Progress Interrupti

We interrupt the regularly scheduled art work to spend time whacking on a keyboard writing a paper. Art making will commence in 24 hours.

Moving Forward

I just keep moving forward. Keep printing, keep cutting, keep sticking, keep trimming, keep scraping, keep placing, keep moving, keep arranging, keep thinking.

Making Success out of Failure

Following one of my image transfer failures, I had an image that was printed on acetate that had all of these circles on it. I decided to use that print as a negative for making a new image. This has prompted someone to ask about the significance of the circles. They seem to be in a lot of what I am doing this semester. 

• Running in Circles
• Endless Circle
• Circular Argument
• Vicious Circle
• Perfect Circle
• Balance/Unbalance
• Circle of Life
• Circular Thought
• Balls - Weight
• Bubbles - Floating - Weightless
• Holes - Missing
• Never Fit Together - Always Gaps

In Progress

Plugging along at this. It is a somewhat tedious process to transfer the image to the discs, but the resulting disc looks very cool. I haven't started mounting any of these to the acrylic rods yet, as I need to figure out the background structure. I'm not sure that I am keen on the white box (although it does set off the disc nicely), but if I can backlight the disc with an LED inserted into the back end of the rod, then I might go with black background. My original idea was to mount the whole thing on acrylic so that it didn't appear to have a background, but the more I worked on these, the more I realized that the placement of the discs within the frame was significant. Remove the frame and you remove that element.

Hey Failure, Screw Off.

So, they say that you learn more from your failures than from your successes. True enough.

KAPOW! Take that Failure! Bite me.

More Miserable Failures

This is all of the ink and acrylic that I am scraping off of my acrylic discs with a razor blade because I can't get this to work yet. No matter how long I leave it, it just won't dry because (I think) that there is just no where for the moisture to go because it is sealed in between two layers of plastic (the acrylic disc and the acetate print). Of course, once I peel the sandwich apart it is dry in less than five minutes, which is why I am spending all day scraping the discs with a razor blade.

Better by Mistake

A pile of acrylic discs on the work table getting ready for attempt an image transfer to the disc.

Just laying out the discs in a rough arrangement trying to get some ideas for the first layer.

The first disc that I attempted to transfer onto. Failure. But lessons learned. I am more confident that my technique will work, but I have to give it a few tweaks, including being more patient.

Kismet?

Sometimes, if you let it, life will put what you need right in front of you. A large section of my last paper was devoted to David Hockney, as I am researching artists that take images apart and then put them back together. Flea Market, 25 cents. 1982 Polaroid Close-Up, featuring........David Hockney. Lesson: Don't close your eyes to what is right in front of you.

Yes, I am Still Doing Stuff...

Each section is 12" x 12" and hand stitched together with that twine using a giant needle that I carved out of a stick. Right now it is 3' x 3', but I have 15 more sections to stitch on. I just didn't want anyone to think I had fallen asleep under a tree or something.

Video Inspiration