twenty-five hours of artmaking

current state of the first improvisation (in yellow, blue and orange).  blurry picture taken with my camera phone.  that's an oil painting on canvas (four feet high by five feet wide) on the wall.  below it you can see my palette on a chair, to the right is the laptop showing the photoshop "painting" which is being projected onto the oil painting.  you can't see the projector and video camera, both to the right of the computer.  think the first part of making this improvisation (the oil painting and the photoshop "painting") will be complete in a few days.  editing and programming the digital projected element will probably take a couple of weeks after that.  but i'm getting to the point where i can more or less envision what it's going to look like, at this point it's more about doing the work than figuring out what to do.  there's still some of that, but way less than at the beginning, with the blank canvas and the blank screen.  inevitably becoming less and less of an improvisation the more time i spend working on it.

this feels paradoxical and slightly unnerving - the whole reason i wanted to make improvisations is because i want to explore while i'm painting, i don't want to already know what a piece will look like - but there's no escaping, eventually we know what it is becoming.  the perverse aspect of imagination - the more real it becomes, the more difficult it is to imagine the infite alternatives which do not exist.  the plastic arts born of our minds become the concrete arts of the real world.