It now occurs to me that unless I determine to work no matter the extenuating circumstances, I will never get anything done, so I will work. Fred broke his foot. As an artist, practicing from home, while juggling the banal realities of having children, there is ALWAYS a complication: an illness, an injury, a day (or three) off of school for teacher in-services, a holiday. If I decide that these are going to interfere with my ability to complete a task, my tasks will never be complete. So I have chosen to let the children fight with one another and occupy their time as they like which generally means on screens, since that’s the (anti)social addiction of our times. In fact, it is, in part, what my art is about: the cost of technology. Clearly, there is a benefit to me: I have compliant zombies who leave me alone. It’s perfect for parents and totalitarians. I digress.
In spite of a kid requiring lots of attention with his broken foot and limited childcare thanks to a pandemic, I finished Generative Painting Study VIII and began preparing IX. VIII is all about complications (an unintended coincidence unrelated to the complications of the realities of my life). I began by complicating the work with big splotches of colors. I decided that for this work, the colors didn’t need to bear any relation to each other, except that they are all tonally near pastels. I also painted this work directly on prepared black gesso without an acrylic underlay. I kept the gesso fairly smooth, and it’s only two coats so the wood veneer of the panel texture comes through. It’s a successful piece: more interesting than the other generative paintings, and also more whimsical and playful. I used a loose fibonacci series for the line counts, which gives it nice visual structure. It feels like a more natural organization and patterning. As these works become less regular, with more variations, they become more interesting and beautiful. They are based in pattern, but chaos introduced purposely and accidentally leads to unpredictable outcomes. In addition to resolving better, this resonates superbly with the formal concept of the collection: the further away from perfect regularity and precision the works get, the more intriguing and beautiful. It is the same with nature versus human built algorithms which are overly simplistic and lifeless, even with machine learning. To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, we must think what we’re doing with technology. It seems to me that in a manmade quest to outdo nature, we are pursuing not death, but lifelessness, the outcome of which is entirely predictable.