an explanation of the progression from ‘the spring begins with the first rainstorm’ to ‘chaos comes with the summer haze’
I stare at the sky and at the sea. We are predisposed to do such things. Meditative, dominant, genetic, hopeful, confused, there are a sea of justifications for this human behavior. The pink skies and taupe waters. The black waters that are mirrors for the sky. The battlefields of clouds. The eerie calmness and endearing peacefulness. The ever-present.
Meanwhile, it is August and it is 113 degrees Fahrenheit. The sun burns my eyes and sunglasses are not enough. I have to stare downwards at the dirt. I can only stay outside for minutes. Where has the spring bloom gone when the unlit wax melts?
It took nine months of swings in the dark, the help of a few developers holding flashlights and years of creating environmentally-influenced paintings to create my first digital generative work the spring begins with the first rainstorm. My goal was to recreate the composition of my paintings while referencing the digital environment and taking advantage of the expanse of possibilities unique to the format. The result was, to me, as if I’d painted 487 paintings all at once, rich with the coloration, composition and the earthly movement that I’d hoped for. At its release, I doubted if I could come up with another comparably intriguing idea. Conceptually, however, it wasn’t the end of the story. What would happen after the spring’s bloom?
In the summer’s brutal heat and visual haze, a continuing dialogue about humankind’s relationship to the earth started to form. As climate change overwhelms us, happens next? Maybe humans start to panic as the spring season shortens, crunched by swings of dramatic summer heat and frigid winter cold. What could a painterly version of human panic look like? What would the heat do to color palettes? Would the sky and the sea’s ever-presence become all the more critical?
As we know, climate change is not a big bang, but a progression of states of being. We get used to the temperature as it creeps up a degree at a time, that is, until we do not. Thus as panic starts to ensue, we would still see reminders of the spring bloom, a beauty and calmness interjected amongst the chaos. With these overarching thoughts in mind, I went to work on how the spring would change in a summer of heat and panic, what would be gone and what would remain…
I started to bring ‘human’ movements onto digital canvases when a seminal Robert Rauschenberg work ‘Erased de Kooning Drawing’ came to mind. In 1953, Rauschenberg went to the master Willem de Kooning and asked for a drawing which he (incredibly) wanted to erase. De Kooning obliged and the drawing was erased. It was a revolutionary conceptual art moment. I saw a relationship there to my idea. Human hand gestures, whether with a brush or eraser, could represent the deconstruction of environmental constructs (or for Rauschenberg cultural constructs). We are erasing our future by destroying the earth, we are panicking about it and yet causing more destruction.
Wanting to erase and leave remnants of earthly beauty behind led me to using brushstrokes that are ‘wet’. They pull the coloration of the underpainting along with the brush, often blending colors into new shades as they move across the canvas. In that, the memories of the spring could survive and yet melt away.
With this style of brush in hand, I toyed with the possibilities for human panic in the movement and volume of the brushstrokes. Not all panics are the same, some are loud and messy, some are quiet and organized. I tried to capture a range of them — all-encompassing to minimal in volume — haphazard, circular, shaky and straight lines in movement. They harken to trying to get a dry pen flowing, aggressively scraping away information, nail scratches, leaks of water or blood and voluminous coffee stains.
The color palette for these brushstrokes demanded a haze; a vibe of visual heat. It couldn’t be the spring’s bloom in the heat of summer, but it could embrace a wide range of colors. Initially, I took the 311 colors of the springsand manually selected new versions for each individual color that felt hotter and more hazy. Largely, this meant a paler, lighter, bleached experience. However, the bleach was a bit heavy when using a random function to select colors. They didn’t always blend right, a winter storm would roll in causing a whiteout or the easter bunny would go too wild.
The spring palettes were either random or monochromatic, but ironically, the chaos of the summer needed a bit more control. I dialed back the color possibilities to 237 (for random selection of five or six in each work). I also defined thirty-five specific palettes to best represent the idea of the work. These palettes are titled with the coordinates of interesting, historical or conceptually-related places across the earth. My version of dark comedy is most apparent in the gray-toned palette, whose coordinates point to the largest cement plant in the world, one that crushes millions of tons of earth on the shores of Lake Michigan. The range of palettes is probably overkill, each palette will likely only be used twice, but the digital realm provides such a luxurious ability in color selection that I couldn’t resist.
Next was the gestalt. The gestalt is the earthly imprint found in the works. In the springs, the gestalt was the movement of the earth composed by dragging my physical paintings through the ocean. For the summer, the earth needed to have a louder voice within the chaos. It couldn’t be the subtle movements of the spring, it had to be more aggressive and larger scale. It had to be the visual dominance of the sky and the sea.
I mulled over the thousands of images I’d taken in the last decade. Skies and seas from Thailand to the Amazon, from Santa Barbara to Frankfurt. I searched for a range of patterns to create drama, variety and to engender a range of emotions. After editing and editing and editing, testing and testing and testing, twenty-one gestalts made the cut. Their titles are taken from Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach a novella that ponders the meaning of existence and the after-life through the eyes of a seagull exploring the outer limits of flight. Maybe this introspection becomes a necessity in the time of chaos? Maybe there is a way out, a portal to be found, an answer?
Dimensional portals played a large role in the spring. They served a dual purpose, they were hints to another dimension and hints to a reality controlled by a non-human source. One could jump through them or be conquered by them. That certainly needed a place in chaos too. The hope of an escape portal and the fear of machine dominance are all the more amplified with the summer heat.
As the earth is shifting, the portals are doing the same, they often tilt slightly off their axis. They are multiplying at a faster click. As with everything in the underpainting, they also melt away with the brushstrokes. Seeing the portals’ grayness melt into the other colors was a pleasant visual discovery that adds a bit of intensity to each palette’s coloration.
At this point in the build, the structure was now getting close, but chaos still needed a bit more wildness, discovery and unpredictability. Hence, chaosdives deeper with its version of Rorschach-esque composition manipulation. Certain chaos works are folded in a variety of linear combinations, the vertical being most akin to Rorschach’s. They turn clouds into ufos, water into black holes, portals into keyholes. They break the brushstrokes or reform them into geometrically perfect designs that harken to insects or bacteria. Seeing these folds go to work, I felt like the organism was really growing on its own, but that could just be my Rorschach-psychosis.
With all of these elements, the visual range of possible outcomes is wide. The spring was wide-ranged too, but mathematically, chaos has significantly more variety. Yet, it is an edition of 163 compared to the spring edition of 487 (this is the closest lucky prime to 1/3 of the volume). With chaos comes significant loss. Without loss, there wouldn’t have been panic. Unfortunately, to move humans en masse requires significant loss (or, in the future, hopefully, inspiration).
Physicality was unavoidable not just in the conceptual nature of the work, but also literally. The rising edition brings me back into the studio where I build the components myself: a print of each qualifying mint mounted on wood board, a hardcover compendium describing the process, and a sculpture (all housed in a custom crate, screen-printed and constructed by yours truly).
I design the book as a visual exploration of the process behind the work, it is then printed in Northern California with Edition One. The print is a pigment print on thick Hahnemühle paper, tacked to maple board and sprayed with a UV coating. The sculpture is a spin on the sculpture of the spring’s genesis edition. The genesis edition included a serpentine rock collected from Figueroa Mountain. The rising edition takes similar serpentine rocks and does what humans naturally would do to protect something (albeit ineffective): wrap it in a blanket. I roll porcelain clay, mold it around each green rock and place them in the kiln. One fascinating thing that occurs at high heat is that the rock turns from green to orange. Certainly appropriate for chaos’ summer haze, the rock’s color change mirrors a shift from spring to summer. I consider each component of the rising edition its own work of art.
When I screw the final rising edition crate shut, chaos will be complete. I’ll be left starring at the computer fearful of the burning temperatures soon to come again.
Hopefully we’ll survive to see the fall.
Both projects are available from Art Blocks