Dye In Water: Delta S

For the last few weeks I have been making an attempt to get out of comfort in order to find a more pointed understanding for my current direction and reasoning for why I paint what I paint.  Tuesday morning I had an adventurous conversation with Gordon Lee, my current mentor,  which has tied together a lot of the concepts and ideas I have been exploring.  Recently I have been spending a lot of time contemplating degenerative brain issues like strokes and Alzheimer's.  There have been a few personal experiences that have led me this way.  My grandfather experienced a minor stroke that caused him to lose all of the nouns in his vocabulary for around 45 minutes a few weeks ago.  For that time everything was fine except for his ability to pull from his library of nouns in conversation.  Most recently the father of a good friend of mine suffered a stroke due to bleeding in the brain or hemorrhaging  that caused him to lose the ability to read and write correctly but not entirely.  Words like down and town illuded his writing ability while words like dermatology are spelled without error.  He can write things like his name, wife's name, his hometown, and other details, but when confronted with reading a copy of the writing he is unable to complete the task.  My aunt is 101 and can tell you stories about 1920 like it happened yesterday but cannot identify who is in the room conversing with her.

For a while I was thinking about what losing libraries of information must be like. How this happens? What it meant? I was getting nowhere really. And found myself toying with the idea of changing the rules of my paintings or negating them entirely.  Rather I chose to explore new routes of creation. For many of the last 8 weeks I have been exploring different mediums like silkscreening and canvas, raw and gessoed, stretch and not stretch.  The canvas work has been frustrating but has taught me a few things with relationship to my recent understanding from Tuesday morning. Along with exploring new mediums and attempting to get out of my comfort zone I discovered that I was working with groups of marks that were being grouped together in quantities that happen to add up to be prime numbers, 1 3 5 7 11 13 17… The number 2, while prime, never really shows up and this may be because it divides with 2 without leaving that extra “one” in the remainder. It is too symmetrical.  To follow up this prime number discovery I did a few explorations of line and prime numbers where I created different groupings of lines based on rules, like whether the lines were allowed to intersect or not, along with combinations of these rules based on how I paint.  Anyways, I showed the drawing to Sam and she suggested that I explore primitive language roots and directed me to cuneiforms because of the basic language structures and logic that I was creating. This exploration made sense to me because I was dedicated to neurological issues and language is a large part of what is lost from the brain in many cases that I have encountered.

So time travel to this Tuesday morning.  After showing my recent explorations, Gordon Lee brings up this article he has recently read about entropy and its relationship to the universe and we get going down this great conversation.  I am relatively familiar with the term with respect to thermodynamics (and cats) because of my work towards double majoring in art and biology in undergrad but this is something special with respect to my work.  Entropy for those who do not know can be defined as a lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder.  In chemistry entropy is a thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system's thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work, often interpreted as the degree of disorder or randomness in the system.

Entropy is a natural occurrence that happens all of the time in many if not all facets of the universe.  What are examples of entropic processes? Colored dye in a glass of water is a great example of the entropic process.  The drop of dye hits the water and begins to swirl and mix until the glass of water arrives at an end point of balanced distribution of color or to a point of homogeneous mixture.  The natural world is full of these entropic events. The way the temperature of the air around us changes with the rising and setting of the sun is an example.  Leaves falling from the trees and decaying in the fall is another, while being absorbed by trees and turned into new leaves on a tree is the reverse reverse.  These processes can take an millenia like that of the creation of a sun from a mass of gas in a galaxy or they can be something so simple and quick as that of a cup of brushes a cat knocks to the floor from the edge of the table.  People leaving a stadium and finding their homes is a form of entropy.

After understanding these examples how is this relevant to the concepts of language and cognitive function I have been exploring?  A stroke is an entropic event of the brain that at times can be an event that causes the almost instantaneous loss of language or writing.  Alzheimer's is the same only much slower as a brain gradually loses it’s ability to recognize that which it has been trained.  Chicken is no longer chicken or it can’t be recognized as chicken even if it is sitting right in front of the subject.  I view this as entropy of the brain.  A degradation or transition of structural understanding into another form of existence or nonexistence.  Now that I have laid out these examples of cognitive entropy, I can give you the real point to what is happening in my paintings.  It isn’t exclusively entropy I am exploring but the control that can be placed on that entropy through basic structure.   As language is a semiotic structure for defining and sorting the chaotic universe in which we exist graphic mark making is the structure that controls static entropic states that I allow to exist through pooring paint and allowing it to run.