Enso Rising In Cyberfunk

Enso Rising With Sidebar And Scroll, 12X16", mxed media on panel, 4/22/11

Yesterday I was showing this piece for the first time to my son, and having quite a fun time enumerating all the stuff in it.  Meanwhile my new follower, mixed media artist Sharmon Davidson, has the most brilliant idea of listing "ingredients"right in the blog.  Perfect!

Ingredients:  red part of a chocolate bar wrapper,  black lace, nylon window screen, white wedding frufru (four layers), Rich Art 'poster' paint, Crayola Washable, acrylic craft paint, un-tinted tint base No. 3, Elmer's glueall, spackling powder, sanded grout, tile mortar, sheer toilet paper (the cheap kind from hell).

Again, you cannot see the really cool thing going on here--some of the areas of glaze are so thick (visually) that you see all the way down to the bottom layers, past the splatter, and the cement, and color strokes, the embedded piece of window screen--and so forth.  Maybe if I showed a detail you could get some sense of it.

Enso Rising With Sidebar And Scroll, detail.

The enso is serious business.  It's part of Japanese calligraphy, and is thought to reflect the complete state of the maker's character.  If so I'm probably sunk for a start.  It carries a lot of mystic Zen vibe, and often is accompanied by that crazy Japanese script and red stamps that are just cool and no one knows why.  I mean people get this stuff tatooed on their necks.  I mean, huh?  I don't know what that's all about.  Anyway, I like ensos, serious or not.  They're like mandalas.  Very mysterious.   In a former life I was a sign painter, made ensos in my sleep.

Never done with enso.  

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A Visual Vocabulary

Composition With Canton,  6X9", Mixed on panel, 4/11

Composition With Arch, 9X6", Mixed on Panel, 4/11

Composition With Tracks, Photograph, 4/11

This was my week last week.  I got all the stuff out--whatever was stowed away--water-based stuff, all compatible.  Put the Bartok on and went at it at long last. These two are a couple simple ones that I will probably not touch again.  In all there are  eighteen new pieces in various stages.

I'm using an untinted acrylic latex paint as a glaze medium, and building complex surfaces with combinations of acrylics, spackling powder, sanded grout, kids tempera paint, Derwent pencils, markers--lots of crazy stuff.  It's all going together and producing some very cool stuff, within thick layers of "glaze", so that some of these pieces are getting downright 3-D. You can see down through all these layers, past splatter, strokes and smears.  What a vocabulary. At some point there will be wax--but not yet.  

The tracks photo above and other snap-shots of really cool stuff just on the pavements around here has been the inspiration for all this.  I have no idea where it will lead, but at least there's new art thinking going on.  Feels healthy! 

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