Beginning to explain

Forgive me if you've heard some of this before.
This starts in L.A. I found myself there once, trying to make artwork. It was the first time I had been to the west coast of America.
Part of the massive scale of Los Angeles involves the many advertising materials employed along the multilane highways that dissect the built environment.
I was in the car with my notebook, and for something to do I was writing down what all these signs and advertisements had to say. I realised that they only used a very few colours, and the colours were bold, brash, and used in very visually compelling combinations. About ninety per cent of the messages that flicked past my retinas were using seven colours.
I noted these colours down; red, green, blue, yellow, orange, black and white. All, I think, made from pigments derived from the petrochemical industry, the same hydrocarbon trade that has made modern Los Angeles possible. The colours were red, green, blue, yellow, orange, black and white. I decided to paint using these colours, straight from the tub.
This was some time ago, back in 2003, I think.
I made the paintings for Radiohead's album called 'Hail to the Thief' with these colours, and I continued to use them for several projects afterwards. I find them, in combination, both deeply attractive and subtly distressing.

More recently (although, to my sorrow, no longer) I received several spam emails promising me a better sex life, a bigger penis and something called polynominal slosh prowess. I collected these emails. When they inexplicably stopped, they were replaced with spam emails offering me the chance to buy foreclosed homes as bargain prices. A cheap property from other peoples' misery, you could say. I collected these emails too. And emails that purported to come from the impoverished relatives of African presidents.
What interested me about the emails (apart from the promise of wealth, cheap luxury housing and the life of a porn star) was the way that the words in them functioned; just a glance at the title of an email was enough to tell what sort of contents it would hold; much as the colours of L.A. grabbed the visual cortex these words seemed intended to grab the linguistic cortex.
I have seven colours, and I have a lot of words.
9th June 2010


Continuing to explain

I'm easily influenced, and I'm painting pictures using these words and the seven colours in a way that I like to think is fairly true to the signs and advertisements I saw in Los Angeles all that time ago.
(Actually, I checked when I was there recently, and I'm not doing too badly.)
So I paint rectangles of all the seven colours, and then I paint the words on top of the rectangles. The words must stand out. They should be as vibrant as possible. This is like advertising. My favourite kind of advertising is that found on packets of detergent, bottles of toilet cleaner and bleach, et cetera. It's fucking amazing. If you spend enough time in the aisles of supermarkets that deal with household cleaning products and you will see what I mean. Last year I almost got a job at the supermarket so that I could stack the shelves in that aisle every once in a while, but fortunately my girlfriend informed me that it was a stupid idea.
Well, anyway, this is about making the paintings of words from spam and colours from Los Angeles, not supermarkets or bleach.
When I have seven colours to paint with, one thing that's important is to keep the colours away from each other, so, for example, blue isn't next to blue. Another thing is to avoid a sort of chess-board effect, which means keeping, say, a red corner away from another red corner. What I'm trying to do is create an evenly spread scatter of colours, a random arrangement that is pleasing to the eye and incredibly hectic at the same time.
I've come across the problem of randomness before. The problem is that randomness isn't random; or rather, it doesn't seem random. A truly random event is getting struck by lightning twice, or three times. I once tried to make a website display a large selection of statements as a random series, but it didn't work at all. The same statement kept appearing, again and again, like lightning.
Eventually I gave in and called a professional web person, who actually had to write a pseudo-randomising bit of code. Even that wasn't completely reliable. The problem of randomness was my problem, and it was a problem of perception. What I actually wanted was a highly designed ordering system that would ensure the longest possible time between any possible repetitions of statements. What I wanted wasn't random at all.
11th June 2010