PAINT GRAFTS

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Bring out 'nothing' from something. this most foolish of creative impulses took me on a journey not unlike that of the Ouroboros eating its tail. With the first Paint Graft, I scraped paint globs of the palette from a previous work and photographed the glob from various viewpoints in order to model its sculptural form in 3d CAD. Once that was done, I projected the image of the glob onto the 3d CAD model and printed the result out on canvas. Then I painted over the image with the constituent colors of the original paint glob. This painting about the form of paint felt incomplete--by trying to layer so many forms of documentation about a thing onto itself I had hoped I could at 'nothingness'. But I got nowhere doing so.

 

PAINT GRAFT 1

Mixed media on canvas, 30" x 30", 2010

I tried again to embrace this abyssal nothingness. With Paint Graft 2, I continued to tackle the paradox of 1+2+3.... = 0. Maybe if I represented the subject matter with enough layers of complexity it would eventually lose all meaning' in the same way drawing over a previous drawing ad nauseum results in an incomprehensible mess of graphite. So I repreated the same process as last time. But this time I also gave the 3d model a mirror-like texture which reflected myself painting the canvas. Surely this would work.

 

Like the dance of the Ouroboros, this path seemed endless.

 

Now I was onto my 3rd iteration, and was having serious doubts about why I was doing this, I repeated the process of Paint Graft 2, only this time I not only truncated the glob into a 2d representation of a 3d shape with reflective properties, but I also expanded it back into a transformed 3d form. The resulting semi-opaque layers left me feeling nothing. Maybe that was a good sign? Had I produced content void of meaning? It certainly felt pretty meaningless, but viewers were interpreting it nontheless. I was no closer to my goal, but I did finally glean some hard-earned perspective that pretty much anyone could have told me at the starting gate.

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I didn't want to engage in the fool's errand of representing 'nothing' because it is a mystical contradiction. I simply didn't want to represent anything. I was done with painting.