Retitling Art 1: Gridded Patterns
Artists want to sell their work. I was looking for various venues online. I was willing to change the character of certain works of art just to score some sales. My previous body of work had to do with Tarot cards. I had done over a hundred paintings for this theme, but when I looked back on them, some of the paintings didn’t fit. Toward the end of my Tarot journeys, the whole Tarot thing wasn’t coming together anymore.
So in the interest of selling art, I was going to use some of these weaker paintings and come up with a new body of work. Why couldn’t I do that? Sometimes, the spirit of a painting comes to you only in hindsight. With that rationale, I decided that there were about twenty paintings that didn’t belong with the Tarot group. And the crux of this new direction came from the painting I had titled The Gridded World. This painting depicted a floating world made of squares. There was something about the word, gridded. What was gridded? I wasn’t even quite sure what the word meant. But I liked it. I started using “gridded” for some of the other paintings as I retitled them.
As I was coming up with new titles to old paintings, gridded started to mean something. My new definition of the word was the situation when something was subjugated to a form that was not natural to it. In the painting that originated this new meaning, the floating world should have been round, but it was made of squares. Essentially, when something was gridded, it was mutated.
The other word that started to mean something was “pattern.” It came from the idea that we all go forward into life from a pattern established at our conception. Though they may give clues to certain habits we pursue, the patterns of people are sophisticated, inevitably indescribable. They define our existence by propelling us to make choices that parallel these patterns of ours.
Soon, a narrative was coming to me from these excised paintings. They were now depicting situations of either pure pattern or patterns subjected to becoming gridded. Many of these old images were now defining patterns that were in various stages of being bent out of shape. The paintings themselves didn’t say much to this end, but in the context of the new titles, they provoked a new understanding.
Could this make the art stronger? Perhaps not, but there was a valid concept behind this, and I was starting to like the story that was coming through the machinations of making money.
