Everything is a canvas

It started when I took a Chinese brush painting class in Portland's Chinatown in 1964. I later learned that Charlie Leong had been Gary Snyder's teacher a decade earlier. The first thing a brush painter does is rub an inkstick on a stone with water until the right consistency of ink is reached. Creating the ink and loading the brush generally takes ten times longer than making the brushstrokes. And attention needs to go into the creation of the ink as well as brushing it on paper. I've written here before about painting and metacognition.

In 2001, I painted a dozen sarongs for our Burning Man crew. For years after that, I wore it while writing or painting in my garden.

Eventually, I started wiping my brushes on the sarong. And although I wasn't trying to render an image, I began to put some awareness into the marks I made when wiping the brush. This went on for years. Eventually I started acting like it was becoming a painting. For a couple more years. I mounted and framed it and hung it on the wall of my office, but it didn't really move me. It needed better lighting. I contemplated pin spots. Then I learned about Arduino and programmable LED strips. I knew nothing about coding or electronics. Adafruit makes the electronics part easy, and I like their business model: they make thousands of tutorials, complete with code libraries, available for free, then they sell you the parts, which are inexpensive enough to impulse-buy. I was able to buy two LED strips, connect them, download the code to animate the LEDs in various color combinations, for about $50.

All of which is to say that I've been applying the everything-is-a-canvas philosophy to my splattered cards. When the groundcloth card gets filled to my satisfaction, I start splattering it further as a painting unto itself.

Which I have been cutting and pasting onto white jewelry boxes:

I've started a couple new groundcloth pieces and they caught my eye as paintings in their own right in the earliest stages, although I plan to splatter cards on top of them until they start looking filled enough to treat as paintings in their own right. Those are the two at the top of this post.