Monthly Archives: October 2008

I’ve been intending on posting this for a while now. This is a video/slideshow presentation of the mural under development. Enjoy!

I finished this one last week but didn’t shoot it until today. Machine #3 uses a standard silkscreen suspended parallel to a stretched piece of paper beneath. In this image you’re about paper level, so you can’t really see it too well, but you can see the underside of the silkscreen from this angle. That black on the screen is actually an old print, so I obviously used a screen I had laying around. On the top side of the screen are various blobs of watercolor sitting and waiting for rain, which is predicted tomorrow.

The idea here is that the rain will saturate the silkscreen and moisten the watercolors. The screen is a fairly dense mesh, so it should hold the water until it builds up significantly by which time it should be well stained with the moistened watercolors. Then areas of the screen will reach critical mass and begin to drop wet colors onto the paper beneath. Where it will choose to drop is just natural random order.

In fact, this one has already been hit with rain. On the one hand, it was not PERFECTLY level, although it appeared to be, so the dyed water more or less ran to one side before building enough weight to drip through the screen. Not planned. However (this is the other hand) it did make a really soft interesting design on the paper. I’ll be pulling it tomorrow and post the results here, but frankly the subtlety may be too much to reproduce digitally. We’ll see.

For tomorrow, however, I hope to take Rick’s suggestion and record one of these babies in rainy action and post.

This one I was finishing as it was starting to rain. Like the previous machine, cups of watercolor are in the bar across the top of the machine. With rain, the cups fill up and drop watercolors onto a slanted plexiglass at the top, drip down to a stretched paper, run down the paper, then drip down to another stretched paper at the bottom. Basically acting like a waterfall, the machine creates two paintings at a time. After it had rained some I took these shots, so you can see some of the paths on the paper.

Well, not really amazing and technically not a machine either, this gizmo is a contraption to paint watercolors generated by wind and rain, patent pending.

Basically it consists of a rack to hold and stretch the paper with dry watercolor and nylon string dangling across the face of the paper. When it rains, the watercolor moistens and runs down the string depositing patterns on the paper surface. With the wind, the string should create interesting patterns and directions.

More to come.