ink on paper

now i'm in amsterdam!

i've come over to europe for a break/honeymoon/research field trip. the amsterdam situation is almost entirely the first two thirds of that equation.

i arrived with only computer, cameras and a dictaphone for art making. today i bought a moleskine notebook for less than 20 australian dollars and have started some ink drawings.

this is a cactus in our apartment:

i quite like this style of dots and lines. so i tried another cactus, this time one completely invented.

 

for me, i think the way the cactus branches are formed as a collective unit works better in the first image. they are no doubt all affected, in terms of their growth pattern, by the sunlight pulling their attention toward it. the second image is made up and doesn't conform to a specific pattern of collective behaviour. this may render it somewhat abstracted from a more realistically recognised entity from the real world. 

this is not necessarily a bad thing. it is more surreal. more of the imagination.

i have a suspicion, however, that with mass expansion, an entire field of these branches would at some point achieve a kind of critical mass. a tipping point at which the collective apparent behaviour of the forms would appear to be coalescing into a sort of pattern. a pattern of the artist's working processes and of the conceptual sunlight working on the forms.