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In this piece, I’m looking for shapes that arise from combining two or more individual works together into one piece. Interesting, unexpected results arise from my playful experimentations. It reminds me of community billboards on college campuses outside. There are so many pieces of paper stapled on top of layers of previously posted pieces of paper, and they all have different degrees of erosion and decomposition having been exposed to the weather.

I used New Morals, the piece I recently posted, and Interleukin, the piece that began my ball-point pen Micro-Chimerisms project back in 2008 in this amalgamation. This work looks like it’s been aggressively dealt with by someone or some force that was ruthless enough to scrape over it leaving it in the state that you see now. Perhaps the person who ran roughshod over it was interrupted by another person or force and was left laying in the condition you see here.

Anyway, the force that left it—be it nature or human—I imagine left it as a mess with an intriguing design; unintended, of course. Though I ultimately made this image, I still sometimes like imagining stories behind what created them in order to generate more amusement, excitement and wonder. Maybe a combination of weather and a manual laborer worked there impersonal energies upon this picture plane. One could almost imagine that this is a bird’s eye view of a worksite where piles of dirt rest waiting for laborers to shovel them into wheel barrows and make deliveries to other areas. Meanwhile, stages of snow, rain, and wind visit the site every so often, and leave it slightly more tattered than before.

I titled this piece Oriole Radiation because it looks like something is emitting or radiating from the yellow lips near the lower left of the picture plane. An oriole is a colorful bird found in the Midwest and Northeastern states of the US. I thought it was fitting because they are song birds who sing in the Spring, thus radiating sweet chirps and warbles. Oriole is similar to the word “oral.” I was going to use the word oral, but then I decided to word associate it with oriole. Maybe the message here is a beautiful cry for help.

The quadruple pinwheeling pisciforms compose the background forces of this eidolon. They seem so dominant and bold with their colors that they are fighting with the cool light blue foreground design. Intentional or not, it is what it is, and, overall, it works together in an orderly structure. I did leave clues of the squared off graph sketch I made in preparation for the original drawing, which is Happy Zephyrs.

I titled this piece Annulus to signify the light blue shape right in the middle of the picture plane, which looks like a waistline with a belt around it. Annulus is an Arabian word for ring. I learned of that while reviewing the structures of the heart and the aortic arch connecting to the heart.

Inversions, flips, reversals, hue warping, and combining two individual drawings into one piece is what this one’s about. The blue foreground design comes from a piece I did several months ago called Growing Independents. Obviously there’s a political message in that title. Perhaps this one’s alternate title could be Merging Independents to signify the growing awareness that partisan politics, in the traditional sense, are just empty marketing jingoisms.

It takes active oppositional forces for change to start significantly altering superstructures of state. The cool blue design in the foreground can be seen as a relief to the growing heat and tension arising in the background… for now. Its icy and fragile structure will soon give way to the full blown revolution of the zephyrs and proletariats blowing like empty potato chips bags in the background.

Certain patterns must accumulate certain amounts of energy by accomplishing enumerable repetitions, much like the running legs of a jogger, or the curls of a weight lifter. In art, exhaustive oceans of intricate design can come together to make greater coherent wholes, and the transmute into different structures frequently. I captured a certain state here.

An interesting aspect to digital, in contrast to traditional art, is that it never decomposes, deteriorates, or entropies. A piece of art online forever remains the same. I wondered to myself how deterioration, or corruption, could happen to art in the cyber-world. Viruses can corrupt files I thought, and I’ve seen examples art mapped from computer viruses that artists have created before, but these aren’t caused by the forces of time; they’re caused by human factors.

I still wonder how time can deteriorate art seen online. I suppose a computer can become so old that it might distort an image, but it wouldn’t be the internet itself that deteriorates the image. Again, I come the idea that perhaps, if the internet were to be accessible to us indefinitely from now on, the art found on it would never get old, fade, scratch, or decompose. Perhaps it is only the sensory modulators—natural or digital—that corrupt and entropy over time and not that which is perceived. Perhaps we and everything around us is contained in compressed learning experiences that are really artificial in the greater scheme of things, and timelessness exists past the barriers of our physically indoctrinated perceptions.

The media used for this piece is nothing new to art. Collages and assemblages have been used by artists since the early twentieth century. There may even be instances before the 20th century as well where craftspeople used readymade printed on paper and objects to construct images or sculptures. The shifting paradigms around art in the 20th century, however, allowed for collages and assemblages to be conceived for acceptance to wider appeal.

Moreover, the techniques I used to give this piece it’s weathered and scraped look is nothing new to art. In fact, the distressed technique in the kitsch and decorative arts have been well established for a number of years now. So I don’t necessarily feel that original in this way with regard to this piece.

I suppose one thing that comes to mind is the reversal of the text so that it semi-illegibly hints at something a little more original, but even that technique is well-worn by many artists. I do, however, enjoy the subliminal, creative, and suggestive aspects of mixing words and letters up. This technique, of course, originates from William S. Burroughs, an author from, again, the 20th century.

In my review of assemblages and collages, the artists I can think of right now who were the originators of them are Robert Rauschenberg, Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst, and many other Dadaists and surrealists. I suppose my fascination with these art forms is found in their recyclable qualities, and their suggestions to re-use found objects & periodicals for irrational reasons. I’m repelled and drawn to these modern day kitsch, arts & crafts, scrap-booking art-forms simultaneously.

I’m repelled by scrap-book art because it’s so common now-a-days, but I’m attracted to it because it dovetails with my life-long efforts to create mosaic and mosaic-like art. From my Wrecked Tangles series, on back to my first serious oil painting I did in high-school called Memory (which was based on a Byzantine mosaic my teacher showed me from a Smithsonian magazine) my art, to a large degree, experiments with particles and pieces joined together to form greater wholes, or gestalts. I suppose on a more basic level, I’m dealing with primary syzygies, such as matter and space, light and dark, male and female, etc.

I’m just developing my own ideas using the available ideas I’ve learned from previous artists and giving them my own energy, my own style, my own perception. I sometimes feel glad to explain what I’m doing with my art by blogging about it, and other times, I feel irritated because I can’t think of anything to say. I usually surprise myself, however, when I start typing about the first thing or two that comes to my mind when I prepare for posting a piece online.

I titled this piece New Morals as a para-association from the flipped and reversed text in the picture. Specifically, the word “world,” which can be seen in the upper right corner of the picture, looks like it could almost begin to spell the word “moral,” as it has the first three letters m-o-r in it (the letter “w” flipped is “m”). The coy look of a woman’s eyes and lips can be seen blending with the off-white of the paper of the various pages with text I glued on to the original media.

Perhaps what this crafty title could be suggesting is the new morals that shall be developed in the 21st century cyber-age. I recommend reading Jacques Derrida’s philosophy about writing and language. He indicates the mercurial and contradictory nature of words and writing in his philosophy of deconstructionism. Words and writing are intended to put into stone that which is rapidly processing and quickly flowing through our minds in streams of consciousness. Words, letters, and writing are really like small windows through which one can look to see only part of a landscape. Furthermore, that landscape is always in a state of change, no matter how slow.

It looks like leaves, feathers, and zephyrs swirling and undulating around nebulae up in the sky as a person from a different time on earth gazes upwards. Of course such perceptions are imagined as bold. This because of the lack of city lights in that time. Who knows what year it is? Who cares? When one is lost in the beauty, mystery, and awesomeness of this unfathomable universe or the next, one loses meaningless needs to measure and compare.

Well, I still like having my rational mind about me, and even sharpening it for a better understanding of my surroundings, things, and people. It’s just nice to take flights of fancy into incredible reveries so that I can capture a few of their elements in drawings and writings.

I just finished a new drawing I call Happy Zephyrs. While this is not that drawing—and I haven’t posted it on my Art of eVan blog yet—it does have elements of Happy Zephyrs embedded in it. There’s no hidden text in this piece, so don’t concern yourself with sublime communications. I titled it Storm of Dark Matter.

This electronic illustration makes me think of peering up into space. Or, perhaps—I imagine—I am in space, traveling around in it on the outskirts of galactic clusters, penetrating the folds of dark matter (whatever that is) and taking snap-shots of what I see. Because, really, astrophysicists don’t even know what dark matter is, but they do know something more permeates our universe because of the amount of stuff measured in it as compared to what we can see.

This piece makes me think of the Hopi Indians, and how they left artistic markings in stones consisting of characters and spiral formations. I imagine the Hopis looked into the night sky often and let themselves unleash with wonder, awe, and imagination. It is indeed energizing to feel the unseen properties and elements of space and time. Rather like waves lapping on a shore of consciousness and audible conch shells in a backwater location.

In my sketching of new ideas, I’ve been exploring trebeculations interconnecting irregularly, and then adding convolutions and spirals to them. So it’s a play on straight and curved lines really, which makes me think of bitmap and vector imagery combined into one level of a fractal snapshot. Like nautilus shells placed in open boxes so that one can put them together as a piece of art and hang them on the wall.