's, tagging them with relevant information and assigning some temporary artwork to the files while we settle on art for the EP (or single tracks as it may be). So for some temporary artwork I created a file for the standard MP3 image size and "auditioned" (almost chose sections at random) several detail shots of some of my recent artwork, which I mysteriously referred to in this POST. So I thought I would share some of the choices I chose from: