Quarters

I had been picturing these for months. I had also been hoarding the good paper. Today I stopped doing both.

The first series on the Japanese sheets is called Quarters. Each piece is built the same way: subdivide a square recursively, hatch the resulting cells.

Quiet sits low on the page. A dense block, a few uncertain marks floating above it like weather that didn’t commit.

Vanishing holds in the middle and lets go at the edges; the cluster reads as something coming apart.

Brimming refuses negative space. The nested chevrons interfere up close and vibrate from a distance.

These are baby steps. I plotted about ten over the afternoon; the three above are the ones that came closest to what I had been picturing. I am still learning the paper (it takes ink differently than I expected), still learning the software (mostly: which of my own knobs are actually useful), still learning the medium. Each title ends in a five-digit number because the seed used to generate the plot becomes the edition number. There is exactly one of each.

Seeing them on paper changes what I want to make next. The imagined version is always slightly different from the printed one. Ink pools where it shouldn’t, the machine drifts in ways a machine isn’t supposed to drift, randomness has its say. You have to see the work to know what works, and that is the input for the next round of imagining.

Subdivision and hatching are not, on their own, an artistic practice. Bound into a book, with a few more rounds of this, they might start to be one.