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paint as a low-relief sculptural material Monday, May 14 2007
As before when I managed to get my laboratory clean, I've found myself distracted by painting projects. But there's nothing to paint except the sloping ceilings on either side of the room's central axis, and the rule I have about such painting is that it must be white (even though the background is also white). Since the only natural light in the laboratory comes from a single north-facing window, I want to conserve the few photons that find their way in, and the best way is to not have them be absorbed by dark materials. But the ceiling is dull and uninspiring without something on it. So for the past few years I've been using paint as a sculptural material, using small brushes to gradually extend a web of abstract low-reliefs across the ceiling from north to south. On the east side this design tends to be chaotic, with hatch marks going this way and that, one set layered onto another until the underlying surface drowns away. On the west side, the hatchwork is ordered, and consists of long rays centered on two different ceiling features. Some time ago I experimented with drywall compound to create random blobs of chaos across the east ceiling, with hatchwork added later to tie it together and otherwise "respond" to it. But I've been unhappy with the excessive roughness that resulted. Several months ago I added a low-relief of a human face, the first representative imagery in this project.
In the past few days I've been extending the chaotic cross-hatches of the east ceiling along its entire length and adding a dense series of rays emanating from the relief of the face. On the west ceiling I've extended the regular rays, but warped them as if they're now force lines in a magnetic field.
In addition to the low relief of the small brush strokes, in the past I've also used white paint with a different glossyness from the background, making it possible to write text on the ceiling that can only be read when the light is glancing off it at the correct angle (there were some obvious examples of that in the photos with yesterday's entry).
The face on my ceiling.
Looking across the west side of the ceiling.
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