"I breathe black and white day and night".
Captain Beefheart Mark making is fundamental, in that it occurs in more than one direction. Internally drawing on inspiration and externally conjuring traces yet to be fully realized but always at hand. I work from a collection of notes, scraps and doodles, collected over months and reworked, organized and traced in a pact with a digital interface. Each sketch begins as a separate component (mountain, river, tree, chimera, growth, glow, etc) that finally finds itself remapped on to the open ended plateau of desktop divination. Modern vector programs give the user a power to traverse a new landscape of possibility not unlike the bed ridden Mattise and his cut outs. Yet due to the exploitation of Automatic motifs the final graphic / illustration is always open ended and liquid. From the many different parts the conclusion is a nausea of the re-imagined where "figures in a landscape" transmit as broken. The blueprint is a mental impression incomplete and made ambiguous tempting the question of whether art digitized is able to speak of its essence. And if so how, what, and belonging to whom? I tend to work with hand printed output because I think it furthers this incoherence and in order to return something of the truth in the hand/made. But of course its imprints are no more to be understood as "before", so left behind is something of the struggle to regain control of this loss. Hence the references to superhero comics, anime and sci-fi. Further to this Rammelzee, Bacon, Ernst, and Free Jazz are influences that have helped deepen me in this investigation of the eternal sketch. |