These are the result of the first time I ever, as I recall, did art just to do it, willfully abandoning care and concern for the end result being ‘good’. And of course, as I learned then and have re-learned since, that’s the kind of liberating notion that allows it to be good in the end. Doing it just to do it, not thinking about whether it’s good or bad.
20040826-01, digital image, 800x600 pixels, August 2004
This is also the point where I gave up on trying to name non-representational abstractions. 🙂 A few to come will have names, but from this point on for most the names will just be the date I did them in yyyymmdd format, and maybe as above, followed by a sequence number if I did more than one that day. Naming non-representational abstractions is hard, ya know, because they don’t represent anything that already has a name. The only reason I put forth the effort to do that today is to give them usable search terms for people Googling… (yes I hope to be Googled by accident. To be a search result that if not what they were looking for, that catches their eye and a few curious clicks. I do that myself all the time. Anyway, google image search “living mosaic” — I’m in the first 10!!)
Anyway, what’s going on with 20040826-01 is me adding the hand-‘moused’ black squiggles that look almost organic next to the straight lines and geometrically perfect shapes. The straight lines themselves were quick sweeps across the screen with the pencil tool. What would be a bold natural curve on paper or canvas, was rendered as series of straight angularly connected line segments (this was 2004, probably on Windows 98; or might have been on my Windows 2000 machine). Anyway, that kind of geometric perfection is what I liked most then about using a computer to make art, and yet the ‘natural’, ‘organic’ squiggles seemed to provide the eye with a welcome relief.
Christmas Tree Farm, digital image, 800x600 pixels, August 2004
And as soon as I explained how in general I stopped naming them, this one got a name. I kept going with the organic thing and got a Christmas Tree Farm. Perfect blue rectangles for contrast and because that’s the strength of this media of course.
20040826-03, digital image, 800x600 pixels, August 2004
In 20040826-03 I was experimenting with dots and specks that became swarms or clouds. Again, in contrast with digital geometric perfection.
20040827, digital image, 800x600 pixels, August 2004
By the next day I had not run out of steam yet with these ideas, but 20040827 got technically challenging. Paint could not do gradations of color back then — for that matter I don’t know if it can now, but these days I also use paint.net which can. So I did the yellow gradation the hard way. I needed a spreadsheet. The thickness of each yellow band is, the thickness of the band below it, minus (same thickness minus 175 pixels, divided by 3). Or in Excel, a range of this formula: =A3-((A3-175)/3). Then each band is 10 points more luminous than the band below. This was to get the ‘ground’ to recede towards the horizon. Man I really wanted that gradation! Then blue rectangles and black squiggles, much more relaxed (or exhausted?) than the day before. This one definitely taught me something about the difference between unbound, non-verbal creativity, and serious analytical calculation and planning.
zorgor 