Recursive Colophon

This is the first purely typographic work I have made in several years. All my typecraft owes a lot to the work of pioneering typographers like Wolfgang Weingart and John Maeda. This particular experiment is, as you can probably tell, a joke about fractals executed in thrice-blesséd Hoefler Text. I plan to make a steadily fading version with even more iterations, but fear for the safety of my computer. Still, as my brother continually tells me, art is all about knowing when to stop.

I've just noticed the similarities between this image and the black beams in the post below. Coincidence? Yes.

Carnivale

This is a 'digital painting' that I completed today. Adding left/right symmetry to random phenomena always, for me, brings out faces. This form of assisted pareidolia (seeing patterns where there are none) always makes me wonder about the baroque facial recognition algorithms hard-wired into the human brain; at certain times - when rationality is weakened - even furniture can gain an expression. The world is so quickly turned in to the Beast's Castle (in the 1991 Disney movie) where every stick of furniture has a personality. And what is more, when we share our observations we often find that people will agree that, say, a certain jug looks pleased with itself, and another jug looks glum. (Indeed, it is not only in English that objects such as ceramic vessels share our anatomies; lips and feet, necks and bellies). Whether we learn all of it from experience, or have some basic physiognomy hardwired, we all infer character from appearance, and our inferences often agree.

The Trees of Whiteladies

Found Paintings

I took these digital photographs at the Bristol School of Art. This kind of suface is the result of layers and layers of accidental painting and repainting. Contriving to produce such a surface rather defeats the point, and (like the difference between distrssed furniture and an antique) often looks daft. Of course, the act of framing a section of a rich, paint-spattered environment is a powerful one. Compositional beauty (perhaps all beauty) lies in the correct application of a grid, and I am no photographer. Often, the beauty my eye finds in these found paintings in the environment relies on a semi-conscious editing out. I cannot photograph what I see.

I have a passionate attraction to all things distressed, dirty, moldy, verdigris or patinated. Looking at lichen or the cracks in leather can occupy me for hours. I think it has something to do with the scale-invariance; aerial photographs and microscopy have much in common. Staring into rockpools, I lose my sense of scale. For a feverish moment, my sense of myself expands and contracts at the same time.

I seem to loom, ballooning, yet simultaneously, vertiginiously, to dwindle down to a mote. I call this sense 'the giantiny'. Along with this scale trick, the kind of surfaces in which I find most pleasure have that quality of Leonardo's Wall (which many men have spat upon). Yet even this rich hallucinatory material does not fully explain the almost culinary attraction I have to this kind of thing. They are a feast for my eye (I have but one). On seeing such a surface in life or art, I almost need to lick my lips. Reach out and grasp with my hands. Open my mouth. I cannot fully describe the sensation, the hunger I have for the speckled surface amazes me.

I have a troubling 'Truth to Materials' Leech-style superego, which takes an offence (comic in its intesity) to material made to look like something it isn't, but in a half-arsed way. A copy of a copy. Why, for example, do cigarettes have mottled orange filters? The filters were once made of cork. Accident lazily becomes tradition. The reason such a thing as the colour of cigarette butts makes me so angry is, I hope, bcause it is emblematic of a wider trand in culture. The future becomes a thoughtless shallow copy of the mask of the past.