Lazy Nights #6

My year in art, part 4.

I started the 50000 Rectangles series in May. Up to that point everything was either experiments or short series of related items pulled from the experiments. Most of the experiments were discarded in the background; only my favorites made it into this blog.

The 50000 Rectangles series started with a few pieces from the Experiment series. This time I did not just finish and publish those items. I stopped and asked, what is similar and what is different in these pieces. It seems obvious now: lots of overlapping rectangles. But it was not obvious at the time. In fact, it was not a process of finding what is similar, but rather one of deciding what is similar. It could have gone many different ways, I decided to make the overlapping rectangles the constant for the series.

The text in the 50000 Rectangles series describe the design decisions in detail. In summary, everything has lots of small rectangles. Typically 5 sets of 10000 rectangles each, but the exact numbers vary. Within a set, all the rectangles are similar. Between sets, color, length, orientation, density, and skew change.

The rules did not arise from a sudden light-bulb idea that popped into my head. They evolved over several steps. Even when the rules seemed done, more tweaking was required. For example size should vary, but only within a limited range. Too large, and few dominate the whole screen. Too small, and they are hard to see.

None of the originals that were the seeds for the series made it into the final cut.