Art of eVan

Note the pinpoints of organized light, like they are coming from the windows of a skyscraper working at night. Like there’s a story of workaholics to be told here. They were formed by a flooding technique I used that’s provided for users to use in Photoshop. Overlapping text can be determined—however inchoately—as composing the vertical and horizontal structures. It can’t be determined, however, whether if the larger text arising from the bottom to the middle of the picture is implying “services” or “devices.” In a larger, holistic context, devices perform services, so there is indeed some meaningful overlap there.

Usually I make and show images with a lot of color in them. This piece doesn’t meet that standard, so it is sort of an odd one for me. It still expresses a style I’d imagined and been inspired by. It achieves an apparently complicated and random background—sort of like white noise—but makes gestures towards order and implications towards meaning. It’s like a subconscious stew or alphabet soup. Perhaps I may develop some ideas playing with the shapes of letters and transforming them into aberrations of traditional letters as found in the English alphabet.

After reviewing this piece and preparing it for my online galleries, I am reminded of Maria Elena Vieira Da Silva’s art, and how it inspires me. I find this piece to be very similar to some of the paintings she produced. I’m not ashamed of that either. Usually I strive to be as original and independent as I can from other artists, but, with this piece, I feel it’s a model that only resembles Da Silva’s; and it acts as a stepping stone for me for inspirations of newer and even more original work.

I find this illustration to be rather top heavy due to the concentration of white points collected at the very top of the image. This vaguely annoyed me, and I wanted to add some space above that concentration. After looking at it for a few more moments, I decided to leave the canvas shape and size as it is. I find it to be an asymmetrical balance that creates tension, but not enough to be obnoxious. Moreover, I selected a rectangular shape in the lower left side of the picture plane, and darkened it slightly so that it differentiates to a slight darker shade from the rest of the dark grey background. It could be the silhouette or shadow of a building in the foreground in one’s imagination.

In putting this image together, I saw light casting out from a mechanical device. I thought of film, as in film for a traditional 20th century camera, and how it chemically forms images on its surface after being exposed to light. Then I thought of the primitive ritual art that cavemen made in prehistoric times on cave walls. I combined these thoughts in the title Cave Camera. 

I wanted to combine a futuristic robotic or computerized device with the idea of a caveman painting something on a cave wall along with light cast upon it so that the image can be seen with added special effects. Simultaneously, in a more contemporary time period, I see associations with a movie director and how movie directors set up movements in time to be filmed. Images capture moments in time, whether if they are more subjective, as in a painting, or more objective, as in a photograph. Movies capture movements in time, such as with films and videos. Movies used to be created by image frame stills in the 20th century. Many stills were linked together so that, when they quickly passed over a source of light, the images cast upon a wall or silver screen gave the illusion of movement. This surely would have been a magical experience for a caveman. 

I was inspired by some of these ideas by reading The Work of Art in the Mechanical Age of Reproduction, by Walter Benjamin, and Meditations on a Hobby Horse, by Ernst Gombrich. It seems like we are entering a dark age here in the Western world, so I have ideas now that reach back to the origins of art and why people made art in prehistoric times. I realize pretty much everything time related is cyclical, so, if we do end up collapsing our civilization all the way down to a dark age, it will only be temporary; temporary in a larger sense of time that is.

This image comes from three different sources of my art that I’ve blogged about before. One of which I’ve blogged about already—Astonished Buoyancy. Another image I blogged about here, Archimedes’ Light, is part of a larger drawing I made called Tree Fish, which is amalgamated into this illustration. A part of New York Station is also incorporated into this piece. My goal is to explore the varying degrees of approximation the different layers and sources have with one another as I form new images. They sometimes merge well as if they were all from the same source, and other times I can tell that its been put together. Either one of these perceptions is okay with me because I work with the new image enough to usually satisfy my visual field and sense of composition. 

In Meditations on a Hobby Horse, Ernst Gombrich discusses the idea of replacement, substitution, and surrogation. A hobby horse is meant as a substitution for a real live horse so that a kid can enjoy imagining riding a horse as he or she rocks back and forth on it. While this is an outdated idea today because kids don’t ride hobby horses in this day and age, it still represents the idea of substitution in art. In history, art has been a vehicle for representations of reality as people perceive it. More recently, art became a vehicle for representing an artist’s inner world and how he or she expresses it for the masses to represent a collective inner reality. That’s where I am at in my artistic endeavors. 

The layers of previous works that I’ve made introduced into new images and combinations are concepts I use to build in my imagination. These concepts are usually found in objects, people, places, or ideas. My art becomes a subtle substitution for a multiplicity of things. I aim to create eye food for you. Something to help you organize your mind. 

Specifications:

Title: Cave Camera (version 1)

Source mediums: Water-based ink, and ball-point pen, on paper, digitally combined

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: 9/3/2017

Dimensions of print: 32 inches by 28 inches

Number of limited edition prints: 25

Investment of print not framed: $90.00

Investment of print framed with glass: $430.00 (shipping included)

Contact me: artofevan@hotmail.com

I made the foundation for this image back in June, 2017. It’s a selection from the piece I posted and blogged about then titled Supplant. I titled this selection June Joinder. Three lines are joining a circular fiducial marker structure in the center lower left. They look like they could be composed of metal. They also make me think of some alien technology doing measurements on some earthly plant life as they scan a selection of organic matter.

Anyway, I had fun introducing a drawing I’d done earlier this summer with marker and ball-point pen on a manilla folder into a background of organic plant matter. The plant matter is just weeds I gathered from the backyard and scanned into digital documents. It’s the idea of every little detail being observed by an adjoined point of sense.

I’m noticing I’m taking a path opposite of the trending pop art craze. I read an article recently showing that people are looking at contemporary art in museums and galleries a lot more currently than they are looking at the more classical art movements. Even impressionism and post-impressionism are being ignored more by the younger generations.

Compared to the more classical art styles and movements, contemporary art is generally more simple in content, detail, and composition. Pop art is, of course, a great representative of contemporary art. I see pop art everywhere I look in current culture and society. I know what purpose pop art serves. It doesn’t require people to think, contemplate, and discover. It’s all just surface.

I just know from my own experience that anything my mind has to work at to understand frequently discourages doing so. There’s always so many more things my mind can consume that are easier to understand. A new word I don’t know, while I’m reading something, can often trip me up and discourage me from reading further. I surmise that this is generally the case with others.

But now that “the world” is a handheld device, it’s so easy to look a word up. And I often do so. I just gave that example in the above paragraph to describe a common challenge we all experience as mortals with limited abilities and resources. I think our current educational system and fast-paced world discourage noticing subtle nuances and details in our surroundings because so much information usually doesn’t serve someone else’s purpose.

So with my art, I put a lot of detail and nuance back into the picture plane. I want to encourage sensitivity to things usually ignored. I like how, over time, nature and natural forces overcome manmade things—including pop art. Pop art can be found in amusement parks and carnivals. I like imagining visiting an abandoned amusement park in the future that has been overtaken, to an artistic degree, by natural entropic forces.

Many pop artists like the mockery and worship pop art makes of itself. They seem to enjoy the irony of it, while profiting off the cultures of dumbshits educated to ignore vast experiences of nuanced perceptions. I like the impersonal mockery time and nature make of securely established elite pop artists and their pop art.

Specifications:

Title: June Joinder (version 4)

Source mediums: Ball-point pen on manilla folder digitally combined with digitally scanned organic plant matter

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: 8/10/2017

Dimensions of print: 30 inches by 25 inches

Number of limited edition prints: 25

Investment of print not framed: $85.00

Investment of print framed: $425.00 (shipping included)

Contact me: artofevan@hotmail.com