Tic Tac Toe was a mess. This 40″ by 56″ foam painting was colorful, but wrongly so. The smiley faces were in yellow, the mugs in violet and the grid in a mixture of the two colors, all set upon a motley background pretending to whiteness. With nothing to lose I blanked out the ground and blackened the figures. Most of the distractions are gone, allowing the basic question to be asked.
Posts by Jay
A Little Help Here
Parked about the place, doing a slow burn, has been a dubious project. It is a deconstruction of sorts wherein an ordered and functional format is scrambled.
It contains the elements of a compass including a round face. The letters designating the cardinal directions, however, are congregated in a pattern that is more self-referential than indicative of a greater orientation. The needle sits idly by, with no particular functional opportunities, or sense of direction.
Still Here
Months have passed since I posted anything. Like others I have been distracted by a number of competing priorities, but have kept my hand in as much as possible.
The affair with plastic as a medium continues – in fact has perhaps gone over the edge a little bit – as I buy all manner of absurd plexiglass which now threatens to take up all available space.
My initial work with plastic in trying to put out a clean product, continues. Added to this are experiments with a happy-go-lucky kind of drape forming, which is something of an antithesis, or complement, to an otherwise obsessive concern for smooth surfaces and clean edges. The drape forming is a primitive exercise in laying plexiglass sheeting over a variety of shapes and blasting it with a sizable propane burner. The plastic sags and bubbles in the flame and assumes some semblance of the underlying structure.
In this instance I obtained a waffle pattern from an old louvered door. Some colored varnish was dropped into the grooves. When this had hardened I then painted the back in silver. While nothing in particular was anticipated with the exercise, I found a hybrid effect that recalls a sort of medical metallica interspersed with a sense of bubble-wrapped bodily fluids. Sometimes keeping to an intended path and not being drawn off by such happenstance can be most difficult.
Modest Progress with the Spindle Series
I’ve shown the likes of these previously. The going has been slow as I have had to sort through a lot of possibilities and pick up some skills. One thing remains unchanged as I am still stacking balanced elements on a common axis.
The summer a year ago I had stepped back from a somewhat futile campaign in which I had played around with wood lath. The results were fairly weak, but some directions were indicated. Then I discovered plastic with its many options. In fact, I have found that the variety of visual effects – transparencies, mirrors, colors – can resemble a candy store and I have had to restrain myself.
Blue
As many of you know, I have this thing for low solar angles. This is a sheet of acrylic in its protective layers that I casually placed on the back porch. It reflects little while transmitting a softened and generalized view of things beyond, including the combined image and shadow of a mop handle. The nice blue is the color of the protective material. Really, no issues to discuss – I just thought you’d like to see this.
And
This touches lightly upon some of our prior discussions.
I wanted to compare an Albers “Homage To The Square” iteration to a similar, but mechanical version as rendered in Adobe Illustrator.
The Albers image was chosen because it appears that he was trying for a gradation in a single hue. I lifted from a site where it is being offered as a poster. Therefore, it may be chromatically inaccurate – but what hey.
I created a replica of the outer limits and the innermost rectilinear shape in their respective relationships. I then sampled the poster for the colors of the outermost and innermost elements and then blended the elements, calling for one interim shape.
Obviously the interim shape is at issue. The Illustrator version splits the difference in size between inner and outer, as it does the color. Not so with Albers who made the interim more imposing in size and saturation, and to my eye it looks a whole lot better.
Cheap, Easy and Maybe Just Wrong
Bruce Marsh Commented on Josef Albers in reference a recent post on Giorgio Morandi. He presented the challenge of finding three colors that would create the sense of two colors overlapping – if I understand correctly. It made me wonder if this daunting task could be automatically solved by the computer.
I heid to my Adobe Illustrator and drew two identical rectangles. One I colored green and the other a lavendar. I rendered both 50% transparent and slid one rectangle partially over the other. This created an intermediate hue; the rectangles acting like translucent panes. I then rearranged the panes by sending one back, and where the intermediate hue had been a green over lavendar, the new effect was lavendar over green. Overdoing it, I then introduced a offset shadow effect, which created the appearance of actual translucent objects. Not done, I tried red and yellow at a greater opacity.
Would Albers – having been kept ignorant of the means employed – approved?
