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April 9:
I really had to push myself to make myself do something at Paint Shop yesterday, but--gosh--sure was luck I did because I . . . Well, I futzed something onto the screen--words. Then did a long random line that kept ovaling back and across itself with the "freehand selection tool." It's a little noose that you outline some part of your image that you want to flood a color into, or remove, or confine your work to. I didn't know what I was doing. When I finished, I'd lost some of my text, and scattered the rest. Asemicism! I added some irregular shapes I put color into. (I'd been working to that point in black and white.) I reversed the colors of a portion and did a few other things. Couldn't get very far, except that I thought I had a good suggestion of submerged meaning trying to become visible. Suddenly, I added the name, "Narmer," to what I had--as the divisor of a partial dividend shed I'd put in a few moves before.
Later a few Narmer-related ideas occurred to me. Narmer, by the way, is considered the first ruler of both upper and lower Egypt. His palette is famous. Hence, the fragment of "archaeology." After that, it was just a lot of tweaking. One major (for me) thing I did for the first time (I think) was relegate my text and images to a quarter of the page. A large expanse of nothing but background is an important element in the piece.
Its story-line is simple. Something obliterated times Narmer yields a door (and who knows what else); add archaeology to that and you get the dividend, also obliterated. Or archaeology opens doors ever so slightly into the past. Pretty insipid, but only an underlying framework.
I feel good about this piece (only a black and white detail of which is shown below so I can submit it to Geof, and another venue that's just solicited visual poems). For several days, I've been feeling I wasn't getting anywhere with my mathemaku. I like risking averbality, as here. I just don't have much interest in surrendering to it. Working with unpretty colors intrigues me, too. In this piece the main colors are an olive-green and a dark maroon. In any case, I feel like I may be reviving. I just hope I can keep going for a few more days.
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