Exponential Art...

My desire to create art, my artistic ability, and my availability of time do not line up. My desire is extremely high, my ideas are extremely conceptual, my ability is lacking, and I don’t always have the time available or I become distracted and switch to a different project before completion.

So it occurred to me in a stroke of madness that I should be focusing less on creating art, and focus on creating devices that make art for me. Yes. Now let me preface this with a few things:

1) I do not like automated or computer generated art
2) I don’t like robot art (art made by robots and art with robots as the subject (…for the most part, I saw Bender in this sketch that I liked))
3) I enjoy art that can be tailored to an individual somehow or is based on a set of constraints or determining factors that influence the outcome. Ephemeral, singular, and serendipitous
4) I want art that is in a series or some sort of progression
5) I very much enjoy color field art (Morris Louis, Barnett Newman, Kenneth Noland)

fig 1. Morris Louis

So I’ve devised in my mind and on no more than three pages of a three and a half inch by a five and a half inch Moleskine notebook a rudimentary schematic of how I will do this. I will need nearly all of the following materials:

1) A large amount of Copic markers across the color chart (http://copicmarker.com/)
2) Eighteen inch by twenty four inch paper, no more than 80 gsm
3) Lattice structure to hold markers
4) Wine (Bordeaux (Haut Medoc))
5) Time

So as you, the illustrious reader (…quite the appositive), have surely guessed I will be arranging the markers to be held in the lattice structure as individual pixels that will be pressed down upon 200 sheets of paper. Leaving the markers to bleed over time (I am thinking one month) the ink will continue to draw down into the depths and begin to blend together. Some colors will penetrate deeper, some will blend and some will not, and after a month I will have a progression of prints (a large amount that I will no doubt send to anyone interested) Yes.

But first I need to do some test and some trials. For the first trial I tried some pointillism work with five sheets bundled together and being manually held to the paper for only thirty seconds. I bundled the paper with this set of fun clips that were purchased at Blick Art Materials at around one forty today. They were more effective than fun. When I first started I was very deliberate with the color choice of each dot and spent too long thinking about the difference in color of lilac and pale lilac. Below are the results from the top sheet to the bottom (…Blackberry Bold 9800 1.8x zoom (flash?(I know…horrible picture quality as the real deal is really vibrant(I have a camera but lost the charger)))

So I was able to clearly get to four sheets with only mild color appearing on the fifth sheet. I like the overall aesthetic and particularly the comparison of sheet 2 with sheet 4. With ink traveling to sheet four without any problem at 30 seconds I am interested now to find out how far it will travel after one minute, ten minutes, and one hundred and forty seven minutes.