Weather Spirits Showing - October 2006

With the exception of the frame glass and the archival inks and paper, the Weather Spirits project has been produced entirely from found and recycled materials. Most of the watercolors used are from the Mount Vernon dump’s recycle shed, and the inks are thick-mixed Rit dyes and home-made vegetable dyes.

The most frustrating thing about painting for me is that I prefer black backgrounds and a degree of luminosity that watercolor on white paper tends not to have. As a computer geek, it occurred to me that a negative would invert the white of the background color to black, providing me with the desired tones I wanted – but I also wanted, other than that inversion, to leave the computer totally out of the process.

Every time a computer adjusts an image, data is lost. My goal was to have only one step of image conversion between paint on paper and the final print – to do this, I learned to paint in negative colors, and the results were radically different than I expected. I spent much of a month learning how colors worked in inverted form.

Happily, nearly no data was lost in the single step inversion, and I fell in love with the creation process. At that point, I decided I’d also provide illustrations for a book I was working on: Weather Spirits. I expect the book that draws its art from this show to go on sale sometime in mid 2007.

As an author, I point you towards my Livejournal, where you can find the occasional ramble on just about anything, as well as the occasional poem, picture, or essay. When available, you’ll also find pointers to where you can buy prints, books, and anything I might create.

Many thanks to my brother, without whom there would be no frames for these pieces. He’s the woodworker I only dream of being, and I owe him much for helping out. The framing materials you see here are recycled wood and wall paneling materials.

As an artist, welcome to Weather Spirits – I hope you enjoy!

Artist: Wetdryvac
Email: wetdryvac@gmail.com
Livejournal: http://wetdryvac.livejournal.com

Showing at Railroad Square Cinema
17 Railroad Square
Waterville, Maine 04901