Whimsicality and spontaneity are pretty hard states and results to achieve in art. That is, when you try to line them up with the love of beauty and wonder. Beauty and wonder do require a sense of design and order to some degree or another. I haven’t measured that degree, but it does seem as if there is some intuitive knowledge there at least. It all has to seem effortless, too, which is a state one works oneself into after doing doodles, warmups, practice runs, and exercises.
This piece here achieved a result of such whimsicality and near total spontaneity that I felt it satisfied a certain, but deficiently defined, level of experiment and discovery for me. I have been trying to achieve this level ever since. But this image you see here is part of a larger image I titled Astonished Buoyancy for which I posted here a while back. Astonished Buoyancy is more suggestive of a large balloon in the foreground, whereas this image has the large foreground balloon cropped so that it looks more like the curved surface of a planet in space. There is still an orange balloon shape in the background at the upper part of this illustration however.
I just became thrilled with the nebula and clouds pervading the space around the objects, which add to the life, dimension, and mystery of the work. When I was physically drawing the drawing this image was derived from on a piece of paper, I made sure not to get overly preoccupied with the lines I was drawing for delineating the forms. This is what I feel is the whimsical aspect. The spontaneous aspect occurred in the filtering of the image as a whole in Photoshop as I altered the colors, did inversions, and executed sharpening effects. The neutral washes and background colors became even more emphasized and psychedelic as I worked on the piece.
What’s exciting about it to me is that, as I work throughout my entire process of creation for an illustration, both traditionally and electronically, space seems to always want to express itself as something more than mere flat emptiness. It always seems to want to express something more, something just beyond perception, beckoning me and you to explore further, to travel past the obvious and discover whatever it is past the fold, hill or cloud radiating from this particular window in time.
Specifications:
Title: The Curvilinear Traveller (version 1)
Source mediums: Water-based ink, alcohol-based marker altered by lacquer thinner and rubbing alcohol on paper, manipulated digitally with filters
Print medium: Hewlett Packard printer ink from Hewlett Packard DesignJet Z2100 printer on Hewlett Packard print paper (Note: print can be made with archival paper and printer if requested)
Digital manipulation completed: 9/20/2016
Dimensions of print: 25 inches by 24 inches
Number of limited edition prints: 25
Contact me: artofevan@hotmail.com
Art of eVan 