Yesterday was ‘close up’ -

here’s the same Jaume Plensa sculpture ‘from a distance’.

To give you some idea of scale, the red blob is a person inside the sculpture. The effect is ‘Seurat’ from PFAEC.

I am fascinated by this piece – does the fact that it is made of letters make it a book? Probably not – but it inspires some interesting ideas.

 

Knowing that today would be Babybel and gym day, I worked on the image yesterday – and I’m glad I did because today has been so hot and humid, I have little energy for anything challenging.

I will probably manage some more work on SAM tonight – I made 2,3,4,or 5 marks yesterday, depending on how you count them.

Is this one or two marks? I’m counting it as two, even though they overlap, because they are not conceptually related to each other - [‘ark at ‘er!]– apart from both being inspired by the dye marks on the cloth.

 

I have decided  that this is also two. The little blue blobs were worked over splatter marks, and I’m counting them as one mark. The others were an exploration of related ideas, so also count as one mark.

The block on the right, which reminds me of rhubarb, was inspired by the colour exploration I did yesterday – using embroidery floss and changing the proportion of red to green by one strand each time. Then I tried a similar idea but changing the number of strands in the needle each time. I’m tempted to have another go with machine embroidery thread, which I hope is even finer than floss – how minimal can a mark be before it ceases to be a mark? 

I did look up the word in a dictionary yesterday: lots of interesting ideas came out of that, including holes and symbols. But I can’t make up my mind how 3D a ‘mark’ is – and what about texture? I tried thinking about art media marks – the difference between pencil marks and paint marks, for example – and of course paint can be textured and 2.5D if not 3…

Is it just me who wastes spends time thinking deep thoughts about questions like this? Does everyone else just get on with it? It’s interesting, though, and looks like being a good cure for insomnia.

One decision I have made is that somewhere there will be a big red ‘X’ …