The Last Four Years

In one sentence in the last four years I have gained a child and switched teaching content areas.  These four years have flown by and I find myself once again opening my personal art doors.

Jumping right into the current artwork that has been evolving since early November of 2015.  For whatever reason binary numbers have captured my brain.  The best art for me involved some kind of problem to solve.  This problem was how to use binary numbers in a visual way to relay different numbers to the viewer.  First came the learning curve, how do binary numbers work to exchange one number to another.  In this case, a birth date to two numbers, a zero or a one.  Because there are basically two options, the powers of two come into play.  Below is a picture of what it looks like to me.

This template was created to speed up the process of drawing a friend's birthday using binary numbers.  Each block represents the month, day and year.  I found this representation fits almost all birthdays, except for days larger than fifteen, for those an additional column is added to the day block.

The most entertaining part of this process is thinking about what the columns of space represent and how they should be interpreted within the blocks.  In the first few, I was very strict in their representation.  Everything had to be square and contain the same number of columns.  Over time, I realized that both the blocks and the number of columns could change in size and still represent the same binary number and in turn birthday.  I struggle to let go of symmetry.  It made my brain very happy to live in perfect little squares and perfect little columns of information.  However, it became much more fun to imagine how the visual representation could be changed and still be the same number.  This process has reminded me how much I enjoy algorithms.  They can be utilized for any job that may be repetitive or may take several steps or decisions to reach an end.  With the same thoughts of building the date in the original work, I let myself become more flexible in terms of the columns and block sizes.  Pretty soon I might be able to leave the square format!

Mom in process

Mom completed

 Two pics of Cynthia and Steven above.

A couple pics of Roger.

This one was supposed to be Frida Kahlo, but I made an error in coloring so is the number 6-6-955.

Matt

Brittany

Above are Jackson Pollock, Georgia O'Keefe, and Mary Cassatt in order.  

The backs of the artworks serve as a spot to record/define which color is a one or zero as well as dates and materials used to complete the work.