Exercise great care when choosing your essential fictions
What made this one pop was adding some brightness to the closed loops. In all of these filigree-like clusters featured in my paintings, there are closed loops, and then there are the concave segments connecting them — swaybacked or spiraling, depending on how long the line gets before crossing itself and closing the next loop. It’s a binary alphabet, a visual machine language. The loop is like a ‘zero’, oriented inward, a seed, an egg, encompassing, containing, constraining. The segment is like a ‘one’, outward, a sprout, a tail, a tendril, spreading and connecting.
Selectively adding the brightness to emphasize the structure conveys more information through a sort of a color coding of the loops and segments that makes this painting more directly illustrative than a lot of the others. It also enables the final clustered form to hold its own against the tangle of prior iterations, particularly there in the middle where there’s been a lot of rejiggering.
It also reinforces a weird underwater trompe l’oeil effect resulting from the earlier, darker iterations reading like drop shadows or silhouettes. There aren’t any coherent light sources, the alleged shadows point every which way, and that stuff was there first. But I have my tried and true evolution-derived models for recognizing how light interacts with objects, and I know what shadows look like. These look enough like shadows that I want them to behave like shadows, and they warp in and out of following the rules for doing that. When a painting simultaneously gives you something and makes you want something, it is worth looking into why that might be.