A LOOK INSIDE MY BRAIN

My thoughts and commentary on selections of my work.

The Spill Art Series
“Ej”, “In the Beginning”,
“Gateway to Shinto Temple”, and “Masked Carnival”

Spill Art describes itself. I spill diluted paint onto a fresh canvas and manipulate the canvas (by tilting, shaking, and striking it) to move the paint.

In my mind, Spill Art involves or engages one of my ideas about creating abstract art: to see the confluence and interchange between an artists influence and the force of serendipity in a work’s creation. It is a concept I’ve explored in my Flick Art, and in my use of plastic sheets to move paint over the canvas.

If you agree that an artist does not control everything about creating a work, then you may ask where does his control begin and end? What happens if you omit his input and let the “forces of creation” or whatever you wish to call them (divine intervention/invention perhaps?), “do their thing” (however you define that as well!). There are powers involved in creation that are, for me, hard to label, difficult to understand, and it is nearly impossible to describe their exact role in creation. But there are forces out there, of that much I am certain. I played a role in creating my work, but I cannot take 100% credit. And so I explore these ideas and surmises once again in Spill Art.

“Ej”

In “Ej” I drew black lines to represent an abstract human figure. The diluted paint covered some of the lines when spilled but I was able to control the movement enough to create the blocks of color and form the images I wanted. I then added thick lines of paint over the spilled paint. The images I obtained were not the images I had imagined but the results created one of my personal favorites.

“In the Beginning”

For “In the Beginning” I also drew in black lines to guide me in creating images but I also experimented with various dilutions of paint and the result was even more free form as the thicker paint obliterated the guidelines. I used thicker and thinner dilutions to create various textures and manipulate the images and produced an actual sense of creation, as I had intended, and thus also created the title.

“Gateway to Shinto Temple”

“Gateway to Shinto Temple” began with brushing the red gateway onto the canvas (most gateways are red), using scrapers to define the shape further and then adding the spill paint and manipulating it through the spaces of the gate defined by the red paint. I used scrapers to pull some paint to the edges because I could not continue tilting the canvas without covering the red gate image, and I wanted to completely cover the canvas. I began this work with the strong clear image of the gateway, which I had definitely and definitively created, and the spill paint suggested the context of movement, beckoning, and mystery in which the gateway is presented, aspects of which I had not fully anticipated.

“Masked Carnival”

I manipulated “Masked Carnival” the least of these paintings. Paint was spilled at different times over an initial toss of white paint, a pattern which included large circular drops. The colors stayed vivid and the white spaces became integral parts of the imagery, as opposed to the other spill paintings in which the white canvases are nearly completely covered. I believe the Carnival imagery is some of the most dramatic I’ve ever created, and you can see masks, being worn and having been discarded, throughout the piece.