Foxfire

Lumen & Logic

A near-black sheet in which every bright thing is the same luminous underpainting showing through a dark glaze. The underpainting is never painted: it is a smooth colour field of overlapping saturated blooms, and the picture consists of openings cut in an opaque skin laid over it, each opening taking its colour by sampling the field at its own position — so a disc, the seam beside it and the drip running off it are all the same hue, and that hue changes slowly across the sheet. The skin is four or more panels of dark cloth, cut row by row so the vertical seams do not line up between rows, separated by uneven dark gutters, and each panel is tinted by the field beneath it rather than by an arbitrary dark — olive over the chartreuse, plum over the magenta, umber over the orange. Each panel wears one of three surfaces: a plain-weave scrim drawn as two families of dashed hairlines whose dash period is the other family's pitch, so the lattice of bright crossings comes for free; a coarse checker of soft blooms where the glaze runs thin; or a comb of brush drag across the panel. A share of the panel edges show a bright hairline in the gutter beside them, never more than two per panel, and never as an outline. The dominant mark is a flat enamel disc, sparse and off-lattice, with radii drawn from a power law so the largest is several times the smallest and the small ones dominate; each carries a thin rim one step round the hue circle and darker, a share carry a halo built as a small stack of concentric opaque annuli stepping down into the panel, and a share are painted in the glaze instead so they read as holes punched through the picture. Paint then runs: every drip starts on a seam or a panel edge, tapers as it descends, wanders, and ends in a pendant head; some pool into flat irregular puddles; constellations of spatter fan from a point along a shared direction; and a few hairline loops of dried skin sit on the cloth. Opaque throughout — no transparency, no gradient, no shadow, no blur, no outline and no per-pixel work anywhere.

Medium

Generative algorithm, archival pigment print

Dimensions

60 × 90 cm