Chasing Shadows

Making visual art puts you firmly in the light business so what better way to address the main ingredient of your work than to record paths of light.

Using the studio floor to support my unstretched canvas and planning to change a daily paint application in style and colour I began rolling and dripping and pouring paint into the areas defined by the passing light. 

Each day upon entering the studio the canvas would be rotated 90 degrees clockwise at approximately the same time. The purpose being to create a record of the path of sunlight on the studio floor using paint. 

For further reading on painting experiments see my post, 
Blind Men and the Elephant

Derivative Speculations

After high school I trained as a graphic artist.

For the most part my work was in black and white and on a flat surfaces readying work for reproduction in various media. 

Some tools of the day included pencils, erasers, brushes, pens and ink. T squares and set squares. Scissors, knives,and pots of glue where used  to shape and then hold it all in place.  Paper and cardboard were the support.

Cutting edge technology of the day was an electric typewriter manufactured by IBM and called the Selectric, I imagine, because it was electric and gave selection.

The Selectric gave the typesetter the ability to interchange single point size fonts on interchangeable golf ball type devices. At speeds only imagined previously. Computers were only discussed in science fiction.

I can see these images deriving from the work of those days.

As I mentioned previously in my post Black and White the first steps in this direction began as work progressed for the Garden Party show at The Art Sales and Rental Society Gallery. In the later paintings I stripped out colour and reduced my palette to black. White is provided by the canvas itself.

I began wondering what would happen if colour didn't play such an emotional part in the work and location didn't matter.

In this case the garden remained a starting point for work but once the sketch is rendered and photographed the image is installed into the computer and out of my hands as it seems. 

Work proceeded within the computer and recalled the arbitrary matter of factness of rubbing and rolling work for Home and Garden.

As a hands on painter, I will say that rendering the two dimensional images of derivative speculations within the computer opens endless possibilities but I also find the computer strangely strips the emotional investment touch imparts in the finished work. 

Black and White forms the basis for this latest installment of garden paintings.