Angela J. Hill

I was hoping to go somewhere this weekend, but allergies and a cold combined really got the better of me. So instead, one more weekend in London.

Unfortunately I’m having serious computer issues and can’t even deal with RAW files right now. I finally set my camera to shoot RAW + JPG–and I guess I’ll have the source files handy to go back to later. Better than nothing?

110 is the perfect number to describe this scene, and I love it when that happens:

At the Tate Modern:

As a synesthete, anything about the ability of one sense to trigger another sense is immediately of interest to me. Gabe sent me this article from Wired, which also led me to this one from Discover. The point of both is that the parts of the brain we use to process input from each of our senses can be used to process information for other senses…basically just that the brain is extraordinarily plastic in ways that are almost impossible to conceive of because they challenge our fundamental perceptions.

(As a sidenote, we’re taught (in the US at least) that humans have five senses: sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing. But in reality, we all have many more.)

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 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.

Click through to see more photos…

It is, indeed, done!

…and, the Glamour Shots:

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.

Finito.

…and a detail:

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!

More layers done, more layers to go.

Here’s where we are now…

…and here’s where we came from:

I did this yesterday evening when I should have been working on Christmas gifts.

“3.6″, acrylic on canvas, 24″ x 30″

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.

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…

There are…even more dots! We’re getting close now…

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: