today i began by re-working yesterday's collage II to the point that i reached a dead end. remembering ellsworth kelly's marks that he had cut up and randomly arranged in 1951, i cut the collage into squares which were roughly the same size. but i didn't want them to be exactly the same. then i arranged them randomly and bonded them to the surface. next i cut up some calligraphic marks i made earlier in the day and randomly arranged them, creating the composition you see in the center. Finally, i made a collage along the lines of the series i've been doing the past few months and loosely based on my plain air paintings. it's title, mp-05, derives from the hublot la ferrari watch, which at 345k is not one i'll be acquiring soon. a detail of it's complex mechanism, consisting of 11 interconnected barrels, can be seen in the lower right portion of the collage. it has a 50 hour power reserve, a record for a hand wound tourbillion.
creating collages means i have papers, magazines, old documents everywhere, and my work space looks chaotic, as you see on the lower left. at the bottom center, a shot of the 3 pieces i created today sitting on a table top, surrounded by the many images, photos, materials i have in the studio. and on the bottom right a large piece of paper on which i created a series of calligraphic marks loosely based on 11th c. chinese calligrapher huang tingjian. this was cut into pieces and used for the piece in the upper row middle.
