The Process - Diagramming Automatic Art Making

I’ve been doing a lot of automatic art lately and thought it would be interesting to try to diagram the process. (This is the analytical engineering side of me talking now. I was watching Elizabeth Gilbert's 2009 TED presentation on line last week where she talks about the magic of genius and divine inspiration. I said many years ago about my own art process that I felt like I was simply an instrument through which the art passes to get created - that the divine just wants my eyes and arm for it's use. That struck me as at once humble and arrogant. I can only say that it is what rings true for me several years later.)

So, here’s the process for my computer-based art. The process for real canvases is similar, but the source material is obviously different. For now, I will just say that when working in the physical medium, my base images come from art done by others. Collaboration? Appropriation? Again, that issue will be addressed in future posts.

STEPS TO CREATE ELECTRONIC ART

1. Use a blurry boo-boo photo already taken, usually with my iPhone, as a background. I love these accidents and cherish them as much as the good photos I'm intentionally trying to take. I never delete them, and quite honestly, have almost run out of them in this recent spate of art I've been doing manically.

Before:


After:
2. I follow the Photoshop mantra that all the pros suggest, which I've learned only from some really great on-line tutorials - the best of which is You Suck at Photoshop - HILARIOUS! (Okay - I digress, but Donnie makes the best Photoshop tutorials ever).

So I duplicate that background layer, retaining the original, and adding 2-4 blank layers that I can then turn off/on and move around in order. This is amazing to me that a software allows you to collage seamlessly up and down with images, trying this layer over that, behind, etc.

3. Use Photoshop (now CS4 version) and fiddle with this image. I usually start by adjusting the brightness and contrast up or way up. I may rotate the image, though usually they are so undecipherable that rotation is not needed. I am trying to abstract the image to something that is not recognizable, but that retains elements that the viewer’s brain will recognize, even when rotated, but on a very sub-conscious level. Note to self here: this seems like an element of phenomenology and having just read Shepherd Fairey’s Manifesto where he talks about his Andre logo being right there in a person’s face (obvious) but at the same time containing subliminal elements that their psyche then works on in the background. Okay - an artistic influence.

I may also use the gradient tool to apply a gradient. The tool picks something right at first that seems to be a function of the base image’s colors. I try others and get various effects - sometimes very colorful, but also there are some gradients that are just nice monochromatics that I would never intentionally find to work with, since I am typically so much in love with color. This is a conscious edge I try to work with in my art - more gray, sepia, and cream colors. I love when I see art out there that is monochrome and it is not something I can intentionally start with (eg, a totally blank page of white or cream; that just freaks me out in its expansiveness). My art works by building on prompts. A difference in the texture, an edge, a color break - these are all “prompts” that provoke a choice of the next color, brush, layer placement - and it is all rather automatic. It proceeds very quickly - I usually can do a piece (photoshop/electronic) in a matter of minutes.

These pieces show a better example of the gradient application and rotating the image:

Before
After


4. Next, I add things to the image using Photoshop brushes. I select these first by what strikes me as fun to work with. I don’t think about this too much, but just pick up from the brush selections what appeals. I have a certain level of trust in the process at this point, and the next steps.

5. This is where the piece is more like traditional painting. I will keep selecting brushes and fiddle with the effect of the brush (normal, burn, dodge, hard light, etc.). I have no way of diagramming out that process - it’s very iterative and automatic - a matter of trust and luck. I select various opacities for the brush, it’s size, and the effect and depending on which layer I am working on, that will produce an effect. I make generous use of the history function at this point, going back several steps if I don’t like the effect. Note: Here’s another important thing about this process for me: it is magic what comes out of this process as I pick up various elements to paint and stamp the image.

6. For this piece, I liked a gradient overlay, so I kept that. I used the eyedropper tool to pick up the purple color, since again, this is not a color I would typically choose to work with and when using the basic color swatches in Photoshop, I tend to pick the same ‘ole colors that end up not being too sophisticated. So I pick up the purple and then darken it a bit.

7. I pick up the brush that is a stamp of various squares, sizing it to cover most of the base image, and then I stamp away. I usually put the opacity down quite low and do several stamps in the normal brush mode, just so that I can control how dark and imposing that overlaid image becomes.

8. I like this effect and keep it. I move on to picking a circle brush. I worked this combination in a piece I did yesterday I called Tic-Tac-Toe

That piece was a small section of the upper left corner of Burning Desire. I wanted to work with an abstracted close-up area of a piece. That piece started as yellow, but I somehow got to a beautiful blue and then used the circle brush to stamp into the squares.

So I did this again on this piece, varying the color and opacity of the circles from yellow to an aubergine purple. It could be that I then went to put some words on it and googled yellow and purple circles, or something like that - a connection to the piece. I can’t find it now, but I probably followed the same process of Googling and then taking a phrase from the browser window.

9. Next, I need a title for the piece. Sometimes, the words I put on the piece (if I do use words), are the right title for the piece. Other times, I feel it is something else, usually less obvious. So, for the title of this piece, I Googled: seattle hotel room circles.

10. This took me to the about 1 million hits in Google. I usually try to stick with the first non-commercial hit; in this case the 1997 Merleau-Ponty Circle entry. This was intriguing because of the French aspect, so I just click.


This took me to the website of the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology. Ok, so that’s interesting, because since I slipped down that rabbit hole of divine brilliance with the commissioned piece last summer for Mark and Cathy where I relied heavily on phenomenology to create the written piece to go with their art (deconstructing the symbols for home based on Gaston Bachelard’s book The Poetics of Space, I’ve been wanting to research and better understand phenomenology, which my coach told me was too big and complicated a word to use with other people). I used it anyway in the little handout I gave the client. This was a statement to myself not to gloss over the body of work of phenomenology, but rather to stay with the term in the out-facing work I do - honor and embrace the term rather than hid it and be embarrassed by it. Put it out there for others to wonder about, and possibly look up in a dictionary or on Wikipedia.



11. So the next step was to read through the CARP website and learn more about phenomenology. My first hit was that I didn’t recognize any of it - terminology, concepts, names of people who created it.... The link in Google was because one of the thought leaders of phenomenology is Merleau-Ponty. This is a page for the agenda of the The Twenty-Second Annual International Conference of the Merleau-Ponty Circle: The Concept of Nature September 18-20, 1997 Seattle University. I notice just now that this happened on my birthday the year I was battling breast cancer, but I digress...

Another sidebar note: As I'm posting this painting I did back in mid-2008, I see the tear of yellow paper I put on the right side. It is a piece of poster from Carpenteria France that I picked up in Avignon in 2006. My daughter was upset that I kept picking up "garbage" and taking it back to the hotel. I see now another layer of meaning: only the letters C-A-R-P (Center for Adv. of Research in Phenomenology) show up. This piece totally opened me up to the area of phenomenology in my own work.....

12. So at this point, I am scanning their agenda for this meeting, seeking a title for my piece of art. There is a session titled:

11:00-11:45 Concurrent Session 3 (Pigott, Room TBA)
Moderator: TBA
Speaker: Romano Khan, Universita degli Studi di Siena
"Knowledge and the Temporal Cliff of the Flesh"

I like the sounds of this - Temporal Cliff of the Flesh - so that’s the title of the piece.

(I’m looking at the piece now, and realize I’ve put the words on the piece: a question of violence. I can’t remember where that came from. I chose the Carbonated Gothic font because I liked the edge lightness of it over the circles. Hmmmm....well, that is the magic of this process. Somehow the words a question of violence came into my head, but have now vanished. That’s where the piece itself ends. I titled it, saved it as a .pdf and .jpg, and then went into Picasa and selected the “blog this” function. It automatically takes me to my blog, Daily Art Diary, and I insert the title into the daily post title box and voila, posted.