Life here sheltering-in-place during the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 is a bit haphazard. I seem to float around between wanting to get a to-do list done, wanting to peek in on the news (usually a downer), or wandering through my photo archives. I have an overwhelming amount of work to be done there. I have some organization of my fragmented keyword list to do, getting a copyright submission together, catching up on some editing, endless website work, or finding what to do with images sitting in stasis.

I have A LOT of images in this state I call stasis.

sta·sis : a period or state of inactivity or equilibrium.

I differentiate these from images I still need to develop. For the images I still need to develop, I already have ideas on where I want to go with them. I just haven’t done it yet.

For images in stasis, there is something about them that kept me from deleting them, but also kept me from developing them further. I am undecided about what I want to do with them, but something. I don’t always know what that “something” is – only that it is “something else.” Many times, I create an image, and it just doesn’t quite result in something I know what to do with. So rather than just putting it out there feeling it is half-done – I put it away in the image closet… in stasis.

Newton knew

And there they sit. I feel these images are much like an old truck, 4 flat tires, rusting away in an abandoned field. At one time, served a useful purpose. Now, the longer it sits, the more immovable it seems to become. Of course, the engineering side of me kicks in and knows that truck won’t be moving, until a force great enough is applied to move it.

Every body persists in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by force impressed.

Newton’s First Law of Motion, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, 1687

Sir Isaac Newton certainly had a sense of this centuries ago, though I am quite certain he would want to slap me in my philosophical application of the law here. Nonetheless, I would propose that a creative block that prevents you from moving forward with any work can be an as difficult force to overcome as a set of flat tires and rusted out engine.

And so, the force holding this stasis state would need to be met with a greater force, which usually isn’t the status quo. And so, with a bit of time on my hands during this crazy time in the world, I have been playing with a variety of forces to see what causes even the tiniest little bit of movement in that truck. Then I will have a hint on where to push, pull, tug, hammer, explode, implode, whatever.

Raster Painting

Pushing and tugging in a variety of ways isn’t something foreign to me. I wrote about previously this in my Sketchpad post. Most of those ideas are a result of simply playing with a variety of techniques on my phone in a chance it might conjure some ideas for a project or two. Those pieces weren’t really stuck in any significant way, just kind of rolled around like a ball to see where it would end up.

“Raster painting” is something that is a bit of an evolution of previous techniques I have used in developing images. It certainly takes the process much, much further away from representational photography. It is essentially using the base image as a makeshift paintbrush.

Although labels have never been my thing, or wanting to define (confine) something inside a box. But I recognize the resulting imagery will present some questions to a viewer – the most basic being “what is it?” I am perfectly fine leaving abstracts named as abstracts and leave the interpretation of the subject up to the viewer. As they say, sometimes “art” is ruined by words. But the basics of the medium at least deserve some explanation. Ultimately, perhaps that doesn’t matter either.

Wikipedia defines a lot of media types when it comes to the term “painting” ; oil, acrylic, watercolor, ink, encaustic, fresco, gouache, enamel, spray paint, tempera, water oil paint, and lastly digital painting. Digital painting, of course, fits as a major parent category for this type of work but is too wide open of a genre for my tastes. It covers basically anything produced with a computer, which could be a cartoon to a digitally-generated world.

So I looked back at the basic elements of what defines the other sub-types of painting and they generally have to do with the type of element being manipulated to create something else. In the case of a raster painting, I am using a raster image as a pseudo-brush. It wouldn’t exist without a camera to begin with, so there are origins in photography, but I am hitting it with enough creative force to make it into something else. The gloves are off as far as wanting it to resemble anything like the original photograph. It also gives me a term to use in my image galleries for where to place them.

Will it stay in motion?

To me, this is the ultimate question. Those objects stay in motion until “compelled to change its state by force impressed.” I have experienced this plenty. I start with some idea, and it seems to fizzle out…. get stuck in the mud. I either lose interest or carry an idea as far as I have the ambition or perseverance to keep it in motion. Friction sets in – and the object comes to a halt.

For now, this is new for me, allows me to explore some creative options with the thousands of images sitting in my archives collecting digital dust. It allows me to examine those images in stasis, hit them a bit harder, without any constraints. Maybe some will begin to move again.