Swarm

"Swarm". 24" x 60"

Detail

 The piece is 24" x 60", it took four months (working about four or five days a week) to make if you don't include the study piece, which add a month or so to the time.  

"Swarm Study" 1st version 2022

Lotsa Swarms around lately...there's this and also there's this.  I guess I am cresting the wave of some zeitgeist here.

The inspirations are, well, multitudinous. First and foremost, I began a residency at the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics last spring.  The lab is led by Anjan Chatterjee who wrote a fantastic book called "The Aesthetic Brain".  As an artist in residence, I attend weekly lab meetings and am making a series of project including a geodesic dome chapel--which I am beginning work on very soon.  During the lab meetings I tend to doodle a lot.  And I have been doodling FLIES.

Neuro doodle  (with guest doodle by Clifford Workman)

another neuro doodle

I had the notion to make a picture of inspiration itself, which of course is almost impossible to define.  The feeling, though, can be one of a burst or a gush of multiple ideas (I don't think "inspiration" would be "having an idea", for instance.  It might, however be "having a network of a zillion ideas happen almost simultaneously".). And I could do this by a literal representation of hundreds of variations on a theme. The theme being FLIES.

Why flies? Because they fly? 

Maybe that's not enough of an answer...!  I like to doodle things I can riff on. Things that contain similar elements, like, in the case of flies: wings, legs, antennae, eyes, etc that can be endlessly combined like the letters of an alphabet to create different forms.  And these "words" can be combined in a "syntax".  Does this make sense?  I have done endless variations on other things like birds and flowers. I thought flies would be interesting because I had always focused on insects wings as the main defining element, and somehow I noticed their eyes, tongues and bodies were much more interesting than I previously thought! And, of course, I have a long history of being interested in redeeming the ugly and disgusting--but on its own terms.  I don't want to over-prettify it. Just enough... This also fits in with some of what is studied at the neuroaesthetics lab.

 

So, I had AI generate a swarm of flies.....lolz!

Maybe its completely unremarkable, but the way the imagination can recombine elements into an infinity of new possibilities fascinates me.  Especially in the days when reference material is a simple as clicking on google images.  I don't want to get to judgy here, but it bothers me when artists, especially young artists with no real practice of plumbing their own imaginations rely on reference material, which they do not bother to transform very much.  I wanted to "prove" that on the fuel of imagination alone, one could "invent" hundreds of new flies.  And that to design a gushing plume of them would be a literal representation of "having an idea"...at least having an idea about flies!

 

Below are some additional images of the process.

What the separate layers of glass look like

All the red pieces.  This is glass engraving, enamel and silverstain

Original sketch

One thought I had and rejected

How I was trying to conceive of the color burst.

One more thing:  while I worked on this piece, I often thought of my dear friend Sharon Church (who passed away on Christmas). She and I spent many years teaching together and one subject we always returned to was "beauty". Since she used frogs as a motif in a few pieces, I thought of this as the tantalizing, delicious and yes, beautiful, desirous meal for one of her frogs.  RIP, dearest friend.