Any artist, either figurative or abstract, would say that they appreciate those accidental moments that somehow enhance the work…so called ‘happy accidents’.
I read a book about the visual work of the experimental musical composer, John Cage called Every Day is a Good Day. Sticking rigidly to self- imposed rules, he would use random techniques to locate on paper and canvas positions for mark making….dropped leaves, scattered sticks etc. He developed a series of imaginative methods to produce artworks that were solely the results of chance and completely free of his own aesthetic prejudices. The results were surprisingly beautiful.
I wanted to create a series of pieces following the same methods that harness chance, initially as an experiment, but found the results to be fascinating. The strangeness of the arrangements…arrangements that would normally never occur to me, grew firstly from multiple dice throws and later by a random number generator app recorded onto a lightly pencilled grid. These are some results.
