Santa, Lines and Skulls.

It's been really hectic for me recently. Lots disruption to my normal work schedule. Which means I've not been as regular with these posts as I would like to be.  So enough whining about poor old me, "What have you been up to?" I hear you ask. Well the answer my friend is blowin' in the wind( a Scorpion reference always helps everything along.) The real answer lies below...(spooky)

I've been focusing on just two paintings lately which is really odd for me. Both works are significant to me, because I'm really trying to push and gel my ideas together. First up is my procedural painting from my last post. 

Procedural Painting  V3.1.2 20" x 20" Oil on Board. WIP

I'm trying to really make use of emergent properties with this series. See my blog hop for more details. As I work from a series of instructions for these paintings I inevitably make mistakes, but rather than get rid of my mistakes or 'glitches' I incorporate them into my work. The bottom right corner has a grey smear which was a misplaced square. It should have gone and has been placed correctly above near the top right corner. To highlight the glitch I circled it in black. The other circles and squares have come into being because of how the painting interacts with itself. (For example when lines from different layers cross, it creates a randomly located circle or rectangle, the properties of which are randomly generated as well.)

Next up is the latest in my Pattern Recognition series.   

Conways Loose and glitch life. Oil on Canvas WIP

Not much to tell you about this really other than it's really pushing my technical ability, I've set my heart on a particular finish for this piece. My problem is that I don't know if my skills are up to it. It will be both frustrating and fun to find out.  As a bonus you get to see parts of my Cave of  Paint. 

Procedurally painting.

Today was ACE. My time was limited as it always is, but I started a new Procedural work. I love these paintings, the only input I have creatively is the setup. I create the conditions for the paintings and allow the various elements of the piece to be calculated randomly. The process of painting them is great, I fall in love with a certain combination of brushstrokes and colours and in the next...um... 'brushstroke' it's painted over and my heartbreaks.   

The new procedural works are dealing with the idea of emergence. With in the algorithm for the works I allow for the artwork to generate its own structures. This means that when the elements of the painting (lines in this case) interact, they create new structures that were never included in the algorithm.

Below is a little series of images that show the progress on this work. This is the entire first layer, I have another 9 layers to paint.

Where the line crosses itself the tonal value is allowed to get darker or lighter. The little semi-circle in the last image shows where a mistake or 'glitch' was made. The fainter dry brush marks are the 'glitch' followed through to the end of the instructions.

Freshly Mined

I've had a tough day down the paint mine. Much of the work was just not happening. Ideas were not coalescing. I don't get much time to paint,(although it's getting better time wise) so when I get a day in my  cave of paint I don't want to waste it.

Rather than call it a day I painted through the non-painting stage. I came out the other side with a lot of duds and one or two gems. 

Gem one - a Work in Progress. I've titled it Piranesi's Frustrated Pier as it uses the composition of his 'Pier with Trophies' from his Prison etching series. 

Piranesi's Frustrated Pier, Oil on canvas, 80 cm x 60 cm. (WIP) 

Gem two- is part of my Procedural Painting Series. 

Procedural Painting V4.1.3,  Oil on canvas paper, 14" x 10". 

I'm off to Liverpool tomorrow and hopefully I'll be able to fix the duds on Thursday.

Spelunking in the cave of paint

I finally got to clamber back in to my paint cave today. Two weeks off from painting and I was going feral. I mean it. I love my kids but two weeks of constant child care and no painting was too much. I had a blast painting. I was manically happy by the end.  

Selfie OverWritten by circles, (WIP) oil on board, x cm x xcm 

I the reason I have so many works in progress is because I like to work on a LOT of ideas at once. These are a few of the works I've been daubing today.  

Curling Union, Oil on canvas paper. 14" x 10"

The title Curling Union will change maybe. I've got more layers to add and more details like lines. 

Conway's Loose Life,  (WIP) Oil on canvas, 80 cm x 60 cm

The image below is part of my Pattern Recognition series. The binary background in is from the hexadecimal information from a photograph of my lovely visage. I've used the binary to seed for a very loose version of Conway's Game of life