Organized Chaos: An Introduction to How I Work
My art, like my life, is a balance between organization and chaos.
Initially, I struggled with perfectionism and that got in the way at my early attempts to make art. I started playing around with mono printing on a gelatin plate as a way to loosen up. After a typical mono printing session, I would end up with a large stack of junk but a small stack of really interesting prints that were a total surprise. I got hooked on those surprises but I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do with the pretty papers.
In the meantime, I was also teaching myself to create patterns using graphic design software. I loved the control of creating repeatable shapes and scaling, rotating and duplicating them. But, in the end, I thought the final results were stiff, flat and uninteresting. Then, one day I realized I could combine the two methods and fill the digital shapes with scanned images of the chaotic artwork – and, thus, my style was born.
So, this is what I do: I have printing days in the studio (sometimes with a friend). At the end of the day, I look for the papers that have that joyful expression of color and texture that I crave. I set those aside for another day when I work on the computer to turn those prints into endlessly repeating patterns. (That is a big, non-trivial task, the details are tedious. One of these days, I will publish a comprehensive how-to.) Other days, I sketch critters and plants. I’ve loosened up over the years – I know it’s not the final product so I just sketch. I use these sketches (or sometimes photographs) as references to create digital drawings that are comprised of different shapes. Finally, I fill each shape with the digital patterns I created from the paper prints. Working digitally, I can rotate and scale the pattern within the shape so that it looks like it was just meant to be.
I know – that’s a lot of steps. Each step has a purpose in combining simple, controlled shapes with rough sketches and unpredictable prints to create art that is my organized chaos. For me, though, the final designs are really just the middle of the journey resulting in some pretty stuff that lives in my computer. In order to share it with the world, I need to build it into something. This is where my love of textiles comes into play. I upload the designs to a textile printing partner where I can choose to print the designs on about 20 kinds of fabric (and wallpaper!), then sew the fabric into final products. I also print the designs on archival paper for wall art and cards.
