Plastic Acid: violet

Showing posts with label violet. Show all posts

Friday, July 6, 2012

I want a makeover

I think of it as my office / studio / living room... I would say it measures roughly 12 feet by 20 feet, and it contains 2 desks, 2 computers, 3 printers, 1 television, 1 television stand, 2 shelves, 2 rocking chairs, 1 couch, 2 end tables, a hutch for the expensive printer to sit on, my large paper cutter, and a lot of paper and paint and glue and otherwise miscellaneous art supplies and stacks of Rolling Stone magazines.

This is where I spend a lot of time sitting...

Oh, and it's peachy-pink or pinky-peach. Technically, regardless of how that color looks in the pictures — it's peach. It wasn't until I forfeited 50 days of my life to the side effects of pills that I realized that I'm tired of looking at peach.

It was a completely random and arbitrary color choice. The studio / office / living room — where I spend the vast majority of my non-sleeping, non-working, non-grocery shopping time — is in the basement, the unfinished basement. So, technically, it has 3 walls. 2 of them are cement, and the other is made of fabric. It was the fabric wall that determined the color scheme of the room. See that panel of fabric in the first picture behind my computer? There are 3 of those that hang on the opposite end of the room. The paint color on the wall is the same as the background of that fabric.

That fabric? I bought it in the clearance section of a JoAnn's like 10 years ago. So, I've been looking at it for 10 years I guess, and now I'm tired of seeing it. Cement, btw, is hard to hang things on, hence the occasional fabric panel - like the one behind my computer. Any artwork that hangs in the room is suspended via fishing line from nails that are fixed in the baseboard around the ceiling...

I know, I should go outdoors more (because it's been 94˚F to 103˚F for the last 2 weeks — heat stroke, awesome) and enjoy my crispy brown yard or the sweltering heat? My other option is basically the bedroom... and the bedroom is a technological negaverse where the most advanced technology is a tie between my stereo (cd AND cassette player, which is so old that I doubt that the cassette part works) or the alarm clock. I'm not really the type to lay in bed and read books... oh, and did I mention the lack of air conditioning?

Yeah, so I want an office / studio / living room makeover... something that isn't peach.

I like this color. I believe I could stare at it peripherally everyday without trying to imagine I was somewhere else. So, now apparently I have to go on a quest to find some fabric with a nice gaudy floral pattern (the more seventies looking the better) that involves the use of this color.

And in the mean time, I've been trying to work on the general 'chronic disorganization' that seems to plague the room. Every flat surface somehow ends up cluttered up with piles of papers and drawings and art supplies and cardboard, and well, it looks a little like an episode of hoarders minus the animals, rotting food, and water damage... yeah, it just looks like a paper tornado came through here most of the time.

Anyway, in order to change the paint color — I have to move everything. So, now I have an excuse to waste endless hours of time rifling through stacks of papers and throwing things away. At least it's ten degrees cooler down here.

Friday, May 18, 2012

plum aurora alchemy

My favorite color is always going to be violet. It was my first favorite color. It's probably why I secretly rooted for a lot of the villains in all those delightful products that were marketed my way as a child. EviLyn was my favorite He-Man character. I mean, look at her purple outfit, plus she had magic powers... and then there was Sour Grapes from the Strawberry Shortcake franchise. Not only did she wear a purple dress, she also had purple hair and a purple snake. That's a lot of purple. To be fair, I also liked Raspberry Tart - I mean, she wore purple, and had purple hair in boing-boing curls.

Clash was my favorite character on Jem and the Hollograms - mostly because of her awesome purple hair. She was one of the villains, but that didn't matter to me...

Anyway, I like violet or purple. I sit here typing this on my computer where the "wallpaper" on the screen is violet. The clock above my desk is violet. I have a violet stapler, a violet trash can, a violet lamp... I buy a lot of stuff just because it's violet. Oddly enough, most of my clothes are green or black.

So, while I have a favorite color, not everything is that color. For instance, this is my office / living room / studio (when it was cleaned up some time ago):

So, while violet is my favorite, it isn't the one and only color for everything. Although, clearly, the carpet is purple. :D

Anyway, I have no qualms about other colors, or using them.

plum aurora alchemy

Color theory was one of those classes I had fun with in college. Not just because Vincent Castagnacci was the Prof, but because color was something I always had fun with. BTW, Castagnacci was like my favorite professor ever, even if I did occasionally refer to him as Satan, which was meant as a sardonic compliment, considering my childhood of casually rooting for the villains in cartoons... That, and Castagnacci didn't accept any sort of crap or half-ass anything, plus he had a New York swagger... it was the perfect escape from the pasty Ann Arbor vibe of organic this and that.

Anyway, I enjoy color. And I enjoy playing with color. I happen to be fond of that painting — plum aurora alchemy. Apparently, according to the info on the back of the painting, I made it on 8 January 2011, which was a Saturday. And I probably did like 20 paintings that day, because that's simply how I paint.

The painting is mostly just color. And considering the colors that it's made from - it could have been a total crapshoot. Dark purple, fluorescent red, orange, sky blue, dark pea green, and a smidge of yellow - via someone else's application or technique - that could have been an entirely different image. I don't paint squares or shapes or lines or splotches or blocks. I just paint with color. And completely arbitrarily - albeit my color choices are often outside the box - I paint with color in such a fashion that the image is implicitly a landscape. Green at the bottom does it every time. Of course, the horizontal nature of the application of color aids in implicating a landscape. If the paint had been moved up or down or in spotches or spots or blocks or something - then maybe it would be different.

What I'm saying - is that while my color choices are somewhat random based simply on what paint I have sitting around when I'm painting, they aren't that random. And that artistically, I know what color of paint interfaces with what other colors of paint. There is orange paint in that picture that is mixed on the surface of the illustration board directly with sky blue paint. Think about that for a moment: orange + sky blue, what does that =? Is it mud? I guess it might be, but it is and it isn't - because if the whole image was saturated color, then there would be no contrast. Or the orange would just sit next to the blue and the stark contrast would just be obvious.

But it's not like I pondered that before I spent 7 minutes putting the paint on the illustration board on some chilly Saturday in January a year ago. It just happened because my use of color is the accumulation of all the things I know about it and how it occurs in paint.

I didn't carefully calculate every line or blotch of paint, not consciously. I did it because it was there to do while simultaneously being inherent, which I know sounds like a lot of polysyllabic gobbeldygook. I think paintings are there for the visual, not necessarily a dissertation of words. Some people differ on that ideology, but then, one size never fits all. And the accumulation of all the things that lead one person to make whatever they make based on the materials they have at hand isn't going to be a ubiquitous experience for all people. In other words, my paintings - color choices, application, style, and subject matter are the accumulation and expression of my experiences, and like favorite cartoon characters or colors - they aren't for everyone.

I like this little snippet of the painting. The graphic shows it at about 3X the size it is in reality - but look at all those colors - mixed and separate and coagulated, random and smeared, but moving in a direction based on application and technique. For a painting that is technically nothing but color and situational pigment - there's a lot going on there.

It's not all neat and compartmentalized; nor is it demure and polite and subdued. But in the end it's just a painting that I made one day in January based on the paint that I possessed at the time and what I felt like putting on my illustration board... and it's available somewhere out there on the internet, sometimes...

Life is full of random choices and decisions that materialize into things.

So be adventurous.

Sunday, June 5, 2011

Summer begins...

Well, summer officially starts on 21 June... which I know because it's my birthday. But it's summer now. The weather really doesn't care what the calendar says. It's humid and 70-80˚F out right now — that's summer weather.

So, a couple weeks ago I happened to look up at the obsolete tv antenna that towers over the house, and sitting way up there on the top of one of the rods was the male hummingbird. It's amusing to see such a tiny creature sitting way up there, where presumably he's surveying the territory. So, I cleaned up the feeder and made some bird kool-aid for him and the rest of the hummingbirds to fight over... and this weekend I finally got around to taking all the snowflakes down. Yes, I still had vestiges of the winter decorations hanging around the place. Laziness, I suppose.

So, the hummingbirds and the butterflies are now up.

A few years ago I was looking for snowflake Christmas ornaments at Target, and I happened to notice that they had all these resin bird ornaments... so I picked through them all, carefully, and literally bought all the hummingbirds that didn't have broken beaks, as resin is fragile, and these were just hanging on hooks. They had bluebirds and chickadees and goldfinches too, and yeah, I bought some of those as well, but they were all made in a perching position, where as the hummingbirds are flying. (Some day I'll get around to making something that my bluebirds can sit on)

So, anyway, all the birds were painted as the male form of the species... so, I brought them home and repainted them. I made males and females, and went so far as to use iridescent nail polish to make their feathers more authentic. So, every year when I finally let go of my laziness for an hour or so - I get them out and put them up - and they stay up until October or November - long after the real birds have flown south.

I made the monarch butterflies probably about 10 years ago. I suppose it's silly or childish or whimsical or maybe a little 'Flowers in the Attic'-ish, but I like weird stuff I suppose. And if you looked at the pictures and you're wondering - that brown blob on top of my computer is a snail knick knack.

I did some paintings on a whim last weekend, so now I need to scan them and varnish them, and sign them, and print out and attach the labels for the backs of them... I finally went through my paints this week (since the garbage was off by one day in observance of Memorial Day), and threw away all the bottles that were dried up and chunky or almost completely empty. I do that every now and then, particularly when I can no longer fit all the paint into the basket that holds the paint. The overflow of arts & crafts supplies gets to be a little much every now and then...

The summer flowers are here. The irises are blooming! Irises are my favorite flower, hands down. I love them in virtually every color (except the brown ones - that I will never understand). But violet (and any other shade of purple) is my favorite. Violet is also simply and unilaterally my favorite color.

Plus, after probably not having ridden on an actual bike for like 15 years - I bought a bike this weekend. Yes, it's a lavender shade of violet, which was most of the appeal... aside from the fact that it's a female model, adult sized, and has brakes. Yeah, I'm not one of those cyclist people, so, really I bought it because I want a bike to tool around on mostly for leisure purposes - which means riding it around the block in a residential area where I am least likely to be impeding traffic or hit by a car.

Hopefully your summer is filled with color and happy things, and maybe air conditioning, a fan, or the occasional cool breeze.