Like 200, this one is done by virtue of the fact that I’m gone and can’t work on it anymore. Had some issues with the gloss/matte mediums that haven’t been problematic before, which I’m sure is due to using lighter paint colors. So I think I will go back and highlight that when I return, but it’s done for now:
The numbers are there, at the bottom…
This one is similar to 641 and 407, but unfortunately the numbers themselves are impossible to see straight on…
…but they’re there:
When I get back from the summer abroad, I may go back and make some adjustments to bring that out–maybe paint the number in a slightly “off” color or something, then go over it again in the matte finish. Love the texture in this one, though. Very happy with that!
Last night I did the texture; today I did the color. I think it’s clear by now that these are done with latex house paint. Today I had the yellow paint mixed and they could only do a semi-gloss because of the pigments–so when I add the numbers in a matte finish, I’ll also gloss-ify the rest of the color field. Hoping to do one more of these before I leave for London on Thursday, but who knows…
I really enjoy these paintings. The paint is mixed directly on the canvas, and the more of this I do the more of a feel I get for the necessary timing. It’s like diving into a pool; once I start, there’s a very solid timing window, and I have to get things into the correct position before I hit water/the paint dries, or I might break my neck. Painting like this feels a little like free fall and I love it.
I want to finish this before I leave the country next. We’ll see if that happens, but I do like the way it’s coming along. This series has been interesting and has really made me think more about the textures that go with my numbers. This one is muuuuuch bumpier–almost pebbly–than the last one, 0350200450.
Numbers cut out and affixed…the third one in this series will be in the works before too long, though my travel schedule has a way of getting in the way of that since these paintings take a lot of time.
It’s amazing how putting the numbers on gives me such a tremendous “AHHHHHH” feeling, like everything matches and all is right with the world. Hurray!
With the addition of the numbers (again, painted just in a matte finish), this is complete! Like 641, it’s latex and acrylic paint over modeling paste on canvas. These paintings really have to be seen in person to get a real feel for them.
Details:
The paint is done; simply need to cut out and affix the numbers. I’m in Seattle for a few days but hope to do that first thing when I get back next week. I really like how this is coming together and can’t wait to get started on the third one…
Details:
It was a busy weekend painting-wise. This will be a companion piece to 641; there could be more to come, too. I’d like to do some that fade off to white instead of black, I think, or that fade from one color to another. And I feel like orange (5) is getting neglected a bit. At any rate, the paint work on this is nearly done, and the numbers are printed and sitting on my floor, ready to serve as templates for the matte finish…
Details:
The number is painted simply in a matte finish, so it floats into and out of the surrounding color as the viewer (and the lights) move around it. Photographing it was quite a challenge! I should try again with a polarized filter.
This piece is 40″x30″ and is latex paint and acrylic mediums over modeling paste. And, this number is my work phone extension. I never ever use it, but it’s staring back at me from my phone anytime I’m in the office.
And a couple of details:
It’s coming along…the paint is not quite complete, and then I’ll need to add the numbers, but it’s finally getting to a point where it begins to captures the essence of the number’s color. This style is really challenging for me, because it requires so many layers of paint, and as the paint is built up, the top color always seems so much more prominent than it should be (or will be at the end). It’s a leap of faith to know I’ll find my way to the right order and combination…then again, it’s that much more interesting when it gets there.
This has been drying all afternoon, standing on its side in front of my TV. With latex paint it’s very important to let thick layers cure before doing anything on top of them, and anything with texture like this is just going to have thick paint, period, as it settles into the nooks and crannies.
I started by making a texture with modeling paste and a variety of tools (this is just a detail of the whole thing):
Then, painted it red–right down to the aforementioned nooks and crannies. I knew I’d miss spots on the next coat so had to get this coat on pretty well. (this is partway through the process. It’s hard to shoot these big canvases with my DSLR when they’re on the floor.)
And now I’ve added the true color. I love the way the color and texture evolve together as they travel across the canvas - when the numbers are added it will be finished! (This photo actually shows it rotated, and the white parts are glare - this is what I get for using lots of gloss. It doesn’t always photograph well but I love what it does in person - mess one’s depth perception.)
This will be a companion piece to 4670007790, and there will be one more to come too…
I often keep the number nearby when I’m painting, for reference. This is just the very beginning of a painting that will take many many many layers of paint before it’s done. I love to see how they build up.
Finally finished cutting out the numbers and affixed them last night. There are two more in this series coming. Actually last night I also started a small study for a large piece I’m about to do in a different series–feeling very creative these days. Also, sidenote: the numbers on the sides are cropped in the painting, not just in the photo. I’m starting to change my painting composition a bit.
And a couple of detail shots, just for fun:
I finally came up with a new technique for representing the numbers. For awhile I’ve wanted to put numbers on top of the textures I’m painting; but the numbers really need to be flat, and therefore rigid; in addition, it needs to be doable in a timeframe that will not send me to crazytown. Anyway, after considering a plethora of foams and plastics and combinations thereof, it finally occurred to me: balsa wood.
The biggest problem with this method is that balsa wood is happy to break in the east-west direction; so the number 7 kept breaking at its tiny neck. I have one intact and two broken; hoping I can work around that. Now the numbers are getting painted (black). The edges will wind up white, and then they’ll be affixed to the painting.
I haven’t done much painting lately, but a trip to the Seattle Museum of Art and a look at a Jackson Pollock inspired me. Somewhere along the way I realized that I wanted to do a really gestural painting with a lot of thin white lines. The number 4970006670 came to mind in the middle of the night.
At this point, I’m done with the paint except for the numbers. Those, along with better photos, will come soon…
Yes that’s right: my paintings are now live and for sale on ArtQuiver. I’m so proud of this! They have a great UI, and policies that really make it possible to feel confident buying art online, including a feature where they’ll mail you a free black and white life-size proof of art you’re considering, and a lifetime return policy. Take a look, and click around to look at the other artists too!
At Christmas last year, my gift to my brother Adam was that I’d do a painting of any number he wanted. Since he’s a nerdy (read: fascinating and cool) guy, I thought that might appeal. After several months he settled on a pretty nerdy number indeed: 256. After several more months, I’m finally working on the piece:
I’m not sure if this is done yet. I have to live with it for a bit to figure that out.
All finished. So simple compared to many of the others. I will be painting this number over and over, I think.
First I accidentally destroyed the one I was working on. I tried to do something with a medium and to make a long story short it did not work out the way I’d hoped at ALL. At first the glossiness brought out the depth of the colors but eventually it completely obscured them. Well, you live, you learn. I even tried to fix it, to no avail. It looked even worse afterward, like a preschool art project, and not in a good way.
Then I thought, I’m just going to do this all over again with a different canvas. Something short and wide. So this happened. The paint is still wet and reflecting the lights (since it’s the middle of the night) so a finished photo will come later.
Then I thought, well, if I could do that, why can’t I fix the other one, too? We’ll see when it dries if it worked or not, but regardless I think it gave me a couple of interesting photos.
Making a list of stuff I can do to feel better the other day, I realized that it makes me feel very good to think about the number 7440. I find it very soothing. It’s so smooth…and the color is beautiful, blue, both bright and subdued at the same time. With inner motion but outer stillness.
So I’m painting it. I think this will be the first of potentially several paintings of this number. This is just phase 1. I intend to fill the numbers in with white and do a heavy layer of gloss gel over it.
It’s very little. The ink part is maybe 8″ across.
The yellows are pretty wrong, but I’m letting it go.
I haven’t painted anything in weeks, so I’m easing back into it with another miniature of an exisiting number painting: 2569062. This is all pen so technically I suppose it’s not a “painting”. The blue numbers are card stock stickers. This is the easiest way for me to protect the white space of the numbers–they’ll come off when I’m done. Oh, and I realized too late that I had only 2 6s/9s so one has had to do double duty, which is why the 9 is already blank.
It was THE party of the season, so to speak. There are several pictures here! Thank you SO much to everyone who came and made my first show a really special event. And if anyone has any more pictures, please send them my way!
If you’ve seen my paintings at Mighty and are interested in learning more, please visit my Art page for prices, availability, contact information, and commissions.
I am THRILLED to report that three of my paintings are now on display at Mighty, a club in SF. They’ll be there for a few months, but to celebrate, I’m having a shindig at Mighty on Saturday, May 9th. Doors open at 10 and everyone’s invited.
I painted this several weeks ago as a gift. Obviously, it’s a miniature, with a different aspect ratio, of 422079.
I will say, this makes me want to do miniature paintings of *all* of my work.
I just finished it, and I’m ever-so-pleased.
There are plenty of photos of the work-in-progress…but here are some details of the finished piece:
It’s all about sand right now. And, now I’m kind of interested in creating things, paintings or sculpture or whatever, just for the purpose of photographing them. But this is just a step in the road to finishing this painting.
Between 8pm and 2:30am last night I did the following:
Took several pictures of my Rhodes and various other things:
Finished the sketch of the next numbers I want to paint, which I have been wrestling with for a solid week. This is a task that would undoubtedly be better accomplished in Illustrator if I a) had a copy, and b) knew how to use it. Barring that, I use a pencil and paper. Anyway, I like it now.
Drove to one Kinkos to make copies, realized it wasn’t open, and drove to another one, where I performed the elaborate task of enlarging this sketch and piecing the copies together.
Stopped by the grocery store, where I picked up a sandwich and an enormous chocolate bar. Ate half the sandwich and all of the chocolate while getting out my paints.
Cut out the numbers, taped them to the canvas, taped around them, and outlined that in black paint.
While waiting for the paint to dry, played dress-up. Put on these things:
- Color-block dress with a cowl neck
- Weird green-grey fedora
- Leather/stone necklace from street vendor in Prague
- Matching leather cuff bracelet that I bought one year earlier from the same street vendor in Prague
- Boots with purple contrast inside, styled kinda weird
Played with makeup, too.
Taped up the numbers once the paint was dry. Now the canvas is fully prepped and ready for me to get working on it.
Decided I wasn’t done playing dress-up:
- What’s now a pencil skirt with a kick pleat, remade from a skirt I got for like $4 at Target
- Brown & white tie-front silk top that reminds me of that dress from Pretty Woman
- Speaking of Pretty Woman, very provocative shoes
- Safety-pin necklace I made
- Big ring made from a kit I got in Paris
- Absolutely ridiculous hoodie sweatshirt from Tokyo
And then I went to sleep.
This was more of a study with of the forms and media…I’m actually completely unhappy with the color, but wanted to experiment with flourescents a bit. The numbers are coated in two different media–a “lava†texture (the 1) and a glass bead gel (the 4). Look for a do-over with the “real†colors soon.
I’ve actually just finished it, but I need to varnish and photograph it tomorrow. It’s amazing how a painting can come alive in the final details. Final pics up tomorrow!
This is what I’ve been been painting for the last several days…and this is what it’s looked like at various stages. It’s 36″ x 48″ and the texture is made with a variety of threads, strings, and other fibers, along with many, MANY layers of paint and mediums including a lava texture and glass beads. In the end the overall look will be similar to 14078. It (like the other) started as a small sketch–I spent a lovely morning at Kinko’s massively enlarging it to get to this point. I was surely beloved by all of my fellow customers as I taped and re-enlarged whilst monopolizing a copier. Surely.
A few weeks ago in Vegas, I saw the glass flowers at the Bellagio. I walked by, but then came back to take a couple of photos, because as I thought of it I realized that the glass colors really looked a lot like my number-colors. (On a side note, I just read that synesthetes often have trouble representing their perceived colors with paint because they’re thought of as colored light rather than colored pigment. SO TRUE. Though obviously there are ways around this. But, I think this is why the colored glass was so compelling–it’s much closer to light than pigment.)
So, at Christmas this year, my mom gave me an old tape I recorded when I was in high school. I used to make these albums all the time, complete with covers I’d print out on the dot matrix printer. Look at this closeup of the cover!
What’s extra weird about this is that 1) I didn’t take photos of anything other than people, except for those flowers, and 2) when I showed the photo and the tape cover side-by-side to my family, every person thought they were seeing a photo of the album. So weird!
I did this yesterday evening when I should have been working on Christmas gifts.
I feel sort of okay about painting when I should have been sewing just because these are the Christmasy numbers…I could have done 6.3 or 63 or something of the sort, but apparently this is the Christmasiest combination of all. Why there are no carols about it, I’ll never know.
I doodled these in my work notebook the other day–you’ll be seeing “021″ and “3.6″ in the very near future…
And…it’s done.
It would be difficult for me to love the texture more.
I fixed the blues on the 7 and 8 (the original colors were just base coats–I added coats to all of the numbers, but the 7 and 8 are most noticable), and now it’s starting to come to life.
Yesterday I awoke with a dream half stuck in my brain, and I had one of those moments when you realize that your brain is working out one problem by talking to you about another. I thought about attempting to study a stationary object while you’re in motion…imagine looking at a star from a satellite traveling in a straight line through the universe. You’d take a looooooong time getting there, be in the star’s proximity for a very short time, and then take forever moving away from it. To study any more, you’d need to get a new satellite. To avoid that you’d need to get into orbit around the star. But to do so you’d a) be following a non-linear equation, which easy math isn’t too pleased about and b) need to get into balance with the star’s gravitational pull (to stay close enough without crashing into it).
The point is: the forces in life that act as those kinds of gravitational pull are tremendously valuable, in any medium. For example: I find it challenging to think about higher dimensions. I can get it for a second, but then it slips away. I need to learn the gravity around that. Or music–sometimes I can feel the chord that needs to come next in a progression, but I can only find it by going through the previous 4 bars and leading up to it. I can only hold it in my mind in the context of the approach. But then when I learn the song to a higher degree, I find the gravity in it.
In summary: this is making me think of study not as learning the topics themselves, but as learning how to get myself into (and hold myself in) orbit around a topic for long enough to observe what needs to be seen.
In that vein, here are two closeup shots of my current painting.
There’s more to be done on the numbers themselves, but here’s what I did this weekend.
I worked on this until 3 a.m. last night and was back up at 7, at which point I went into the living room and stared at it for a solid two hours. At the end of that, I knew what I needed to do.
Step 2 (3?): Tape off the numbers so that I can begin work on the background. Tape imprecisely because I’ll be working over the borders a bit.
And yes, that’s tinsel peeking out at the bottom, of course.
Transferring the sketch onto this big canvas (36″x48″) was a fun little project…mostly because I realized that the best way to do it would be with a projector, and where do I have access to a projector? At work, that’s where. And a 3′ x 4′ canvas is not exactly inconspicuous.
I traced it on lightly in pencil, then outlined it when I got home. Thus begins what I think is going to be a really great painting.
After showing a friend my number paintings, we decided to Google the numbers just to see what would come up. The others didn’t immediately turn up anything remarkable, but I can hardly believe what I found for 33103. Here’s the image (by Rich Panse on nycsubway.com), which I didn’t see until today, and the painting, which I did a couple of months back:
I’m serious…HOW WEIRD IS THAT??
Well, that was fast.
This is gloss latex paint on canvas, with ink on gaffer’s tape over it. I chose the gloss latex because I’ve worked with it on some other paintings (which, now that I think about it, I should post here), it blends well, and it has the sheen I was looking for. The gaff tape and white ink were what I originally conceived of, but I went through some other tape attempts and ink colors before finalizing.
The 1s and 0s do actually contain a message, but I’ve decided that this is where I’m going to hide my secrets.
This will be turning into a giant painting soon. And I think the number-layering technique is going to come back again and again because it really represents how I experience numbers.
While reading Uncommon Genius on a plane the other day, I had a flash of a complete painting in my mind. I painted this the day I got back from that trip, but have been waiting to get some more materials to complete it. I got them today so should be finishing this up tonight…
I may have forgotten to mention that 2569062 was going to get a companion piece.
Partway through the first one, after doing about a bajillion dots (all by hand! With a paintbrush!) I thought, Hey, I should totally have punched out a bunch of dots with a hole punch and just scattered those on a canvas. An artist friend suggested that I do both. After finishing the painting I got going on this one–first with spray adhesive, which was both a pain in the ass and also ineffective, and then after sleeping on it for a few nights, I settled on using a gloss medium as both glue and varnish and applying the dots with a paintbrush. It worked! And I realized that I loooooouuuurrrve the two pieces together with this one so much less filled in. They tell the story that way! Continue Reading…
It’s finally done!
The numbers were filled in with an interference violet that makes the whole thing shimmer as the light changes. See how the (white) numbers are greener on the left and pinker on the right? This has been a ton of work but I’m really pleased with the result! Continue Reading…
This painting, which I’ve shown before, is coming along. I can’t believe how much work this has turned out to be. There are really a LOT of…dots. But, I’ve finally hit a point where the momentum is starting to carry me–I think I’ve crossed into the home stretch.
This one’s most definitely in progress. There need to be a lot more dots. But here we are:
Here we have the second of my number paintings.
These are in the Art page, but I wanted to call them out.
I’m doing a series of paintings based on my synesthetic responses to numbers. I have grapheme-color synesthesia, which in my case means that I perceive numbers as having innate color properties. (To get even more detailed, my synesthesia is based on the concept of the number, not the actual physical representation of it–so just thinking of the “concept” of, for example, the number 5, makes me perceive orange. If I see a 7 and a 2, my mind turns it into a math problem, and I get blue for the 7, yellow for the 2, and orange for the 5 that’s implied when you subtract 2 from 7. Just…go with it.)
So, sometimes I either see or just think of a number, and it gets stuck in my head like a melody. Those numbers have been winding up on canvas. This is the first one:
