Combinatrics

Mock up: Screenprints on paper, using nine shapes and 3 transparent colors to create a non-repeating pattern. The goal here is to derive a set of unique prints from a fixed set of shapes and colors. The shapes are triangles and polygons based on a 2 by 3 rectangle. all secondary colors are arrived at through overprinting.

This idea is leading me to examine combinatrics, the generation of permutations from a fixed set of conditions.

Studio Update December 2007

This is a linocut that has been repeatedly printed in the three process colors (without black), cyan(blue), magenta(red) and yellow. It was an excercise in using transparent colors and overprinting, generating various combinations by rotating the printing matrix.



Two experiences of the past year have changed the direction of my work:
-looking intently at the fundamentals of form language while formulating a rationale for my summer design course
-examining and implementing various pattern concepts while pursuing wallpaper ideas

These factors helped lead me to my current project: the development of a framework through which I could insert in an intentional way various ideas that pertaining to process and concept that have emerged in my studies at SFSU.

These include:
-folding in of non-art sources (popular culture, the built environment, technology) in a more oblique way than through pictorial representation

-use of systems to arrive at a finished work that is contingent upon its materials and site
(thinking of Sol Lewitt)

-work that conflates visual harmony and balance with a workman like sense of economy

-a formalism that is graphic and irrational and ambiguously referential

-a process of image acquisition that is varied (automatism, chance operations, appropriation and alteration)

(below) This is a mock-up of a gallery installation. The finished piece in my conception should uccupy the gallery in tha manner of posters of wheatpastes. The medium: screenprint on newsprint. The forms are mutated texts taken from junk mailers. The stencil is paper. the piece should feel emphaticaly ephemeral. The economy of the gesture, posting paper on the wall should be palpable.

Studio Update, 10/9/07

I am currently working on my thesis project at SFSU. Very much inspired by Victor de la Rosa's pattern class at State, my experience teaching design this summer at CSSSA I've decided to attempt to try a new (for me) approach to studio work that would incorporate traditional print media. To this end, I am working within a self imposed set of restrictions starting with everyone's favorite, the grid, and employing various arbitrary methods of image aquisition, towards a series single or large work in a way that will upset, confound, eschew, my normal working process. This is working. I am alternately excited and lost, casting about for a way forward, but always working towards something. This was the point, the struggle now is to justify any further progression of the process within the spirit of the project.
Here is the limitations:
a one foot grid: the work will consist of single units of this size, relief prints, screen prints, the images are derived from various methods: automatic drawing excercises, extreme close ups of digital images, texures recording everyday events

Here is the process:
Through repeating these units, larger compositions, constructions will emerge.
Final product:
Not clear but I am currently aiming towards a series of prints approximately 6 by 6 feet.

Altered Wallpapers

I'm having fun creating patterns from my drawings and printing them over found wall papers.
In trying to figure out where to take this idea, I've started to paste them up on the street along with other wheat pastes.

CSSSA Design Class: Pattern

For my weekend class students carved a 4 by 6 inch block and applied various pattern concepts to it.

Slab City: Process

Slab City: Conversation 2006 reduction woodcut 25" by 36"

I made a video to document the creation of this 9 color reduction woodcut that I made in 2005-06. The music is by the late John Hartford performing "Man of Constant Sorrow".

CSSSA Design Class: Scroll Project

As an ancillary to the black and white pattern project students were asked to make a new stencil that resolved a pattern combination in repeat and work on a collaborative project, a scroll which reached 60 feet in length by 48 inches wide. The scroll was then installed hanging above the main lobby at Cal Arts.
The scroll served as welcome context for a CSSSA movement/body improv class that used the space.

CSSSA Design Class: Color

This project used digitally manipulated photographs of the students as a source which was enlarged using a proportional grid to a 18" by 24" drawing. The students then divided the image into 6 sections and applied the following color principles to them: greyscale, monochrome, analogous, primary or secondary triads (plus black) and complementary colors and "true colors".

CSSSA Design Class

Here are some examples of a pattern assignment where my students arrived at a six inch square black and white composition using an automatic drawing exercise and then used a stencil technique to repeat the motif in different combinations using a 3 by 3 grid.