Picasso’s great painting, Guernica, along with visions of stained glass, shattered, remade, lost and found, provided the spark. Another step along the way.
Today, I mixed the two built-in software programs, Paint, and Paint3D. Used the first to draw the lines, make the shapes, play with the different colors, and then the latter to fine tune the fill aspect. Also skimmed online for information about mixing colors on the virtual canvas, primarily because I miss that, miss watching the process, missed the improv, ad-lib, jazzy-eureka moments as they occurred before my eyes. Missed the way that colors dance with one another, merge and mutate, flow and morph. Meta and more meta. Standing back, eying the deeds of light, diving back in again. It can be approximated via software, apparently, and Photoshop is likely among the best for Windows. An option for the future . . .
There was a time, and another time, when the good god Osmosis was at play, and so were we all. There, at least. In that huge building on campus. I learned daily from my fellow art students back then, and that included where to find great deals on paints and art supplies in general. So we (or I) would take the metro or drive into DC — to Utrecht in a sense. In my head. Not Van Gogh’s Holland, or Vermeer’s, but mine, and not too far from the suburbs of Maryland, as luck would have it. This was all in the service of many things, including the joy of mixing paints on a palette board, or a cast-off piece of wood or glass, and (especially) on the canvas itself.
This can’t be replicated via AI. Nor should it be. That joy is too special for copies. The breaking of barriers as we went along. Overcoming obstacles and so on. Making do.
Below is the third in the Hieros Gamos series, and sets a marker of sorts for the difference in forms and methods, effects and relative limitations. I remember being in love with the process for this one to a greater extent, perhaps, than with any other.
