Work in Progress

I did all of this in a day, and it’s only as big as it appears. I’ll make it bigger when I do the fine tuning. As it is a lot of imagery is suggested, and the more you look the more things you’ll find.

One course to take at this juncture, which I usually do, is to pick one image to work with and refine it. This way I make something I wouldn’t have conceived without going through the process. However, another tactic which I am exploring here is to NOT isolate or articulate a dominant image, but rather to keep and enhance the ambiguity. If something looks too much like a face or eye I may downplay it so that it can be multiple things.

This is more effective if I use relatively convincing shading so that the imagery looks like something in three dimensions, rather than like flat lines and patterns. I could put this in color, but think keeping in B&W works better with the ambiguity.

The underlying concept is nothing new for me, but I’ve achieved better results with it this time, so far. There’s a certain skill in being as suggestive as possible without defining anything. What’s left to do is make it much larger and refine the overall design, shading, blending and so on so that it works as a good sized fine art print.

Below is something somewhat similar I did a couple years ago.

This kind of thing engages my eye and compels me to search for images. It’s probably an inevitable biological impulse.

And it just occurred to me that the way to do it in color is to start out in color. That’s the way I did the one above, but I went painterly with it early on, and now I might hold out a lot longer on increasing suggestiveness before attempting to refine it. I may NOT go painterly with it, though that tends to be a technique that links a lot of my work (part of my unintentional signature style).

And here’s another image from when I was 18-19 years old, done with spray paint on cardboard.

Also, if you follow my art/blog you’ll know I don’t really believe in a signature style as a positive objective, even though I’ve evolved works that are easily recognizable as my own, and distinct from what others are doing. I don’t intend this as my niche for branding and marketing purposes, but rather as part of an ongoing exploration of visual language and image-making that will allow me to integrate and develop more approaches to achieve more individual imagery. In other words, you can expect lots of imagery in my future works, including a rather ambitious piece that I am hours away from completing.

~ Ends

---

If you’d like to help me keep making art, you can make a small donation through Patreon, such as a $1 a month pledge if I complete a new work in that month: http://Support Eric Wayne

---