Just finished a show for Bellingham's First Friday Art Walk, which was hosted by Aaron Loveitt at Altility Art Studio. This project came about as an offshoot of my previous work in book format, taking the idea of the book and "exploding" it. The pieces form a cohesive collection that has allowed me to hone some drawing techniques, and expand on some thematic ideas that I've been working with. You'll see repetition, simplification, asymmetry, and imbalance.
The pentagon pyramids (pentamids) are organic meditations on line, angle and shading. I like doing them to challenge myself to create three dimensional geometry, and to practice a state of mind that feels like detachment and heightened focus. These are graphite and colored pencil.
The universe twists are meditations as well, but more so about fluidity, connection and entirety (as opposed to fractionality or partiality, as the pentamids illustrate). The twists are tricky to manage, because they shift and bulge as they are formed and need to be resolved and merged, so that they appear to never start and never end. This is my mobius strip, my infinity.
The woven sticks are a new addition to my visual repertoire, and I'm working towards an understanding of structure, whether it's physically possible or not. Drawing these overlapping objects gets me to wrap my mind around many small details at once, balanced with the attitude of starting in one small corner and radiating or rippling outwards, with the intention that things will resolve if I follow certain patterns.
Just so we're all clear: beauty is a perception. See more beauty. Feel more love. Now.
Layering is happening. Graphite under colored pencil is really cool. I like it, anyway.
The wood blocks are all hand cut, sanded, oiled and routed for easy wall mounting. They also all stand up, for display on mantles or shelves. They are the shape and weight of hardcover books, which has taken the exploded book idea one step further. The wood grain is a text, in a way, so the pieces as a collection is a representation of a single book that has been expanded to a set of encyclopedias.
