Controlled Serendipity Painting

I used a large piece of watercolor paper as a dropcloth when I splatterpainted watercolors. Before the page was filled, I started treating it as a painting, dropping specific colors in specific places. Like John Cage and other artists, I let the magickal serendipity of uncontrolled events get me started, and then I played with the edge of random and intended. I was remind of William Burroughs, whose cutup technique was a way of deriving messages from semi-random selections.

Among Burroughs’ earliest cut-ups were phrases that meant nothing at the time, but in hindsight took on an eerie prescience. This was like the seemingly arbitrary content of dreams, which lead Burroughs to speculate:

Perhaps events are pre-written and pre-recorded and when you cut word lines the future leaks out.