I managed to find more time than expected to work last week, and even took the boys for an afternoon on the beach in the warm weather. It was refreshing to get out in the waves, feel the soft sand, and we were all amazed by the enormous jellyfish washed ashore. I liked the jellies less in the water. When I was a kid on a trip to Florida, I was stung by a jellyfish. It was both unpleasantly painful and really weird: my legs started stinging from out of nowhere, and when I got out of the Atlantic, there were red marks in perfect lines where I’d been stung by jellyfish tentacles. In any case, we all avoided a similar fate, and the break from monotony made the following day, when the boys were back in school, extremely productive. I formed my silver Bloom brooch in the studio, and came home to put the beginning color block background onto Generative Line Study IX.
For Generative Study IX, I decided to complicate the background further than the others, and found inspiration in the hand-painted color block wall advertising of the sort I saw most recently in Houston. I’ve always loved the bold graphic colors and relaxed lines: they are playful and intuitive, embracing imperfections that lend character to otherwise formal shapes. It is apparent that there is a person behind this type of work. Because the generative studies are about exuberant imperfect humanity versus cold perfection in inhuman technology, this graphic style feels well suited to become a platform for the generative lines.
This is also my last piece of reclaimed MDF for the generative studies, and it feels like a good end point for the group for now. I’d like to get the Protoa series properly underway and start on another collection. I have a new concept for exploration. As I’ve been researching concepts of humanity and the Anthropocene Epoch, it occurred to me that I would like to mark this time of mass extinction with a project. It will start with a list of species recently gone extinct and another list on the brink. Creating the lists reminds me of two works of memorial: Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial and the Holocaust memorial in Prague’s old synagogue where the names of all of Prague’s Jews who were executed is painted on the walls: thousands of names in small painted letters covering all of the walls of a large building. It is very shocking and displays the magnitude of what happened. I believe we need this now to address life in the process of decimation by human activity. One of the questions of this is where to start in terms of time. The dawn of industrialization seems appropriate, though post WWII could lean into the military-industrial age, or beginning at the 21st century may work for its immediacy. Somehow, going farther back seems like it has the potential to create variance between what once was and what now is. Maybe it should be graphed too: extinctions v. time.
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