These drawings began as what for me was an intriguing experiment. Having become recently aware of new thinking in mathematics and biology concerning self-organizing systems (see About Brewery Paintings page) I wanted to see if it was possible to create a drawing process which would completely free me from consciously constructed composition and yet organize itself into something that might carry meaning.
Due to the medium of drawing, using primarily charcoal and pastels, I was able to take the application/negation process from the Island paintings and work on an even more intimate scale. Again the technical aspect played a critical role in the process and the result. My intention was to create a mark-making that was totally random. Building and then negating this randomness eventually resulted in the final form, which I believe does possess an intrinsic organization. The new medium wasn't liquid and therefore did not create its own form in the same way as the paintings, but what is so surprising is that the resulting form was quite similar to the forms in the paintings from the 90’s. As I replicated the process in subsequent drawings, altering mainly the color or drawing medium, the resulting organization and forms were unique but obviously related to the previous drawings.
What I find so interesting about these drawings is that the emergent forms, the tube-like structures which I suspected had become simply visual devices in the earlier paintings, were what materialized from this random process. In the drawings though, they seemed to organize themselves in a more authentic way.
Once I got over my initial surprise, I quickly turned cynical. This coincidence of form seemed to point towards a manipulation, unconscious at best, conscious and not admitted at worst, on my part. Naturally, there is always an element of myself that I can not extract from the process (color and medium choices, deciding when to stop, etc.) so I decided to “try” to control the composition by making my mark making less random (employing a circular motif for example). In almost every case the drawings made by my “trying” were in no way nearly as “interesting” as the ones where I was able to maintain the most randomness. Of course this begs an aesthetic question which is a different discussion.
I suspect that there may even be a model using the mathematics of complexity that could show how these patterns emerged. Still, unlike computer generated fractal images, Julia sets, and the images known as electric sheep, these drawings show the result of self-organization not generated by a mathematical algorithm. But then, so does a snowflake. However, using the drawing process to arrive at a similar result leads me to believe that there may be something beyond aesthetics happening here.
So what? I don’t know. For me as an artist, who doesn’t claim to understand the mathematics of complexity or the intricacy of the new biology in any other than a poetic way, I find the work being done in those fields quite stimulating in their potential to describe the world with greater subtlety and accuracy. What I find intriguing about these drawings, when viewed with the paintings from the last twenty years, is that perhaps it is possible to arrive at similar ideas and insights from an artistic perspective. Perhaps the complimentary nature of these two approaches will be necessary for a full understanding of these new views.
