Friday, December 18, 2015

Meme Catcher (version 1)


Here is the latest continuation on my pisiform design. The previous work, Lucky Trust, had a seven pointed star as the central design around which the fish shapes curled around. This piece has an eight pointed star at around the center. For some time now, I’ve been fascinated with torus knots, so I added extensions of loops from the overlapping bars of the star shape. Basically, the central design is one complicated, but orderly, closed loop. If it were to be seen in a more three dimensional depiction, it would look like a torus, or a doughnut. 

The fact that this design has an eight pointed star around the center, not seven, gives the picture a more orderly and stable sense. The fact that it’s framed in a perfect square shape adds to its stability and confidence. What we have here is a ballet of shapes, forms, and designs. If it were an animated GIF, it would show the pisiforms as uniformly coiling around the star shape. The smaller fish in the loops and rings would be just endlessly circling round and round. 

I had researched some of the designs that are used for decorative iron fence vector, and made some simple designs of my own to add to the details and finer structures supporting the composition. You can see the results of these as the catching the background and space like weathervanes. 

The idea of space in art catches my interest again in my recent work. The space that is shown here has stuff in it however. That is really how I see space anyways. Astrophysicists will tell you that space is actually full of radio and cosmic rays, as well as particles, such as photons, and electrons. Space really is not a vacuum. It has much information, physical and material, passing through it all the time. 

I liken my notion of space to the subconscious mind and information that’s just under the surface of awareness. You can see this expressed by text cut out from old books and prepared for this piece that is showing through a translucent layer of primer. I filled the spaces around the decor vector and bars of the star and rings with some light blue and lavender felt-tip pen. This gave the illustration a sense of collected or bunched up space. 

This drawing, overall, is a collection of charming designs, colors, shapes, and ideas—hence the title Meme Catcher. I hope to make more drawings, paintings, and prints of these types of designs in the future. I have many of my ideas stored away in notebooks and sketchbooks, so when the right times arise, I use those times to work on them and give them more reality with whatever medium I want to create them in.