Artistic Process: For some time I felt that the Universe piece summed up everything I had to say. Fifty years of thought. So… No More Art.
Friends to the rescue! I’ve taken many classes at the Brooklyn Museum and have become friends with the instructors and other students. Over the last year, I’ve participated in an online workshop on experimental printmaking led by Laurel Shute. Museum classes always spun off looking at new/traveling exhibitions. Laurel showed us the revamped Asian galleries. We looked at contemporary asian artists who used traditional methods and the idea of chance) and spontaneity to generate new work. We tried a variety of techniques including suminagachi - a process of floating inks on water to produce random images transferred to paper. That fits with my notion of random evolution producing new …
Almost all of the work in these sections began as ink swirls floating on water. I’ve not mastered that process, but I take the initial images, scan them, combine them, change them in Photoshop until I go THAT”S IT!
What’s NOT random is the consciousness required to recognize, or impose meaning on the swirls. In this series, they are Cosmic Strings. Isn’t obvious? YMMV.