creating within limits

Football is a very useful analogy for a discussion on the freedom / constraint duality. The great Pele called football the beautiful game. As practiced by its finest players and its greatest teams, it can be considered an art. It's not a stretch to call someone like Lionel Messi an artist. He can express his natural skills with the freedom of a child at play. But still within the laws of the game. For instance, he's not allowed to use his hands, except to pick up a 'dead' ball. There are other physical constraints on how he can express his artistry. The size of the pitch, for example. If Lionel runs the ball over the perimeter touch line, it's the opponent's ball. That applies to him as much as to the other lesser mortals on the pitch.

Visual art has its own perimeter touch line of course called the picture frame. All the action takes place inside that space.

Not content with the inherited limits of my vocation, this year I've been imposing some more of my own and paradoxically, doing so has opened up broad vistas of compositional possibility. My hitherto total creative freedom, it turns out, was another straitjacket.

Digital artwork, Everything At Once #6

These are the limits I'm working to currently, on an open ended series called Everything At Once (more to come on that in another post):

• 2 or three colours, maximum 4. I decide before I start.

• Colours divided into equal proportions of the total picture size. For example, a two colour composition (like the one shown) each colour gets 50% of the total - no more, no less. That's another decision made before I start.

• Not correcting anything I've drawn. I create stencils drawn freehand, with a very sharp knife. No pre-drawing in pencil, no erasers or rulers. Once the stencil is cut, I have to use it. I can't repair a 'mistake'. If I really hate what I've cut, I have to start all over again at the beginning. The nearest equivalent to this do or die approach in the visual arts that I can think of is Japanese calligraphy - or, to continue the football analogy, the one and only chance a player gets to score from a penalty kick.

Within these self-imposed constraints, I have total compositional, expressive freedom. Mathematics and chaos! But the knottier decisions I've grappled with since doing painting - do I need to add something more? do I need to take something out? is the painting finished? - are now gone.

The only question now is - am I happy with the result enough to show others?

Use this link please to send a question or message me privately