Month: June 2023

Wiggly Lines

I have published similar things in the past as finished works. This one could certainly stand alone as-is. But as I said a few posts ago, I am trying to decompose an imagined final composition. I am looking at potential layers that could be combined in a future work.

This one could be a foreground or a middle layer. The white background should be replaced by something more interesting. The twisty lines could be a background for something else.

The squares in the previous image are replaced with thin rectangles, placed with a limited set of orientations. Much more interesting this way.

50000 Rectangles #26 is similar. But with more planning on the placement and some small decorations inside the rectangles.

I will just jump in here.

An image has foreground and background. Perhaps also one or more intermediate layers. The layers need to work together, there should be some connection between them. Superposition of unrelated layers does not work well.

There are many exceptions to the preceding paragraphs. It contains many vague and undefined concepts. It also is not how I do art. When I do art, often something like the the description emerges, but it is not planned. Still I want to work with the paragraph.

Too often I get close to a finished piece and then I want to tweak some small aspect. When I do, something else does not work, which leads to a not very enjoyable game of whack-a-mole. Maybe if I think of these things ahead of time, the finish will be easier.

Today’s image is a generalized or abstract image background cover. The white background would be replaced with solid or smoothly transition colors. That smooth background would be messed up with many small objects. Remember the squares are just a placeholder of a not-yet-determined object. With respect to the introductory paragraph, this is an intermediate layer, adjacent to the background.

The overlapped rectangles probably would not work for photographs on a wall. Overlap is ok for what I had in mind. The rectangles could be anything, they are just placeholders. They could be other geometric shapes, distorted shapes, line patterns, blobs, or kittens. Just kidding, I do not do kittens. They could be the same object, various distortions of a common object, of completely different things.

I imagine the final piece will have three or four main objects. The objects are unspecified at this point. The rectangles are just place holders. You could think of this like arranging photographs on a wall. I want to arrange the objects in an interesting pattern. A little jumbled, not perfectly set into four quadrants or a neat row.

Eventually I wrote a program to generate patterns like this. The idea was to create many and then perhaps find interesting combinations that I would not have considered otherwise. At first theses were just black rectangles. I added colors here to make them a little more interesting.

I took a three week vacation during the end of May and the start of June. I made no art and no blog posts during that time. I queued up enough blog posts before I left to cover the vacation time. But I had nothing ready for when I returned from vacation. Now, I have been home for a week, I won’t bore you with excuses, I still have nothing to post.

I hate leaving the blog idle. The main reason is that not posting easily becomes a habit. Next thing you know the site has been static for months or even years. So, as I have done a couple of times in the past, I am starting a series of partial, incomplete and experimental pieces to fill the gap until I have something else ready. Even though I consider these incomplete, some still work well as abstract geometric minimalism.

Just three flat squares. Today’s post could be consider a seed that germinated into the 50000 Rectangles series.