The Dinosaurs of Industry and the Rhythm of Man goes up on Friday. This past week has been a feverish push to be ready to hang and packed up by late Thursday. The work looks great, but I had thought that spending six months on the show I might have escaped some of the last minute ideas that always come to me, that I might be done and not looking for anything more out of myself. I wonder if this isn’t a ridiculous expectation, however. That last minute expectation is the creative urge. That is pure adrenaline, not in a diffused coffee sort of delivery but in the purest of idea forms. It is a beautiful feeling and as much as my wife likes it when I am home in the evening I just can’t do it this week.
I was so very concerned about the balance within this piece. I didn’t want the color to drown out the drawing and I didn’t want the colors to be placed in such a way that it made the the contrast in the moth wings difficult either. I started in the lower left of the piece and moved up, only to find that I had lost three sets of wings immediately above the foundry bucket. At this point I determined that I needed to break the pattern and so I started to paint the shapes exploding out from their initial spaces. It seemed to match the way that the moths were ascending out of their dark past. Even still as I was creating the exploded pattern I was still set on covering the whole top bit of the image until I realized that it wasn’t balanced at all. I put out the word on Twitter and a friend suggested I just leave it the way it was. I hadn’t even considered that, but when I did the piece started to feel more and more resolved.
The week has looked like a lot of this. I realize that most people work upon panels that have already been made. I work a bit counterintuitively on my pieces. My studio is so small that is difficult to find space to move around a bunch of panels with backers and also I like the nature of found and weathered wood. Sometimes these piece end up needing something different than the typical backer and so I like to leave the work open to options.
This is the last piece that I am working on. I was uncertain about the left half of this piece for three months. The rest of the image was all figured out for three whole months. I had drawn a robot head in the sketch that I was working from and it just didn’t feel right. It felt out of place with the rest of the elements in the show and so I returned to my sketchbooks and flipped through the development of the imagery within the show. Upon doing so I became confident that I needed to place the moth eye in that space. Today I am working on possible tessellations to occupy the negative space around it.
This has been so much work and it feels so good to see the accumulation of images all in one place. I can confidently say that this is the best body of work that I’ve ever made.
Peace
-Mike
