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.

Snow Day= Studio Day

I didn't have to work in the optical lab today, so I had a chance to work in the studio and make two new graphite drawings. I actually like the narrow focus detail images more than the actual pieces. They give a sense of what I was seeing as I drew, my nose 3 inches from the paper. I like not being able to see the whole thing, up close they seem more immersive to me.

As I was drawing, I imagined that I was making maps for some imaginary landscape, and each line was a road or pathway connecting possible destinations. The changes in density could relate to population.

Here's the second one:


Anyway, I'm glad I have this blog so I can share things like this the same day they're made. In a week I might hate these and they may or may not ever be seen in public.