new painting
Available in my online shop as an original watercolour on paper or as a $35 print.
This is a single layer in one colour (with some slight variations in colour in spots) drawn from a photo taken by me in High Park sometime in spring of 2022.
some details
While trees and forests have definitely figured prominently in my work, I never imagined that they would occupy this much of my attention – but I am comfortable with that. Below I describe some different tree/forest based projects.
2D trees
In 2022 I began a 2D tree project. The formula is simple: draw a tree structure with the originating trunk starting at the bottom middle of the picture plane. No two colours may be adjacent and no branch may touch another branch. All space must be filled up by making sure that every branch extends as close to its neighbours as possible (within one square distance minimum). No small, one square branches may be made in the middle of a branch, only the end (otherwise you end up with a lot of small random ‘buds’ which I omitted for aesthetic reasons). I used the standard seven colours: red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, yellow, and white and each of the colours has a corresponding tone. I wrote some software that records the drawing process and then plays it back and that is what you see in the two videos below. There are more videos which I will be sharing in future posts. Please like and subscribe and share and all that.
As I have mentioned before, and will reiterate in future commentary, what I like to do in much of my work is create artwork and then analyze it – with the analysis also serving as a form of artwork as well. I develop formulas (generative artwork), much like what I have described above, to produce finished pieces. These formulas are designed to reveal a particular aspect of psyche – so what I am exploring in this project is what aspect of psyche the tree structure reveals. In the second phase of a project, I apply processes of analysis to the piece to deconstruct it and further reveal different aspects of the creative content. What you see above is the first and most rudimentary form of analysis that I apply, the replaying of the creation of the piece. See EHB2 and Ukraine for a couple of recent examples of this but you will find it throughout my work – it is the starting point of the analysis – the ‘introduction’.
Moving on from there, I explore different computational systems that ‘play’ the artwork as an instrument. Again, EHB2 serves as an excellent example of this, as well as my most recently completed project, High Park Branches. In EHB2 I employed a complex system to drive the dots around the 3D triangle mesh, creating animations, some of them with sound (scroll to the bottom of the linked page to activate the online app). These results are meant to be understood as the ‘playing’ of the artwork as an instrument. The player is you, the person activating the system, and the ‘score’ is the system that I have designed to operate within the structure. Each different artwork/object will produce a slightly different ‘signature’ dynamic and sound – thereby offering a way of characterizing the creative content of the work. So it a double artwork – the original piece, the object, and the way that it is played. This could be compared to a sound sculpture – the sculpture is an artwork on its own but it also produces (audio) artwork when you play it.
In the High Park Branches project I employed a system based on self-organized criticality. I am very much interested in non-linear dynamical systems and I am using each of these artworks as an opportunity to explore them and perhaps even invent some of my own. I am just getting started and have a lot to learn still but I have definitely started now that the foundation has been built – this has been an ambition I have had for decades. For the 2D trees that you see above, I am currently working on a system based on cellular automata to animate the artwork. I will be sharing progress on this soon. With any luck I will have something put together by the end of next week.
The internal data structure is, of course, a tree which you will find everywhere throughout computer science – for example, any conventional filing system is based on the hierarchical tree structure. The form that I am using is known as a ‘generic tree’ which means that each node (the place where branches separate from a trunk or another branch) can have any number of branches. The binary tree is especially significant in computer science as it offers significant advantages in searching and sorting. This is a tree where each node has two and only two branches. I plan to explore this in more depth in the future as well.
I have some prints and paintings from this project available in my online shop.
This is another consistent aspect to my work. For each project, I take intermittent screenshots of animations and 2D/3D models to produce paintings and prints from. The paintings are always acrylic on unstretched canvas approximately 64″ x 51″ and the prints are $35, 12″ x 18″ inkjet on high quality matte paper printed by one of the best print shops that I have ever found – Red Hot Printing near Dupont and Landsdowne in Toronto, Canada.
prints
paintings
but wait, that’s not all
3D trees
I have just started, as of this week, on a 3D tree project. Below are a couple of early images. I have already produced one video that animates the creation of the tree (much as I have described above) and I am working on the same kind of system that I am developing for the 2D trees, cellular automata, to apply to these 3D trees. I am very excited about this project as I am using Blender, a 3D modelling and animation program that produces superb results. Blender also features a Python scripting interface which I am using to produce these animations. Finally I have a chance to learn Python and use it to produce animation in Blender – incredible possibilities here. I am also working on online interactive versions of the 2D and 3D tree projects which will run on my website (using Javascript, three.js, and tone.js), so you will be able to both generate and ‘play’ 2D and 3D trees of your own and then order prints and paintings of the results – that is the plan. You can see in the EHB2 project what this will look like.
but wait, that’s not all
High Park Branches
I would be remiss if I failed to mention the recently completed High Park Branches Project (HPB). As I mentioned in my previous blog detailing the wrap-up of my recent show what presented at Back Lane Studios during April of this year, the HPB project has been completely documented on my website and consists of a large number of images, videos/animations, commentary, prints, paintings, and audio albums. This, like many of my projects, embodies many different kinds of media and employs computer programming and animation at the core of it.
Here is a link to the final album of nine that serves as a culmination/compilation of all the audio albums before it:
but wait, that’s not all
NVHT
To illustrate that this focus on trees/forests is not something new in my practice, here is a link to an older project from 2013-2014: NVHT – New Vistas of Hyper-Dimensional Travel. It was an installation that I constructed out of white yarn and black lights in an approximately half-acre section of forest at Midlothian Castle in Burk’s Falls Ontario. I will be discussing this project in more detail in future blog posts. If you care to learn more now, here are the project pages on my website. It’s a pretty significant project in my oeuvre.
NVHT2 – scale map of the installation
click image to go to online store
NVHT3 – the final installation
it was a dark and stormy night – Ghosts of Harvest Past
click image to go to online store
dream
I was in an unfamiliar mall and was leading a group of my family and extended family members somewhere (not sure where). I was scouting ahead. I went up a set of stairs to a door that lead to the next ‘part’ of the mall. I opened the door which lead to the outdoors. There was a large bridge to the right which had predominant black and red colour. There was also a shoreline, beach, and some touristy type of businesses – restaurants, bars, sidewalk vendors and the like. I closed the door, went down the stairs and met with my family to lead them to the next part. We went up the stairs to the door and when I opened it – it was a completely different place. This time, it was a downtown city much like it is in Hamilton – office buildings, cars and roads, people, skyscrapers.
HPB paintings:
2D trees:
what and High Park Branches:
NVHT:
things:
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