Overdue Blog Hop.

Firstly I'm really late with this, at least  I feel I am. With that out of the way on to business. 

I was taken aback, shocked and honoured to be asked by Dawn Diamantopoulos, to take part in a blog hop.  It's one of the best compliments to find out artists whose work  you admire, think the same of your work.  

As part of the blog hop I will introduce you to two other artists, who will continue the blog hop.

How does my creative process work?

One of the issues revolving around my work, is time. Time being a limited resource for me, means, that I can't afford to not work. So when I get blocked I paint through it and produce ALOT of chaff.

I've only recently made the commitment to work at my art full time and I'm still getting to know my creative process. When I'm painting in my 'Cave of Paint' as I have dubbed it, I produce work that is either intuitive or is randomly generated.  

My current method of working  focuses on a generative approach to creating art. Generative art means , for me at least, that a series of  randomly calculated variables are placed within an algorithm, which is then executed. My Procedural Paintings use this process. Most generative art is completed digitally, I like the perverse idea of working in a more analogue fashion. For my work I create algorithms that allow for a lot of randomness. If there is an artistic choice that can be made, such as the opacity of the paint or thickness of line, I turn it into a variable. 

I get into the details below which you can read or skip as you feel. I think I've made it fairly clear. I really need to do a video or something.

Procedural Paintings the ‘pseudo code.’

Before we start on this please remember all of the random variables are calculated by rolling dice.

This is an example of the ‘code’ I have used for my paintings in version 2.0. Each version has a different set of coding rules. I have stripped back some of the complexity of the ‘code ’ because the first draft was horrible to look at and just unreadable.

The first thing is to decide how many paintings will be in the series version. For that I roll 1d6 ( I roll 1, 6 sided dice) and consult table 1. Then I roll the dice that has been chosen. That will decide the number of painting s in the series.

For V2.0 I decided to use coloured grounds on each of the canvases. So for each canvas I rolled 1d8 and went to table 2.

Each painting consists of Layers, Stages and Steps. The Steps have 3 sections to them:

1. Direction -which can be either 4 points of movement or 8 (see table3)

2. Length – which is calculated using table 1 and rolling the specified dice for the value.

3. Thickness of brush stroke – see table 4 details of each brush stroke, its length, direction and thickness.

The stages are either linked together or separated based on an odds evens roll. Each new start point for a stage is a random point on the border of the painting. At each new start point of a stage the opacity and tonal values of the paint is randomised.

When all the stages in a layer have been completed. A random number of rectangles, the size , opacity and tonal values of which have been randomised.

The next layer and its stages and steps are painted over this, and so on until the last step has been followed.

Over the course of a painting mistakes will happen, I might misread a line and paint a step right 5cms instead of left. If this happens I follow the steps to the end of the stage for both the mistake and the correct series directions. The mistake is dry-brushed to highlight it as different.

I hope that is manages to clear up some of the process. If you need more clarification then please ask away.

(edit- I added the image below and the tables lost their format, so I  took a screen shot instead.)

The image below has the tables referred to in the text.

These are a few of the tables I use. My current iteration of the work has  gone ballistic with tables.

Procedural Painting V2.0.3, 22" x 18", Oil on canvas. 2014

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

I am trying to marry the digital world of algorithmic, generative art and glitches with the world of painting. Usually that would mean working in the digital realm, but my perverse nature and love affair with paint, means I'm doing the reverse and dragging the digital world into the plastic.  In away the process by which I work turns me into a machine, whose only function is to paint the lines as instructed.   

What's on my easel right now?

I've currently got about 5 paintings on the go, with countless others stacking up in my head. I swear if I could paint 24 hours a day for a year I'd still have too many paintings left to do.  I've been focused mainly on the two paintings here.

Of the other paintings I'm working on this is the most interesting. It is born of frustration and the impossible prisons of Piranesi.

Piranesi's frustrated pier. 80cm x 60cm, oil on canvas (WIP)

The first artist I'd like to introduce is Joshua Black. I find his use of typography really interesting, it's just the right amount of playful inventiveness and darkness for me. He uses -to my uninformed eyes at least- minimalism effectively. Just the right amount of detail to create a visually interesting space for your eye. His work also allows room for thought. He doesn't dictate how you think about and around his work.

The images below are from his 'Six word stories' series.   

The second artist is Benny Sweeny, an artist from my home town Omagh. His work is mostly mixed media, using paper and acrylic paint  among other materials. The work is a tumult of pattern, colour and shape, all of it competing for your attention. Yet at the same time it seem to have reached an equilibrium where the tensions are tenuously balanced. The work I've chosen to show is from his Concordia Series. 

Santa, Lines and Skulls.

It's been really hectic for me recently. Lots disruption to my normal work schedule. Which means I've not been as regular with these posts as I would like to be.  So enough whining about poor old me, "What have you been up to?" I hear you ask. Well the answer my friend is blowin' in the wind( a Scorpion reference always helps everything along.) The real answer lies below...(spooky)

I've been focusing on just two paintings lately which is really odd for me. Both works are significant to me, because I'm really trying to push and gel my ideas together. First up is my procedural painting from my last post. 

Procedural Painting  V3.1.2 20" x 20" Oil on Board. WIP

I'm trying to really make use of emergent properties with this series. See my blog hop for more details. As I work from a series of instructions for these paintings I inevitably make mistakes, but rather than get rid of my mistakes or 'glitches' I incorporate them into my work. The bottom right corner has a grey smear which was a misplaced square. It should have gone and has been placed correctly above near the top right corner. To highlight the glitch I circled it in black. The other circles and squares have come into being because of how the painting interacts with itself. (For example when lines from different layers cross, it creates a randomly located circle or rectangle, the properties of which are randomly generated as well.)

Next up is the latest in my Pattern Recognition series.   

Conways Loose and glitch life. Oil on Canvas WIP

Not much to tell you about this really other than it's really pushing my technical ability, I've set my heart on a particular finish for this piece. My problem is that I don't know if my skills are up to it. It will be both frustrating and fun to find out.  As a bonus you get to see parts of my Cave of  Paint. 

Procedurally painting.

Today was ACE. My time was limited as it always is, but I started a new Procedural work. I love these paintings, the only input I have creatively is the setup. I create the conditions for the paintings and allow the various elements of the piece to be calculated randomly. The process of painting them is great, I fall in love with a certain combination of brushstrokes and colours and in the next...um... 'brushstroke' it's painted over and my heartbreaks.   

The new procedural works are dealing with the idea of emergence. With in the algorithm for the works I allow for the artwork to generate its own structures. This means that when the elements of the painting (lines in this case) interact, they create new structures that were never included in the algorithm.

Below is a little series of images that show the progress on this work. This is the entire first layer, I have another 9 layers to paint.

Where the line crosses itself the tonal value is allowed to get darker or lighter. The little semi-circle in the last image shows where a mistake or 'glitch' was made. The fainter dry brush marks are the 'glitch' followed through to the end of the instructions.

Freshly Mined

I've had a tough day down the paint mine. Much of the work was just not happening. Ideas were not coalescing. I don't get much time to paint,(although it's getting better time wise) so when I get a day in my  cave of paint I don't want to waste it.

Rather than call it a day I painted through the non-painting stage. I came out the other side with a lot of duds and one or two gems. 

Gem one - a Work in Progress. I've titled it Piranesi's Frustrated Pier as it uses the composition of his 'Pier with Trophies' from his Prison etching series. 

Piranesi's Frustrated Pier, Oil on canvas, 80 cm x 60 cm. (WIP) 

Gem two- is part of my Procedural Painting Series. 

Procedural Painting V4.1.3,  Oil on canvas paper, 14" x 10". 

I'm off to Liverpool tomorrow and hopefully I'll be able to fix the duds on Thursday.