Modern Art

My roommate surprised me today by getting into the thing-a-day spirit in a big way! Last year she went to an exhibition at the Guggenheim by Julie Mehretu. We have a sadly empty wall over our fireplace mantle, and she decided we needed to make something to fill the void. Hers is coming along nicely (she doesn’t have the single day constraint, and has decided to finish tomorrow). Mine suffered some setbacks earlier, but I think turned out ok. I used some cutouts from the books I bought for some earlier thing-a-days, covered in a mix of gesso and decoupage for a base. Over that I painted various triangular patches of color. On top of that I drew a series of ruled lines, and on top of that I free handed some curves with a sumi-e brush. This is where I think I went off the deep end… free handing is not a thing I am good at. So, over top of that mess, I layers some more gesso/decoupage mix, creating a semi-opaque overlay. On top of that, I again used a brush pen and sumi-e ink (this time with the help of some curved objects as guides) to create a network of lines. Finally, I painted a series of color fields using nail polish.

You might ask why I did all this by hand. Wouldn’t it have been far easier for me to write a script in Rhino to make some 3D curved lines, perhaps with their density based on distance to some seed geometry, and dived onto layers by distance from the camera. Then to simply call make2d on this geometry and plot the thing on my craft robo pro. Well, it would have been. But I never manage to do things the easy way.