Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about the illusory nature of art. Also the broad application of art as used by the human species. I’ll be impressionistic with my notation here. I notice things in different fields of study, activity, history, and observation and I connect them together. This is one of my strengths—ideation—as defined by Gallup’s Talent Assessment Test. Being an artist helps me see relationships and connect disparate parts as I highlight and explain the connections.
The Ancient Chinese philosopher of war, Sun Tzu, noted in one of his passages of wisdom “appear weak when you are strong, and appear strong when you are weak.” So, right here, I see the connection between war and art. The connection is that art mimes, imitates, and even mocks reality, and war capitalizes on the mistakes opponents make in assessing the rapidly changing contours of reality.
The Op Art movement from the 20th century manipulated illusions of perspective and played with tricks of visual perception that created illusions of movement and tension. This movement stemmed from Modern Art in general whose revolution was born in the 19th century with masters like Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cezanne. More specifically, Op Art seems to have at least been inspired by Hans Hoffman and his ideas about intervals of tension between shapes and colors as they “stacked” upon each other on a two dimensional surface.
Collectively, we have taken illusion to an entirely new universe called the cyber domain, which adds a dimension that both destroys and accelerates creativity. The amount of diversion found in the galaxies of clickbait and casino modeled slot machine social media destroys creativity in my opinion. But this is all due to the predation on the weaknesses of human passions and lack of discipline training. Luckily, with the artist who has a tenacious vision, these time consuming, life wasting passions are cast aside for self transfixing creative endeavors.
In my piece that I present to you presently in your handheld or home computer world, I suggest nascently what I described in the previous paragraphs. I’m creating tension for the eye between the red and green colors used for the left and right sides of the picture. I also employ illusions and distortions of perspective with the roughly drawn circuit like lines encompassing and networking the shapes. The shapes look like electrical tops spinning remotely by wi-fi controllers on a split tabletop. I intentionally added the misprints, smudges, and ink debris to the surface to give it a slightly uncalibrated early 20th century printmaking machine character.
The media used are colored pencil, Schneider pens, ballpoint pens, oil transfer printing, gauche, and water discolored with old bits of India ink and charcoal. The title, W.E.F.U. Ough Ough, seems to suggest world economic fuck off, off, off (as in, someone coughing).
Art of eVan 