Some Older Pictures

My friend told me the previous one was homey because of the warm colors. True. Here's one that has more cool colors. The field the patriarchs tilled.

This was done very early. Consider a sequence of concentric circles with diameter \sqrt(n) for n=1,2,3.. Then the area of each of the rings is the same. This is in fact how I thought of the sequence, I was wondering what would the radii be if the areas were all the same. Now if we take the square that circumscribes a given circle, then the verticies of that square lie on a subsequent circle.

Here I tried to indicate the squares enclosing each circle just with shading. I like the effect I got in the center circle. It is just two different colors of acrylic paint, but it has an appearance of wood-grain.

This is the clock that Gayatri had in her house growing up. I Drew it over Christmas of 2013 when we were visiting her parents in Bangalore.

The figure in the center is based on the tree-of-life from Kabbalah. I tried to make the path of the 'lightning bolt' 3D and then reflect it about itself.

The leaves were based on a motif that I started drawing while on a long plane flight, and after reading a book on art noveau. The placement of the fences is based on the golden ratio. The field is an elementary exercise in perspective.

Another birthday gift, two wood ink stamps, one of an elephant, the other of a peacock, from India, where elephants and peacocks have special significance. I filled the canvas paper with each image in three different colors, then outlined them with the technical pen. I can't help thinking of Jethro Tull every time I see this because I was listening to Jethro Tull whill I was doing this.

This guy has a booth at the Minnesota Rennaisance Fair, where I purchased this print of his and had him sign it. I did it in acrylic and water color. I like the way the chromium yellow acrylic paint contrasts with the venetian red watercolor to show both the character of the dragon as a glowing fire and as a creature of darkness. This guy is really great, you should check him out at www.danthompsonfinearts.com ! He said that is was representative of a forest fire they had in California. There were skulls in the dragon's claws, but I ended up painting them grey so it hides them.

If we can do these things with circles or rectangles, we can also do them with hexagons. The fact that 19/11 is a surprisingly good approximation to √3 means that one can do this without the usual propagation of the vertices with the compass.

People on Twitter seem to like this more than any of the other work that I have shared there. It may be because other artists enjoy the free breaking of any constraints. Art for artists as it were.

Inspired by tiling in a Tuscan villa we stayed at for a wedding.

After confirming the action of the pastel paper, I wanted to do something with more than one color, so I returned to a familiar theme with the circles of equal area.

Oil Pastel on acrylic on paper, Summer MMXIV, 26 by 40 inches

Inspired by some work I did while in Goa. Expiriment with fluid painting.

I did a solar system with 4 pieces of cardstock taped together. I liked it, but of course you can see the lines where the individual sheets of paper meet. I thought ¿how do you do that without showing the gaps and creases? You can just pay for a bigger piece of paper of course, but that is obviously cheating. What if the creases were just the background? So I thought to use 4 pieces of black cardstock (which I have) and then cut and paste white cardstock decorated with oil pastel on top so as to hide all or most of the lines. I started such an experiment with a single piece of black. Orange and blue on a beige background. Usually I have some texture to the pastel even on the background. But just to be different this time I tried to make the beige starting layer as smooth as possible. This involved a technique different to the usual one of using the clay shaper. Instead the clay shaper was followed by rubbing with a cloth. I started by rubbing with my finger but soon learned that that caused callouses. Ouch. I used a pattern based on the complete graph, K_5, on 5 verticies. In other words, a pentagram. It was OK but I was dissappointed that I got it off center. And because you are gluing the white paper decorated with oil pastel onto the black background, you can't redo it. For this second attempt I used purple instead of beige. The stick was a little old and dry so I moistened it a little with turpentine.

Here I tried to get away from the enclosing squares around the circular theme and instead have the circles propagate themselves to the maximum possible extent. Each set of discs have the same area, as above.

This is part of the basic Blakes' Spiders theme. All the rings (including the disc at the center) have the same area, which means that their radii are in proportion √1, √2, √3, ….

I wanted to do something more linear, something like you would have seen coming from Bauhaus or De Stijl. I tried to make the lines as random as possible and avoid triple intersections. I took special care with making the swirlies inside each shape.

Similar idea to Stained Glass I, except that I did more variation in the color, even to the point where the rules required leaving an area in the center the natural color of the oil pastel paper.

Here the center is offset by the Golden Ratio (about 62%).

I wanted to put 3 hexagons in space at right angles to each other. I then filled in the background in what seemed to me a natural way. When I showed it to Gayatri, she said it looked like tapeworms in a doggies intestines under a microscope. So that's what it is.

I created the central circular theme (tree ring? finger print? mystic tunnel into the dream-time?) with technical pen and pigma micron 005. The background I added with oil pastel. I am not entirely happy with the balance of color because of the slightly different pigments used. I am thinking that more digital manipulations are called for with this one or similar.

I was in Al Hambra, inspired by the Islamic art and its frequent use of 8-point stars. I thought, wouldn't it be a prayer for peace to combine with the star of David, the 6-point star. Mathematically, when you take the least common multiple, you get a 24-point star, which is the (Hindu) Ashok Chakra. Is there a deep spiritual lesson there? Probably just an amusing (but pretty) conincidence. So I started doing a bunch of 24-point stars.

William Morris. Wallpaper patterns. Wallpaper patterns. William Morris. Trying to do a wallpaper pattern, I repeated the wooden vines and then threw leaves in over them at random. To get the wallpaper pattern, I would fold a square piece of paper in half both vertically and horizontally, drawing over each fold in turn, so that when unfolded, the top and bottom, and right and left matched up. I traced the master thus formed onto the paper by doing charcoal rubbing after making the background with oil pastel. I then oil pastelled the rest. I put drops of red acrylic paint for the flowers at the tips of the leaves.

One of the first things that I did when I came to London was walk up to the nearest HomeBase (for those of you used to American, "HomeBase" is British for "Home Depo") and bought a thin piece of smooth plywood cut up into approximately one foot by one foot pieces. I was surprised how cheap it was. The board itself (about 3 feet by 6 feet) was cheap enough. He was supposed to charge me per cut, so cutting it up into so many pieces should have made it much more expensive. But he said that he was bored and mad with his boss so he wasn't going to charge me for the cutting. When I said I wanted them cut "one foot by one foot" he asked me what that was in metric and I had to translate to 30 cm. He said he didn't deal with American measurements. I said didn't we get them from you guys in the first place? He said it was before his time. I struggled with this one for a while and it is not its first incarnation. The background around the outside I spent far too much time on working on small details that didn't add to the overall effect. The central design is one of the linocuts I made. I erased and redid it a couple of times before settling on the curved branches intertwined within it.