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.

Studio progress

Here's an image of a corner of my new studio. This is where I plaster every inch of wall space with unframed finished drawings above and things not yet finished below (so I can reach them and modify them). A ten foot ceiling is a great luxury I'm not used to and I want to take advantage of it. At the bottom is my block in progress for the Block Party on September 11th. Looking at the block this way, rolled with india ink to actually see how it will look printed, I may want to preserve the look of the rolled edges messy and varying in value. It looks like a gravestone rubbing, which is exactly how my similar looking graphite drawings in the Division and Vergence series' were made- by impressing the paper with a hard pencil, then rubbing over that with softer graphite.

Friday Workplace

the new chemistry including thermostat