Elena suggests that I have a plan… No!
An idea… yes… but no plan.
I start at the other end… I already have an image… created, stolen or abstract, that I deconstruct, alter or make unrecognisable. I work on iPads. I develop my own methodologies, running images through a variety of Apps to create specific effects. I replace individual pixels as well as groups of them… but critically I have no idea of the image I am trying to create until it appears on the screen… for me, this is playtime.
My target point is the humble pixel or Elena’s stitch. I’m curious about their relationship to one another; how that when you multiply them they alter, mutate into something other. I’m training myself to view the world in pixels, macro viewing the textures of the environment I occupy…
All this is the intention… I work towards making paintings, maybe some prints. I will reveal the path that this meanders along… maybe some methods…
Already started…
Elena sent me some images of her “disembroiderey”. In a sense, I wanted to continue her unpicking… reveal new layers and take the work back to its basic stitch before revealing some of those stitches as I interpret them. Colour is important so was enhanced… the odd pixel or two altered. The first image was then randomized through an App called Decim8; (Image 1). I have built my own set of filters within the App using some of the pre-made already on offer, so to a degree that part of the process is also borrowed… that’s important to me – that the only hand I have in the process is selection… everything else is adopted and stitched together as you would a collage… Elena’s starting point. The image was finished off in PS Touch after some further manipulation in other Apps. The final selection is from around 30 similar images… a sketch for a possible painting… where my hand takes over, selects the textures…re-structures.
Image 2 follows a similar process, yet strips back even further. I really like what is achieved here, yet all is accidental. A learning is taking place… I’m beginning to understand the “lock-ins” – an algorithm echoing the same function – involved in my processes and the idea is to try and avoid that repetition that so readily occurs whist using Apps.
I’m left now with a series of mechanical sketches that need my hand in them. Selection again becomes key. How I translate each mark into discernable language mirrors the ideas that I am developing alongside this in my own blog, and the resulting work will hopefully occupy a different space to that which Elena pursues… even if it is her work that I am sampling from…
