Breaking Through

I call this work Breaking Through. After I had made it, I wasn’t sure if I really liked it. Now that I look back at the preliminary sketches for it, I see that they have some interesting qualities that were lost in this “final version”. This work may speak to someone, I do not know.

Mental processes

A more painterly (and more sombre) version of a digital painting I made previously using design software. This is about some kinds of mental processes, but I don’t want to describe it in too much detail.

Collager 2023 painting

I wrote the Collager program over 10 years ago, but updated it significantly last year. It uses a library of images and selected parts of them to collage to the screen in a continuous process. The new version can do nifty things like rotating and resizing things it has captured from the source images, and can also reprocess the image to try to bring it more into line with a classic colour harmony (complementary colours, triads, etc). Here is one output from the program I have never shared before which I find oddly interesting, with its unusual colours and composition:

A recent automatic drawing.

An automatic drawing is one where you just start drawing and see what emerges. If you can let go, and allow things to emerge spontaneously, it can reveal what is going on in your unconscious. Although, the result is not always easy to interpret to understand.

Encounter with an AI

How I imagine encountering an AI intelligence in cyberspace. Created using my Shapepaint drawing program.

Shapepaint

Here is an image created using my Shapepaint application, which I coded a while ago, but added new functionalities to last year, and started playing with it again. More to come, soon!

The Knot of Self

I call this painting The Knot of Self, because it is about how the self is not really separate from everything else around it. It exists, but it is contingent on, and kind of composed of everything around it, as well. Its ideas and notions are received from somewhere else, and when you are thinking about something, then the current contents of your mind are composed of those “outside” elements.

This is the Buddhist notion of “emptiness”. The self is empty of any permanent, separate essence, but at the same time, does exist and is full of, is not separated from, everything else in the universe. And if we could realize this fully, we would be freed from all fear and suffering, according to Buddhism.

Lucifer Descending

This is an image I produced in 2022, when I was working through some things, psychologically. The buildings were created in Sketchup, the plants in Affinity Designer, and the image hand-drawn, also in Affinity Designer. I tried to integrate it all together into an image, but I wasn’t sure how successful it was. This image is meaningful to me, at least, in terms of what I was trying to work through. cryptic, I know, but that’s all you get.

Some buildings constructed in Sketchup

Experimenting with the “construction” of some buildings in Sketchup. A kind of twisted tower, a church and a building resembling a rocket. Playing with Sketchup is a kind of drawing, for me. It is quite intuitive to use, and you can create forms in it, and shade them with colours and textures very quickly. Of course, it doesn’t give you photo-realistic scenes like Blender, but it also feels much more like a fun and resource-light way to play with some 3D forms, which can always be exported into more heavy-duty software later on.

Vast Space??

I was listening to the second track on the Atomos album by A Winged Victory for the Sullen. I got the sense of this vast and lonely space with light illuminating the dusty distances. Just a feeling of a huge, calm, yet desolate space. I made some models in Blender, illuminated and rendered them, and got some interesting “drawings” that nevertheless failed completely to create that feeling. This is one of them. I would say this feels like some kind of entity or energy breaking through into a space. I like it, and find it interesting, even though it failed to convey what I intended it to convey.

Fall of Gondolin!

Last year I was reading The Fall of Gondolin (Tolkien), and decided to do this abstract representation of Gondolin being attacked by the evil forces. Gondolin, city of light and purity, valiantly defending itself against the dark hordes of dragons and balrogs.

City 01

I spent a while building this city in Sketchup. I’m not sure exactly what it is about, but I was working on it during Covid, and maybe it was something to do with building some kind of ideal, protected space, where everything was safe and perfect? After a while of working on this, the momentum kind of ran out, because I wasn’t quite sure what is was all about.

New blog to share some side-project work

Hi everyone. I am starting this new Blog to share some of my work that feels a little orphaned - experiments that I found interesting, but did not really know what to do with. For each entry, I will try to explain a little about what I was thinking about with the work, and what it meant to me. Feel free to comment or ask questions on any of the posts.