May

The sketches take the same procedural recursion from the nautilus paintings and bring them to the top of the conceptual stack. i.e. I'm trying to draw more attention to recursion as what the paintings are about.

'Recursion' is used most often in math or programming-- things that deal with algorithms. In a recursion, a process is performed and the result is rechurned through the next time the process is carried out. The classic example is the fibonacci series. The series is 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 etc. You iterate through the series by taking the most recent number in the series and adding it to the number before it. 8 + 5 is 13. 13 + 8 is 21. 21 + 13 is 34. And so on. The recursion is that the process iterates over itself. I'm not immediately interested in number sequences in these paintings, but I am interested in procedures that iterate over themselves. I'll get to why in a bit.

In the nautilus paintings, I proceed in a linear way around the canvas. I paint a single region of the canvas at a time, incrementally mixing paint as I go. The paint for a single color is mixed into the next. Once the color is laid down, it is subsumed the next time I need to mix paint. It precludes going back or touching up or correcting color choices later. The recursion is in the iteration of the mixing procedure that is immediately incorporated into the ongoing process.

In the new sketches I'm working on, the admixture of a new hue is meant only to shift the hue of the existing paint body. The point isn't to turn one color into another color, like in the nautilus paintings. It's to take the aggregated mass and move it one step in some direction. c = a + b. d = a + b + c. e = a + b + c + d. And so on.

That's the process of the sketches. The content deals with a specific interpellative framework. Specifically, the creation of the subject by way of anonymizing declarations. More specifically, craisglist.org hookup ads.

Sketches TK.