creative concept
as far as i can trace back there are several approaches; one is taken by the gestural drawing/scribbles;
countless superimpositions of lines thrown out as if from a quick, expressive gesture, of the most varied strength and color.
layered over and over each other building up a fine and dense polychrom fabric, remaining me sometimes of certain pastel drawing techniques.
another approach is the inaccuracy/disintegration structure; the principle of having a theoretical idea but a pretty imperfect realization or decay over time. in a way that we often encounter in life. (refer to: Background – tapestries)
but there is most certainly a more unsentimental, main approach; the fascination of thousands of overlapping lines, which gradually reveal shapes. the basic joy of playing and experimenting with elementary shapes and colors.
the depth and complexity of these mikado structures become a visible experience at the latest with relatively large printouts one can see this dense impenetrable and seemingly never fully discernible structural space.
project goals:
Project script is on-chain and deployed through a smart contract Generative outputs support large, high-quality physical prints.
NFT provides copyright, licensing freedom for collectors to physically print their NFTs
Media outputs support high-quality digital displays for IRL exhibitions & in-home viewing
background / description
in order for me to really like a picture, it has to have a balance, a harmony, an inner sound. but at the same time it has to have something that hurts a little bit, something out of balance.
in my art work i often try to reach both; emergence and decay, order and chaos.
in e-pastel23 one could see many things, for example an expressive gestural drawing of many superimposed wild strokes. maybe not quite finished, or or even overdone sometimes.
or one could see pictorial representations that have been worn through, which perhaps once had a clear pattern, but now only vaguely remember it.
…i happened to be in an old castle in france during a special exhibition of tapestries from the early baroque periods. the carpets, which had partly run through and crumbled, still had an overwhelming display of colors and beauty.
as witnesses to a long past exuberant and highly sensual cultural epoch. these carpets left a lasting impression on me. maybe i particularly liked this high degree of worn structures in connection with the former picture.
maybe this was another inspiration for going with this red-brown/grey… tones.
while working with colors, similar principles follow me;
through many attempts i have found out that a scattering pattern based on 3 main colors usually appears quite balanced, but stays (remains) in the area of a “colored graphic”,
but if another color, often strange-looking fourth or fifth color is added, which only partially appears, a kind of leap in quality towards what i would describe as “painting”, can happen.
this is also something one could see as another element indicating the endless process.
white edge
During my studies, I dealt a lot with the work of Alberto Giacometti. Especially the philosophy about the base and frame of a work of art has had a lasting influence on me. the frame as a distance to the world, a created artificial space with its own laws…
since around 2010 all my print works have a white frame with an archive number (date/time) and name on it.
technically:
a bezier curve that extends upward and to the right from a point. how a loop reaches into the upper right space. and a second curve, which swings down and to the left from the same point.
this form, which looks a bit like a diagonally arranged butterfly, becomes within a grid, inevitably a mosaic structure.
however, it somehow seems like feedback going backwards to the right, since only the corner points at the bottom left and at the top right appear more defined and the other boundaries seem to be lost in a rushing of countless overlapping splines.
after this beautiful rather coincidental discovery, i began to consciously work on this structure, the loops eventually became wilder strokes reminiscent of spontaneous gestural drawings. growing and shrinking sizes, overlapping color palettes up to a very pastel-like generative drawing.
hence the basic building blocks are very simple, like a minimal building; nevertheless, hundreds of slightly different parts together produce many interesting variations.
it’s a kind of growth process; many different interlocking parameters work together to create a web of curves within overlaying grids.
for the color structure, randomly selected, predefined color mappings are chosen and partly read out and stored.
many different versions have been created over the years.
e-pastel_23 is one of the last upright format version, which is relatively strongly based on a minimalist color grid composition.
holger lippmann, july 2022
bauhaus small writing
http://www.lumicon.de/wp/?p=3526