20120517 (J, ON)
Journal: May 17, 2012
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Art as Purpose                            Epistemology

One Note: Email to John Fountain: Racism

Journal (The Desk): The product is right along the lines of the original sketches, but I think it came out better than I’d hoped (thought).

Then there is: abstraction and perfection, at least their “ideas”, that cut a swath out of the eternity of chaos, or randomness. The source of this inevitable entropic decay is the light where the observer’s head is when sitting at the desk. Maybe the light is God, or the Big Bang, or the “the source”, the womb. After I emphasized the “source” with “almost” white with a little yellow, I noticed it looked like a pussy with vagina, clitoris, and pressed thighs (sort of like my rotted tree drawing).

The source light decays to darkness as untargeted infrared radiation represented by elliptical darkening colors surrounding and emanating from the source. Abstraction, thought, consciousness, human concept of perfection yet seeing an imperfect world (death and other entropic decay) so cast the power of abstraction to manipulate the physical against the “way” of the source. Doing so lights up the region surrounding the abstraction, and its handmaidens, logic, reason and belief. But it is only stolen light, and the forces of decay are only accelerated and pushed toward the source by our thievery and vain use of the source.

Sphere and tetrahedron are end members of an abstract scale of “perfect” Platonic forms, ranging from least to most planes to enclose a volume, three to infinity. A cube and octahedron? Just the simpler of infinite forms, some composed of congruent planes, the Platonic solids, others irregular like a pyriteahedron. So just two “easy to draw” accompaniments to the end members.

Many thoughts or feelings are to be found somewhere along a scale defined by abstract end members most commonly tied to abstract precepts of good on the one end and bad on the other, from murder to proper dress for the occasion. Abstraction’s scales of logic and morality are allied in a great bulwark against “what is” for according to many there is perfection (immortality) attainable but not yet reached. We just need to keep on improving and eventually we will get “there”.

This to me is cursing God, or the “source” on the desk for “showing us light, only to take it away at death”, and other scales. ISTMRN almost everything is assigned to such abstract scales and everything is judged by where is sits along such scales. Each thing occupies a position along many if not infinite (another abstraction) scales. It’s what we as humans do.

But back to the desk. Alas, for all our efforts, all we do is push the entropic decay along, stealing and releasing far more infrared radiation than needed to “live”, which itself may be a form of stealing. The deep, nearly black-red to brown projections from the abstractions, along the natural grain of the oak toward the “source” represent this futile attempt to change “the way of things.”

The edges of the bulwarks have leaks, and behind them things get back to normal pretty quickly because, after all, we really haven’t stolen very much yet. The birds? Whimsy, only that. They, like the pussy just emerged from the grain. But a note about the birds. Their eyes are the only pure titanium white things on the desk. The source abstraction halos and bird feathers all have a touch of yellow “contamination”. Purity is reserved for awareness, not for abstraction. Sorry Plato.

All of that was sort of involved in the design and painting, but something else – an attempt to express the idea that while respecting and accentuating “natural” grain of the oak wood. I put quotes around “natural” because such grain is only visible exposed by the saw, a tool developed from an abstraction. Anyway, I blended the “natural” grain into the design from the beginning. Only the lights of abstractions cut across the grain. The colors? Well, sort of sunset colors surrounding the source, pretty ones.