Ink Drop Drawing Timelapse Video

Check out this timelapse video of my ink wash drawing process:

 

Exploring Color

Here is a series of four untitled 15" x 11" acrylic paintings done on paper. These pieces were my reintroduction to the process of painting after considering the medium irrelevant to me for many years. I decided that I wanted to please the rods AND the cones in my eyeballs. Working atop a geometric sketch, I was mostly concerned with mixing colors from a limited palette and putting them next to each other in various combinations and working intuitively in a continuous feedback loop of painting and repainting until each image settled into a state of equilibrium.

These are a test to see if I really want to paint, and I do. From here on I will be painting larger and on canvas, which I refer to dorkily as the "fabric of space-time".

Water Lilies Ink Painting

Just a tentative title for this painting I did yesterday.

15" x11"

Ink Painting

Here's a detail of one just finished:
And below is a digitally recomposed version of the above image. It looks kind of like a brain. The actual piece is just a plain old oval.

Justin Bieber's Hair is Worth Every Penny

How much would his first pube be worth?! OMG!!

Sorry about all that, I just thought I'd get more hits that way, but I'm sure it will increase my bounce rate ten thousand-fold. This is a kind of Google Analytics test in a way. But Google knows this and may thwart me . ,. , ,. , . , . ,

Who cares about art, and especially this art? Five people, me included.

These first two images show the progress I made in three hours. I really want to make animations of these ink paintings because I think a time-lapse video would be really interesting in conjunction with a static final product.

detail:

Another painting at or nearing completion:

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This is a decent article:

http://the99percent.com/articles/6994/Inside-The-Painters-Studio?utm_source=Triggermail&utm_medium=email&utm_term=ALL&utm_campaign=MIH+Mar+2+2011

Spiky Sea Cucumber and friend

These two paintings are a slight departure from the consistent blob clusters I've been making by dropping ink into wetted triangles. This time I'm dropping ink into the corners of the triangles, and the overall forms are left unconnected, precarious, and spiky. I imagine them as diagrams or patterns that could be cut out and assembled into bulbous forms, like they are flattened polygons of computer generated 3-d Models.

I've spent some time looking at patterns for making Paper Models of Polyhedra, and I guess I'm more interested in the look and layouts of the flat patterns themselves than the 3D forms.
I'm tempted to cut out this bottom painting and try to make a paper sculpture, but maybe I'll do it with a digital print in the future.

Progress on my geometric blobby ink paintings

This first one I've been working on for awhile. I'm painting areas of the paper the same light ink wash over and over to make darker lines as they overlap, but the whole thing is pretty much the same gray from a distance. It's not quite what I had in mind, but since the progress is slow, I'll have time to readjust my technique as new ideas arise.

This next painting is made by dropping ink into lines of water. It's not quite done, but close enough for a picture. This is a new approach to making blobs out of geometric shapes, which are formed by long thin blobs.

I really enjoy using wet media, I feel like I'm working with the fluid dynamics that govern action in much of the cellular world.

closeup:
Three blobs, just finished:
In this next one I'm leaving white spaces, then filling them in, fractal-like. The pattern is something like a Sierpinski Triangle (also gasket, or sieve).

Here the paintings are laid out tile-like, as I think about a display method for showing some of them at Susan Maasch Fine Art in April, concurrent with my Division Series on display in the 2011 Portland Museum of Art Biennial. This reminds me of Cassie Jones' display for the 2010 Center For Maine Contemporary Art Biennial. I want to make several more in this series in the next few weeks, so I can choose five to seven of them to show.

new ink paintings

I just finished some india ink paintings I've been working on in preparation for Open Studios next week.

This is a detail of an ink painting on a 30" X 40" piece of paper:

This is ink dropped into wetted triangles on 22" x 30" paper:

This large painting is actually a practice piece done in preparation for a large (12 foot x 30 foot) wall painting I will be doing at Space Gallery in mid-December. I did this painting to test the brush size, gauge how much I could scale up the patterns I usually use, and estimate how much time something big will take to make. This probably took me 4 or 5 hours to make. I'll have 4 days to work on my wall painting, so I think I won't get overwhelmed, maybe just tired.

I'm in the picture for scale reference.

New ink painting

Here's a freshly dry ink painting on my drafting table. It's 22" x 30".

Finished drawing and my steamrolled print

I think of this as a drawing but it certainly skirts the line between a drawing and a painting. It seems painted because I used wet media exclusively, but doing it on paper in black and white makes it look like a drawing. Maybe it has more to do with using color or not, rather than based on wet or dry media, because people tend to "paint" with pastels. In the end it doesn't really matter to me what I call it, but I do plan on cropping it somehow and mounting it on a wood panel.

And here is one of the prints made on September 12th using a steamroller, printed on canvas 50" x 48" hanging up on my studio wall. A tentative title is The First Seven.

Cabinet

This is painted with acrylics on the backside of glass, like a window painting. It's 4.5" x 5.5". I've never painted on glass before and I thought my object project would translate well into real materials.

more "grown" forms

detail

I'm using some color again.

I'm doing a whole mess of paintings like this one. This is one of the random Haeckel-style pile paintings. Other drawings I've made of this type are more ordered. They are fun to make because the forms grow so unexpectedly. I just make branching lines grow evenly until there's no room left, then I stop. The lines end up competing, the stronger of them reach the limits of each form. I was skeptical about using color, but it really does help to focus on particular areas of interest. 

Small Paintings

Yesterday morning and this morning I got up early and started painting. I didn't have a plan, I just had a size (2.5 by 3.5 inches) and some watercolors. This is standard playing card size, also standard 'Art Card' size. Over a year ago I made about 30 similar paintings within 2 months and I haven't painted another one since yesterday. Having the experience of painting like this I know whatever I come up with will be okay. I don't trust that everything I do will be great, but I know from experience that there are certain pieces that need to get done on the path to better ones. I can't plan to make only the 'best' pieces. Lately my larger pieces have been black and white abstract art pieces. They look a lot like liquids mixing under a microscope. The little watercolors are made in a similar intuitive state of mind, but they are full of imagery, most of which is domestic- beds, toilets, gardens, kitchens, and people or anthropomorphic animals inhabiting cross-sectioned interior spaces. Castles, water, boats, fireplaces, whales, food, doors and ladders show up a lot as well. The diminutive size forces me to be more delicate than if I made the same paintings bigger. In some ways I can add more detail on a smaller area than on a bigger area, which is weird.