I had high hopes for the results when I did the “blue” series last year. I didn’t mention it at the time, but every day I hung up the little pieces of paper in the shower – above the water line. I hoped the steam would make some happy accidents, or, at the very least, some interesting textures. It didn’t. It didn’t make one iota of a difference to have put them in the shower.
I’m disappointed about that.
But I let it go. I have eight pieces of blue paper. Eight pieces of writing to go with it. The writing ends with a question:
Why blue?
I get more ideas, something that doesn’t seem too ambitious, and I set about executing it.
But why these images, why these techniques? I want to be a serious artist, after all, and serious artists are intentional about their artmaking.
Except we live in an era where you can pose any question and get an immediate, articulate and polite answer. (Not necessarily a correct answer, mind you, but you can point that out without risk of being offensive. You will get a polite apology and an immediate revised answer*)
For now, I’m leaning into these mysteries.
Why amphibian echnidae?
Why cutouts?
Why blue?
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*One day I will write about my adventures in getting Bing Copilot to (a) talk to me in the first place – yes I did find the way to offend a language model – and (b) the correct script for evaluting a command line result with ttl. It was giving me all sorts of rubbish. But that writing will not be today.