Buttons for Heaven's goonie

 

Today's project was some friends for the lonely sun in the shape of emission spectra of sodium, mercury, lithium and hydrogen. (Clockwise from the one with the single yellow stripe.)

A bugger to paint, these; the fluorescent paint is the most unforgiving medium and the 1mm thick black lines are prone to wander if the breathing isn't absolutely focused. Internal police have been whinging all day:

"Why don't you just do it in photoshop or something? Take you an hour!"

"Well, um, compression of time into picture ... wanna leave gestural detritits... thingyness... by taking time I open up possibilities for weaving into understanding rather than chasing bits of knowledge.. oh for gods sake this is what I do and so by extension do you so you'd better get used to it and shut up and let me get on with it."

Internal police aren't happy, but it is their job to be unhappy.

Also a bugger to photograph, the camera doesn't know what to do about the ultraviolets. This picture is much nicer in the flesh, but I suppose you'll have to take my word for it.

A goonie is what they call a night-dress around these parts, and if you're thinking of moving here you had best make sure yours is made of thermal fleece or merino wool or at the very least winceyette.

Heaven's night-cloths and all that

Another prototype, another 'dark matter' painting. Boldly going into the final front ear etc. which is a place, let me tell you, I do not like one bit. I mean, I do like it, in a way, but only as long as it stays there and I stay here and don't have to think about it too much.

It's horrid, cold, inhospitable, full of vacuums and deterministic behaviour and infinity and other monstrous stuff. Folding dimensions and huge things moving at impossibly slow speeds or doing all that sickening hurtling. Tiny specks floating forever in solitary confinement in fuck all.  A place where it is possible to imagine a stuff that isn't a stuff and isn't nothing either that wanders around gobbling up everything, including things that aren't there. Ugghh. (Unless Sun Ra did actually make it out there, in which case everything's ok.)

But, you know, I don't think there's any harm in taking the head out of the sand every now and then, just for a while.  So anyway I got all interested in the Harvard spectral classification system and thought it would be a fine idea to start thinking about this by turning the Sun's absorption spectrum into a circle.

A worrying moment for me; as I said before it is my firm rule that I don't do Data. Not my department mate. I can look at it if I want, but my own findings have to be published in the form of analogy, allegory, rhyming, chiming, responding, wondering, mix-up, mashup, whatever happens next; and always in in-the-world dirty mudpie handandheartandhead fabrications. Thinking with Things is my business and everything else is just a hobby. That's the rule. However this activity made necessary the use of a ruler and sums (well, divide by 2) which is, in my book, measuring and maths and therefore Data.  I have grave misgivings about this, fearing the start of a slippery slope which might suddenly lurch into a freefall of Fourier transforms and C++ programming.

Not really a problem, as it turns out, plenty of scope for playing fast and loose with the intensity and brightness of colour, especially if you're messing about with fluorescent paints. Which is something that I may attempt to make more factually accurate in the future.  What's really fun is the slippage between light intensity and the intensity of coloured paint, which is where all the phenomenological hoodoo is for a painter. Its as if stuff itself transmits its own energy in addition to the light it reflects. A sort of Ki of inanimate matter. (Is it me? Is it it? Yes and no, it's in the field of relationships between you and it and everything else, yada yada yada.)

Here's the same thing with a blacklight.