Embracing discovery in a new way allowed me to be open to the creative possibilities in my paintings.
With this body of work, I explored the concept of controlled randomness as I worked on these paintings. Controlled randomness is when randomness is part of a process but with constraints or parameters to guide its behavior, allowing for predictable outcomes or desired patterns within the randomness. In art, it means introducing elements of chance and unpredictability into the creative process, while maintaining some intention and vision.
Employing this process allowed me to introduce chance elements into my paintings, but in a manner that was still guided by my sense of composition.
In my art practice I usually hang my canvases on the studio walls to paint, instead I laid them flat between two sawhorses. Then I applied paint using a Chinese Baoding ball. Chinese meditation balls, or Baoding balls, date back to the Ming dynasty. Most Baoding balls consist of hollow spheres, containing a chime that rings when an inner ball strikes the outer sphere.
I moved the ball, covered in paint, around each canvas by tilting it back and forth across the canvas. The ball chimed as it traveled around the canvas making its marks. This added dimension of sound gave life to the mark making of the painting in progress.
Through the various twists and turns of the painted ball, I could visualize my compositions coming to life. To complete each painting, I used other tools to create more random mark making. With squeeze bottles, sprays and brushes, and borrowing from the action painters, I spontaneously dripped, splashed and threw paint onto the canvas. With some paintings, I preferred the image of a white canvas with one or two colors used in the mark making. In others, I layered the painting and the marks with a background color.
By controlling the randomness in these paintings, I was still able to direct the work while allowing for discovery. I feel it has created a sense of surprise and unpredictability to my paintings, and it has helped to inform my work with new and unexpected results.
