Siliceous Oozes

Siliceous Oozes  acrylic on wood  7.375x5.25  (no longer exists)

Pulling from my geology classes at William & Mary here. I was always a big fan of the term siliceous oozes. It describes a situation where microscopic critters like diatoms accumulate on the ocean floor when the water is nearly saturated with silica. Very slowly blankets of a silica-rich ooze are formed. If I remember correctly, these oozes later become chert after spending a few million years in nature's pressure cooker. Chert's cool because you can make cutting tools and arrowheads out of it. I like chert.

I've included an image to show the scale - a good trick for photographing an outcrop or rock. I reckon it's just as useful photographing artwork. I'll try to make a habit out of it. The Nikon cap measures 2.125 inches in diameter, so this one is a little guy.

scanner bed collages3

I received the first copy of the book I created of these scanner bed images titled "Outcrops" using blurb.com, but unfortunately the colors are dull and dark and not what I was hoping for. And right now I don't have the time or money to correct this. So instead of providing a link to a book that doesn't look very good, I've decided to just post the rest of the images here. Given my experience with printed reproductions of art, they'll probably look better on a computer screen than they do in print anyway. And that's alright because I'll most likely use these for some abstract paintings in the near future. So no harm, no foul.

scanner bed collages2

A small sample of some more scanner bed collages that I made for a digital printmaking class. My task was to make a book of at least 20 pages with any content I saw fit and publish it through a company called blurb.com. Since I was pleased with the scanner bed images I made before and also the process of making them, I decided to use the same process with these. The theme I chose for my book was "geology in outcrop form." Prior to making these I had gone out to the Valley and Ridge and took a ton of pictures of various outcrops of varying degrees of deformation. I noticed that what thrills me most about the outcrops was not the type of rock it was or how old it was but rather the shape, color, and texture of the beds - their formal qualities. And while these pieces don't exactly mimic any particular outcrop, I hope to the viewer they reveal some of the attributes that one might find while exploring roadside geology. In a few weeks I'll have the book, titled "Outcrops", and if it passes inspection, then I'll post a link for those who might want to purchase it. This coffe table book is 8x10 inches and will feature 20 of these collaged abstractions.

scanner bed collages

This is a series of scanner bed collages (all ~11x15in) that I did one night in the digital print lab using my hands and various objects fished out of the recycle bins. Scanners have  a particular way of creating an image. They don't capture everything at once like a camera but rather in a slow, sweeping scan, which allows for "repeats", "smears", and "glitches" of objects in real time (as opposed to doing that stuff in photoshop). The most enjoyable part of making prints like this is the improvisation. You can make multiple variations of one image in very little time. I think I was able to make about 50 of these prints (most of them duds)  in about 2-3 hours or so, which is pretty quick. The only things you have to watch out for are fingerprints and getting blinded by the scanner head as you try to scan things in. I'm going to make a few more of these in my free time to see what new tricks I can learn. It seems there's a lot of ways to experiment with these scans.