Family Of Values

It's not as big as it looks.

And into value we go. A choice between darkness and light. We make a graphite scale, as seen above. This is for reference purposes only. I have made these before and am teased for being a bit on the obsessive side in generating my scale neatly and precisely. The thing is that this is where I think I differ from a lot of other artists. Surface, sheen, value, hue and all other aspects of finish are the things that I find most compelling in art. I want to make a living in metal sculpture. Finishing work is vital to my existence. Everything is practice. The way the paper holds the graphite is just another application of polishing and finishing the paper. The manipulation of the materials to the greatest extent possible is something that I always aim for. Even if I never again use the softest mark a pencil can make I need to know what that mark looks like. Just like I need to know how shiny or how dark I can make a metal surface.

We also got this homework. Lee walks around the room passing out these alphabet stencils to everyone and says he wants us to make a composition using value only that uses only the shape provided. Some people did really cool stuff like buld up a human head out of V’s in various weights. I did this.

Imagine all the stencils...living life in peace.

It has it’s own charm I suppose but I was thinking that it fell a little flat.

As per the now developing norm this is not the end of the exploration. We start into value as an expression of a randomized event. In class we go outside to play with coins and chalk. The chalk is for making a target. Shape is irrelevant, the point is to make a target and number the zones one through nine. We toss the coins into the target zones and record the resulting number sets. We then are told to make a composition based on the corresponding number zones on the value scale.

They said it looked like stained glass so photoshop and I went to work.

The results just fell short of actually being interesting.

The assignment at this point was to come up with our own idea of how to create chance art using value only. No line, no representation, just pure value as a result of randomizable process. I look at all of the possible outcomes to this and see disaster in the making. Too much random will kill me. I hate bowing to the whims of chaos. In order to control the process a little better while remaining within the confines of the project I decide to alter the parameters slightly. I decide to use the full value scale, nine of them in fact and cut each value into it’s own little square. Each scale was to be redistributed onto a new page based on the flip of a coin. Each coin flip gave a reading of heads or tails which meant putting the next value above or below the center line. The result looked like this. 

Well, I liked it better than the alternative...