Posts Tagged ‘pattern’
Transcribed and transposed
Whitby Tetractys 2
Andy Parkinson, Transposed Transcription: Whitby Tetractys 2, 2013, acrylic on canvas, 24″ x 24″
Transcribed from marker pen on paper 12″ x 12″ to acrylic on canvas 24″ x 24″ and transposed from horizontal to vertical orientation.
ABCBA (sketch)
Something I am working on in my sketchbook. The sequence of colours follows the pattern ABCBA, where A = violet, B = orange and C = green.
ABCBABCBA, 2013, Permanent Marker on paper, 9″x9″
The orange is slightly towards red, the green is towards teal and the violet is towards lilac. With the greens and violets present the red/orange looks much redder than it would do if seen together with other colours or indeed against white. The photo is quite near to how it really looks.
“Sixteen”: a sketch
From my sketchbook…
“Sixteen”, 2013, Marker pen on paper, 8″x8″
… “Sketch” perhaps suggests something quick, whereas this took a couple of days to do. It is a preliminary drawing at least, testing out some colours in a slightly different arrangement than others. Sixteen squares in a floor-tile pattern.
Painting is a verb
painting….
Y-ing, Acrylic on Canvas, 10″ x 10″
…layering, juxtaposing, repeating, inverting, looking, interpreting…
Kriss-Crossing?
Kriss Crossing, Kriss Krossing, Criss Crossing?
X-ing, Acrylic on Canvas, 10″ x 10″
sequence and sequence
As well as the sequences of number and colour that lead to patterns like this
I am also very interested in sequence dancing (like Ballroom and Latin but in any given dance couples dance the same standardised 16 bar sequence, which is then repeated numerous times). It is perhaps the repeating but never really repeating that I enjoy, even though there is more repetition in my pattern paintings than there is in most sequence dances.
Anyway, my wife and I are preparing for a sequence dance competition this weekend …
…our first ‘open’ competition. Way out of our depth! We will be dancing Saunter Shiraz, Tango Serida and Waverley Two Step.
Pattern and Meaning
My twin brother Robert is a Baptist minister and he writes a church blog on WordPress. Recently he reviewed the Jonathan Sacks book The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search for Meaning. No prizes for guessing it is about Science and Religion.
In it Sacks argues that science and religion need each other. Like the left and right sides of the brain, science and religion provide different modes of engagement with the world. They are separate but complementary. ‘Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean.’
I haven’t read the book myself, and I don’t know if I agree with the point being made. What interested me was the idea of ‘searching for meaning’. I have the impression that searching for meaning, or attempting to make sense of the world, is a what makes looking at abstract paintings pleasurable, and I think this was one of the points that Jane Raymond made at her talk From Seeing to Feeling: What does the Human Brain Do When it Looks at Paintings? that I attended at Mostyn Gallery in May. Is it a ‘lower level’ of searching for meaning I have in mind perhaps, along the lines of Pattern detection?
I think I am correct to distinguish between levels of search, similar to the levels of abstraction implied in the distinction between two meanings of the verb ‘to feel’ 1) physical feel, touch and 2) emotional feeling (possibly Virginia Satir would identify that as ‘a feeling about a feeling’) or like John Grinder‘s distinction between f1 and f2 filters, where f1 filters are pre-linguistic, the filtering that takes place at the point of perception and f2 filters are linguistic, taking place after the percept has been apprehended.
Another quick slow
A variation of a pattern that looks visually ‘quick’ at first sight.
However, it can become verrrry slow…
Quaduo 2, 2012, Acrylic on Canvas, 10″x10″
When you take your time with it.
Only quick at first sight
Whilst this pattern looks visually ‘quick’ it is really only quick at first sight. Prolonged study elicits multiple interpretations.
Quaduo, 2012, Acrylic on Canvas, 10″x10″
How to encourage the viewer to linger a while, that’s the question.
A few days ago I delivered one of my new paintings to the Old Lockup Studio in Cromford, ready for our pop up show Salon 1, on 18 August. Whilst I was there I tried to persuade Clay Smith and Rachael Pinks that my work took only a few minutes to make and that anyone could do it. When Rachael suggested that there was more thinking time than I was letting on I dismissed her comment, genuinely believing that I did very little of that. Since then I have become more aware of just how long I spend viewing and thinking (sometimes with little or no internal dialogue and sometimes with lots of it – two very different modes of ‘viewing’). Because I enjoy it so much, time flies and I hadn’t been noticing the passing of time. It turns out that it is hours a day, looking, thinking, editing by which I mean turning canvases around to see different variations and paying attention to what changes and how the colour behaves. Early mornings, sometimes I find that I have spent an hour without realising that I had been doing anything it all. And it is through these time distorting experiences that I come to appreciate that these patterns are indeed much slower than they may seem at first sight.
