WHAT IS IT?

Taking a tiny sketch of the back of a tanker, I became interested in scale, in the enormity of the tanker and I wondered what would happen if I increased the size of my sketch considerably.  I took the sketch through various live trace facilities in Illustrator and loved the beauty of the imagery.

This image is a vectored Illustrator image which, frustratingly, I cannot print on silk.  How to maintain the beautiful smooth line is a problem.  In Photoshop (and the image must be a Photoshop tiff to print), the line will pixilate, creating a blur.  I have changed the image to a PDF and converted that to a tiff and it seems reasonably smooth.  We shall see.

  I have created several repeat patterns from the wonderful imagery above.  Unfortunately, they are tiffs or Photoshop files which will not upload onto the blog. 

Creating 4 paper quarters assembled into a 5 ft disk, I wondered about the scale.  How would this piece be viewed from a distance?  What would the viewers  think it is?

I hung the piece in the galleried foyer of our campus at Tremough and created a questionnaire.  The large scale piece created imagery within imagery.  Looking at the hanging, one could see more and more 'secret' images, animals, people etc.

WHAT IS IT?  I had some wonderful replies.

'Man in the moon'.
'Sperm and egg at the moment of conception'.
'A ball of wool'.
'A tree in a hurricane'.
'A dandelion seed head'.
'A burning ball of fire'.
'Eco advert'
'Earth'.
'From a distance, it looks like the trail of something that went in circles really fast, really slow and then found it's place'
'A flower'
'Paint swirls'.
'A long tailed monkey in a crescent moon'.
'A person on a swing above the trees'.

I am really pleased with this response as I love that which becomes something else, something seen in the eye of the viewer.

I then asked

WHAT WOULD YOU SEE ITS END USE AS?

'Art on a wall'.
'Textiles print'. (Several said this)
Decorative piece/ drawing/print/sculpture'.

WHAT IS YOUR AUTOMATIC RESPONSE TO THE PIECE?

'I want to look closer'.
'I like it'.
'I want to stand back from it'.
'Butterflies in the stomach feeling.  I love it'.
'Interest and intrigue.  Wanting to know why'?
'Food for thought'.
'Interesting.  Curious.  Makes me wonder what it is'.

There was some discussion about the 'tail'.  Some thought it worked better without.

WITH OR WITHOUT TAIL.

Most said 'with'.  (i.e. stalk of the dandelion, end of ball of wool, string.
'Tail could be a fishing rod.  Dreamworks?  Reminds me of love.  Pretty'.

I found these responses wonderful.  To look at an art work and be drawn into it, to see other imagery within, to want to look and look into a piece, is to me what art is all about.

I had taken this image through Inked Drawing.  I could only arrive at this image by converting the image to a PDF.  However, it would not always happen and I was becoming demented.  I discovered that, when the image is enlarged over a certain size, the software actually reconfigures.  This fits in so well with the concept of the piece, the idea of the scale of the tanker large scale actually creating the change in the imagery.