underpainting

this is what the first half of "color study" (now a piece, not just a color study, although it will be functional) looks like now.



























my tripod broke a few months ago, plan to buy a new one sunday (hope it's in stock); then hope to begin work on the piece this week. getting chess shown and anything that entails still priority right now. also got matthew's images (from the nakasendo) and haven't been thinking too much about that lately - anyway, color study, a couple issues resolved. first, both halves (diptych i guess is the correct word?) are going to contain "real-world" color and pigment paint-world color. on one square, the one you see up there, i'll paint 81 squares of fundamental colors (grey, white, black, yellow, green, blue, purple, red, orange). i'll videotape that painting - up close, i think. so i'll have 81 little video clips of a base color being painted. then, out into the world, looking for things which have those colors, and taking 81 video clips of whatever i find. green is easy - leaves, grass, public garbage cans. but i'd like to have movement, that's where it gets tricky, maybe - don't know, haven't been out exploring yet. maybe someone is wearing an orange hat and i can zoom in on it? but i'd like to have, not sure if this is the best way to say this, contained movement - so, a toilet flushing works fine for white, for one-of-nine white moving images anyway, because the camera can be still (on the tripod, not tracking an orange hat through a crowd of people on a subway platform - never mind that it's illegal to film in the subway these days anyway) and the white (toilet basin) will also be still, but the clear water swirling will create some movement. suds popping, that's another, fixed camera angle but the popping is happening, that's two white movements, and maybe clouds if i'm lucky, so six more whites to go. so, i don't know, blue or orange - anyway hopefully either sunday or this week or next week i'll be wandering around accumulating these shots. yeah i could go through what's on my hard drive but i'm interested in really trying to find those fundamental colors. a really red red, moving, now, here.

the foundation of the second half then will also be a color grid, but they'll be stills from the video, and that will be printed and plexi-mounted. then the pieces get joined - i'll project the painting of the colors (rotated ninety degrees so you get one yellow square on the yellow real-world image, but then yellow painting over a green image, yellow painting over a blue image, and so on, until you get all 81 color combinations, as shown below in the post from the other day). and vice-versa - projecting all the real-world clips, in a grid, onto the painted half.

i guess this could end up taking a little while - weeks? months? anyway it's started, and it's clear what i want to do, and i don't think there are any major obstacles (flash might not like showing 162 video clips at once, i suppose, i could always cheat and use aftereffects, but i really want it to be nonlinear and always changing). anyway, i'm excited about it. i want to share chess, but this is something for me to just work on. getting it shown might be an obstacle, but that doesn't really enter into my head when i'm concentrating on a project. i figured out a way to let me paint, and painting is so all-absorbing, everything else just fades away, i could be anywhere, really. even just painting that grey, very moving, somehow - it's that painting-state you enter. painting-mind. could call it meditative, i suppose, but it's so active. even just grey, it's action, mental and physical, whole-being something-making.

and yes, i think it's funny that i can't start a painting without a tripod for my video camera. brushes i got, thinner i got, palette, easel, tubes of oil and powdered dry pigment if i decide to use egg tempera, that's all here, but i can't start painting without the tripod for the video camera, that's because i'm a new-media artist rather than a painter, right? a painter would just paint. me, i need to capture that video, or there's no point in doing it.