Out of the (black and) blue...
*all puns intended
I gave up trying to understand exactly where the work developed from a long time ago. From what I can tell there’s usually just the tiniest grainof an idea that gets lodged somewhere in my subconscious. Sometimes, that grain causes an instant itch to start and I have to pursue that idea right away, no time to waste. At other times, that grain of sand gets lodged and my mind begins to form a permeable shell around it, much like an oyster, and keeps it for later use. Time goes by, that grain takes on more information for its shell and before I know it, there’s a new creative path that has risen to the surface that I’m eager to pursue.
It’s not as if this idea is completely fully formed, but often there’s enough information that’s been able to permeate its shell that I feel confident in moving forward, even if I don’t necessarily understand everything about what it is I’m trying to work with. When I think about how or where a new-to-me idea had it’s genesis, it’s usually way too difficult to pinpoint an exact origin because so much information has been absorbed along the way to this moment of a physical beginning: all of the years of experience/influences including books read, art made, music listened to, art seen and so much more. There’s usually no straight line back to one thing that awakened the present condition of inspiration. There’s a tangled web of stuff that has found it’s way into this moment.
Over the past few weeks, since before the New Year, I’ve been quietly exploring some newish explorations that have captured my full attention as of late. I can’t tell exactly where any of this started, all I know is that I’ve been wanting to explore making paintings with close-value tones towards the darker end of the spectrum. I could be reacting to some of my recent more color saturated works, possibly. I’ve been feeling the need to move in another direction, so perhaps this is that path. We’ll see how things look in a few weeks or months.
The three drawings above were made prior to me seeing and photographing the subjects of the last two shots. I’ve since made a few small paintings based around these studies. I happened to choose blue and black to work with for this iteration of work for no other reason than I like different types of blues. Dark blue and black is a challenging combination, but I’m finding a lot to explore within this color constraint. It’s interesting how it seems that the universe sometimes confirms something for us and we don’t realize it until much later.
Am I a coder?
Last night, I had a dream where I saw “C++” emerge through the forms of people and other objects that seemed to be insubstantial in form and made of fog or vapors. The C++ was solid and on a solid background, maybe circular, maybe hexagonal. The “signs” moved towards me three times during this dream. I woke up wondering if I should start to learn to code. I’ve never studied any coding in my life and now I feel like I should look into it. It’s not often that something in a dream will affect me this much that I’ll want to investigate it further, but that’s what’s happened. After doing a little research, I’ve found that C++ is definitely not the place for me to start learning to code, if I do it at all. However, I’m feeling motivated to look into it more and see if it’s a skill that might be interesting for me to pursue investing time in. We’ll see how long this motivation lasts.
I’m thinking that if I do pursue this learning, it’ll be for fun and not for finding work. I could see learning to code to figure out more about how the backend of computers and websites work and maybe even incorporate that into my art somehow. Thinking about how HTML works (and moving to other languages), I can at least visualize how something might look once I know what sequences of code to use for certain effects and so on. It’s intriguing, to say the least.
Things I’m digging right now
Podcasts are a big part of how I get information about different topics and I’m often listening to them in the studio. I’m paying more attention to episodes that are really interesting to me and might be to others, so I’ll start sharing them here. Here are three from the past couple of weeks:
To The Best of Our Knowledge: Deep Time: Ep. 1, Ep. 2, Ep. 3
Bad At Sports: GRAY (Paul Gray of Gray Gallery-Chicago)
Cerebral Women: Courtney Willis Blair
Endpoint
Yes, you needed to see this photo of Sage, you just didn’t know it yet…